A few years ago chemistry and chemical biology professor Mike Pollastri met a researcher name Larry Ruben at a conference. Ruben was presenting a poster on an enzyme that is important to the survival trypanosoma brucei, the culprit parasite in the neglected tropical disease known as African sleeping sickness, or human African trypanosomiasis. The poster ...
Since you’re reading this blog, you’ve probably heard of network science and big data by now. It’s the field of research in which scientists leverage the amazing amounts of data we have these days to understand the world’s myriad networks, be they social, genetic or even transportation-based (ie., the network of airline flights across the ...
Today I met a pretty awesome person (who looks uncannily like my uncle). Professor of pharmaceutical sciences Ban-An Khaw is an immunology guy, or at least that’s how he classified himself when I asked for his background story. And what an interesting story it is! A few decades ago, Khaw figured out a way to ...
Targeted drug delivery is a hot topic these days. Chemotherapy, for example, blindly kills anything in its path — these drugs don’t distinguish between healthy cells and cancerous cells; they just kill cells. Period. Professor Vladimir Torchilin and his buddies at the Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence are developing nanoscale drug delivery technologies, which I ...
The library has an awesome new exhibit up called “Places & Spaces: Mapping Science.” They’ve got dozens of maps describing a variety of scientific concepts and trends, like one spider web of connections between scientific disciplines and a crazy topographical visualization of patent patterns across the globe. This is a particularly interesting concept to me ...