Traffic Laws and Social Engineering for Electrons

David Goldhaber-Gordon

Traffic Laws and Social Engineering for Electrons

Studying and manipulating electrons as individuals and in collective settings
David Goldhaber-Gordon, Stanford University
As befits an innovator in the studies of nanostructures and quantum electron devices, Dr. Goldhaber-Gordon's work has been cited over 5000 times in scientific journals . He pioneered use of quantum dots as model quantum systems. Recently, he's been inspired by the following questions: What ...

Poverty and Pregnancy: Improving the Lives of Women and Children

Arachu Castro

Poverty and Pregnancy: Improving the Lives of Women and Children

Globally Ending unnecessary maternal and child deaths
Arachu Castro, Tulane University
Although with existing clinical knowledge the majority of maternal deaths can be prevented, disorganization of health services, limited resource allocation, and the conditions of poverty and inequality in which people live make it difficult for large populations in Latin America and the Caribbean to ...

Fighting Cancer with New Compounds

Neil Garg

Fighting Cancer with New Compounds

Synthesizing new compounds with biological activity to improve human health
Neil Garg, University of California, Los Angeles
More generally, Dr. Garg focuses his research efforts on the discovery of new chemical reactions, the understanding of how organic molecules react, and the chemical synthesis of biologically important molecules that may ultimately benefit human health. Dr. Garg describes his group of 15-20 researche ...

Seeing is Believing: Peering into Cellular Behaviors on a Microscopic Level

Jennifer Prescher

Seeing is Believing: Peering into Cellular Behaviors on a Microscopic Level

New methods to 'see' biology in action are changing how we think about human health and disease
Jennifer Prescher, University of California, Irvine
Dr. Prescher's young lab, having only been in development for four years, has already achieved important milestones related to imaging probe development, including constructing new tools and performing preclinical analyses. Dr. Prescher and her group are currently translating many of the image probe ...

Natural Molecules that Can Improve Health

Mo Movassaghi

Natural Molecules that Can Improve Health

Efficient chemical synthesis of new and potent bioactive molecules
Mo Movassaghi, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Dr. Movassaghi's research team focuses on the development of concise and unified synthetic strategies, inspired by biogenetic considerations, to readily access these complex molecules, thus enabling their detailed chemical, biochemical, and biological study. Using his organic chemical synthesis appr ...

Palliative Care Extends Beyond Borders

James Cleary

Palliative Care Extends Beyond Borders

Bringing pain relief to the five billion people currently lacking access
James Cleary, University of Wisconsin-Madison
PPSG has a long-standing proven track record of working directly with countries, on the ground, to identify and address their barriers to opioid availability for pain relief and palliative care. A unique model of technical assistance is used to help national governments (upon invitation) assess regu ...

Making Sense of a Richly Interconnected World

Lise Getoor

Making Sense of a Richly Interconnected World

Doing useful things with data in responsible ways
Lise Getoor, University of California, Santa Cruz
Motivated by this challenging problem, Dr. Getoor's highly collaborative research spans statistical and logical approaches with applications in computational social science, computational sustainability, computational biology, computer vision, computational linguistics, cybersecurity, online learnin ...

Stuck On Sustainability

Jonathan Wilker

Stuck On Sustainability

Sea-life inspired adhesives improve patient outcomes and environmental sustainability
Jonathan Wilker, Purdue University
Dr. Wilker hopes to apply his adhesive for replacing sutures, staples, and screws used during surgery. Patient outcomes will then improve, once we can avoid the damage created by such current surgical joinery methods. In addition to biomedical applications, Dr. Wilker's research aims to find more su ...

Developing Anticancer Drugs

Katrina Miranda

Developing Anticancer Drugs

Dr. Miranda is creating well-tolerated, nontoxic drugs that target many diseases
Katrina Miranda, University of Arizona
Dr. Miranda's current focus is on the treatment of breast cancer. Her interest in breast cancer stems from her training at the NIH where she worked with breast cancer patients who were undergoing radiation therapy. While recent improvements in detection and treatment were improving survival rates ov ...

Developing Computational Cell Models

Peter Karp

Developing Computational Cell Models

Creating centralized databases for biological information and developing tools for efficient access
Peter Karp, Stanford Research Institute
As the Director of the Bioinformatics Research Group at SRI International, Dr. Peter Karp has established two highly-used knowledge bases whose contents were distilled from tens of thousands of scientific articles.  For example, his MetaCyc database describes 2,200 metabolic pathways and 12,000 ...

Harvesting Sunlight with Organic Dyes

David Nicewicz

Harvesting Sunlight with Organic Dyes

Creating new chemical reactions that have incredible applications
David Nicewicz, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
Dr. Nicewicz's research has the ability to transform the way in which scientists make a great deal of important chemicals that are used on a range of scales, from large scale commodity chemicals to pharmaceuticals, to materials. The new chemical transformations Dr. Nicewicz's laboratory has develope ...

Revealing How the Brain Learns and Remembers

Loren Frank

Revealing How the Brain Learns and Remembers

Discovering the brain processes that store and retrieve memories, and seek to understand how these processes can go awry
Loren Frank, University Of California, San Francisco
The research of Dr. Loren Frank at the University of California, San Francisco is revealing how the brain learns and remembers and how those processes go awry in aging and disease.  By studying how animals form memories, he has already helped move the field forward. His work has linked specific ...

Revolutionizing Healthcare

Judith Hibbard

Revolutionizing Healthcare

Helping patients to be part of the solution to healthcare problems
Judith Hibbard, University of Oregon
Dr. Hibbard's research is especially important for health policy and industry leaders to make effective changes that work to improve the quality of healthcare or constrain cost by including patients and consumers in the solution. Her research team has developed a way to assess an individual's knowle ...

Wildlife Conservation Matters

Kay Holekamp

Wildlife Conservation Matters

Protecting the welfare of both animals and humans by analyzing and building relationships
Kay Holekamp, Michigan State University
Conservation of large mammalian carnivores is a top national priority in Kenya; most tourists come to Kenya specifically to see these animals in their natural habitat, and tourism is Kenya's second most important source of foreign exchange after agriculture. Large carnivores thus effectively represe ...

Magnetic Fields Healing Brains

Dan Sievenpiper

Magnetic Fields Healing Brains

High resolution magnetic coil arrays for noninvasive treatments of neurological disorders
Dan Sievenpiper, University of California, San Diego
Rather than the trial and error approach that TMS currently makes use of, with this new electronically scannable, high-resolution system, researchers can develop new research approaches like scanning the brain, apply different treatments at the same time, and electronically sweep through different w ...

Computational Theory Sheds Light on Brain Functioning

David Heeger

Computational Theory Sheds Light on Brain Functioning

Bringing together computer science and neuroscience
David Heeger, New York University
As a vocal critic of established paradigms, Dr. Heeger has pioneered new directions for the fields he works in. His innovation has been recognized by being elected into the National Academy of Sciences nearly a decade younger than average and by the David Marr Prize in computer vision, amo ...

Molecular Basis of Disease

Charles Sanders

Molecular Basis of Disease

Unraveling defects in membrane proteins that cause disease
Charles Sanders, Vanderbilt University
Disease-related human membrane proteins are among the most difficult to study of the 22,000 different human proteins. Dr. Sanders has dedicated over 20 years of research to these proteins. This experience enables him and his team to tackle membrane protein-disease relationships. Their work provides ...

Monitoring our Radioactive Ocean

Ken Buesseler

Monitoring our Radioactive Ocean

Measuring radioactivity reaching US shores from the 2011 Tsunami in Japan
Ken Buesseler, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Over the past 50 years, natural and anthropogenic radionuclides have been instrumental in addressing many important questions in oceanographic research. Yet knowledge gaps remain regarding their spatial and depth distributions and the temporal evolution of many radionuclides of importance to both oc ...

Powerful Technology for Society's Benefit

Emerson Murphy-Hill

Powerful Technology for Society's Benefit

Improving existing technology to reap the benefits of software programming
Emerson Murphy-Hill, North Carolina State University
Dr. Murphy-Hill's group, called the Developer Liberation Front, consisting of Ph.D. students, masters students, undergraduate students, and multidisciplinary collaborations, tackles a variety of problems in order to make existing tools and techniques more usable. By educating future scientists and t ...

Unlocking the Mysteries of the Brain

Elva Diaz

Unlocking the Mysteries of the Brain

Taking a ground-breaking approach to uncovering cures for brain diseases
Elva Diaz, University of California, Davis
Dr. Elva Diaz of the University of California, Davis studies highly conserved genes not previously implicated in brain development and genes encoding hypothetical proteins of unknown function with state-of-the-art expression profiling approaches. She posits that such "functional comparative genomi ...

Decoding the Genomes of Microbes to Identify the Kill Switch

Elodie Ghedin

Decoding the Genomes of Microbes to Identify the Kill Switch

Finding novel ways to target parasites and viruses for the control of infections
Elodie Ghedin, New York University
Dr. Ghedin's study of viral and parasitic pathogens are relevant to infectious diseases that threaten humanity worldwide, especially neglected populations. We have recently seen new human outbreaks of avian influenza virus H7N9 in China, Middle-Eastern respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) i ...

Placing Humanity in a Cosmic Context

Brad Hansen

Placing Humanity in a Cosmic Context

Understanding where planets come from and if habitable life elsewhere is possible
Brad Hansen, University of California, Los Angeles
Dr. Hansen's work to combine both observational and theoretical techniques helps to provide a comprehensive analysis of the planet formation problem. More specifically, Dr. Hansen's work may address genuine scientific questions as to how to put our solar system into the context of the other solar sy ...

Usable and Effective Online Security and Privacy

Lorrie Cranor

Usable and Effective Online Security and Privacy

Empirical data increases effectiveness and usability of security and privacy
Lorrie Cranor, Carnegie Mellon University
Dr. Cranor's goal is to develop scientifically-validated processes and design patterns, and create guidelines that will provide a roadmap for system designers to build systems that are simultaneously usable and secure. At the intersection of several disciplines including human-computer interaction, ...

The Strongest Materials Ever and Space Travel

Yuntian Zhu

The Strongest Materials Ever and Space Travel

Carbon nanotube composites will revolutionize technologies for space explorations
Yuntian Zhu, North Carolina State University
Dr. Zhu and his team solve problem with an "outside-the-box" approach. In fact, in addition to being used for commercial aircrafts and space travel, Dr. Zhu is using CNT composites to reach greater heights as he helps to develop the necessary materials for an elevator to space (http://www.thespacere ...

Putting Research to Use in Our Classrooms

David Pritchard

Putting Research to Use in Our Classrooms

Free online activities for teachers to use to help students learn better in STEM disciplines
David Pritchard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
In addition to his successful educational program, Dr. Pritchard's mentorship is also amazing. Dr. Pritchard and his Ph.D. advisor, Dr. Daniel Kleppner, have built the #1 group in Atomic Physics according to the US News & World Report. He has won four major prizes and was elected to the NAS and ...