Life Sciences & Biology
Dr Chad Dechow – The Dairy Cow: Beyond Mass Production
As dairy farmers struggle to make ends meet, economic efficiency often forces the health and wellbeing of cattle to take a back seat. Dr Chad Dechow and his team at Pennsylvania State University have set about tackling this problem, providing a means for producing...
The Consortium of Food Process Validation Experts: Surrogate Bacteria for Food Safety
In the wake of a terrible E. coli food poisoning outbreak, a group of food scientists decided to gear their research towards improving the safety of meat and poultry, whilst reaching out to food industry stakeholders and forming a collaboration known as the Consortium...
Cowpea – An Ancient Crop for Modern Challenges
Cowpea has been cultivated as a crop for thousands of years, and is well-placed to improve the sustainability of modern agricultural systems. As part of a NIFA-funded project, Dr Louis Jackai, Dr Beatrice Dingha and Dr Mulumebet Worku and their students at North...
Dr Macdonald Wick – Illuminating the Causes Behind Muscle Problems in Poultry
Muscle defects and non-infectious anomalies in commercial poultry are increasing in prevalence – with implications for bird welfare, meat quality and economic value. Dr Macdonald Wick and his team at Ohio State University are attempting to elucidate the biological...
Dr Philippe Rolshausen – Utilising the Plant Microbiome in Agriculture
Dr Philippe Rolshausen and his team at the University of California, Riverside, aim to understand the microbial communities that live on and in fruit trees, with implications for crop yield and plant disease. With backing from Californian tree crop industries and...
Dr Nina Bassuk – Trees – the True Urban Warriors
Trees benefit cities in many often-overlooked ways. They not only beautify concrete backdrops, but also improve the quality of our urban lives by providing shade, reducing storm runoff, filtering air and providing homes for birds and insects. Trees face big...
Dr. Erik Sontheimer – Innovation Is in Our RNA
DNA, as the molecular blueprint for life on earth, has long held a special place in scientific discourse and popular culture. DNA also has a lesser-known sister molecule, called RNA, which transfers specific instructions from DNA to produce proteins. RNA is now...
Dr Martha Giraldo – Solving the Problem of Apio (Arracacia xanthorrhiza) Corm Rot Disease
Essentially un-researched until now, corm rot disease has had detrimental effects on the Puerto Rican agricultural industry. Here, Dr Martha Giraldo and her research team at the University of Puerto Rico collaborate with local farmers to investigate the source of this...
Dr Dedrick D. Davis – Biochar and Soil Dynamics
Renewable biofuels are a carbon-neutral alternative to fossil fuels, but they have their own complications. One problem is that growing and harvesting crops for biofuel depletes soil of valuable nutrients. To mitigate this, a byproduct of making biofuel – known as...
Dr Cheryl Van Buskirk – Sandman and the Worm – Cellular Insights into the World of Sleep
Why we sleep is a mystery. Dr Cheryl Van Buskirk of California State University Northridge is using the simple roundworm, C. elegans, to probe the cellular basis of sleep – with implications for sleep in more complex animals – including humans. Sleep – One of Life’s...
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Professor Timothy Schowalter – Bugs are Friends: Taking an Ecosystem View on Forest Health
Humans commonly view insects as unwanted nuisances, and many modern land-management practices focus on reducing insect numbers using toxic pesticides and invasive biological controls. Professor Timothy Schowalter at Louisiana State University has been studying insect...
Dr Paul Slusarewicz – Fighting Endemic Parasites: New Technologies to Solve Old Challenges
Intestinal worms are among the most common types of parasitic infections worldwide. Despite technological advances in other areas of medical diagnostics, the procedure for identifying worm infection, the faecal egg count, has remained largely unchanged since its debut...
Dr Lisa Burden | Dr Daniel Burden – Monitoring and Controlling the Delivery of Single Molecules through Nanopores
Monitoring and controlling molecules as they are transported in and out of nanometre-sized compartments is no easy task. Dr Lisa Burden, Dr Daniel Burden and their colleagues at Wheaton College have made significant contributions to understanding these processes by...
The National Science Teachers Association
Founded in 1944, the Virginia-based National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) is the largest organisation in the world promoting excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all. In this exclusive interview, we talk to Executive Director of...
Professor Julio Collado-Vides – Putting Life in Context
How do you determine important scientific links when you are flooded by new publications each day? Professor Julio Collado-Vides and his team at the National University of Mexico appear to have the answer. Whether it be letters or ideograms, standardised street signs...
Count Down To The Future
At the NASA Ames Research Center in California, the next generation of space biologists are working to understand the effects of long duration space flight on model organisms, and are developing ways to protect the health of future astronauts. The human body has...
Dr Mike Allen – Algal Biotech: Turning Environmental Problems into Commercial Opportunities
With over a decade of experience in producing solutions for industry, Dr Mike Allen of Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML) is a shining star in the field of algal biotechnology. Inspired by the natural environment, he and his multidisciplinary team work to engineer and...
The National Institute of General Medical Sciences
As one of the 27 Centers, Institutes and Offices within the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) supports basic research that increases our understanding of biological processes, laying the foundation for...
Professor Roy Robins-Browne – Disarming Bacterial Virulence
With antibiotic resistance rapidly emerging among many important bacterial pathogens, it is imperative that new classes of antimicrobials are developed. Professor Roy Robins-Browne and his team at The University of Melbourne are taking a novel approach to...
Dr Ashley Cowart – Small Scale Roots of Metabolic Disease
Although metabolic diseases plague Western countries, we still don’t fully understand the molecular mechanisms that trigger these diseases. Therefore, biochemists such as Dr Ashley Cowart at the Medical University of South Carolina strive to uncover the cellular...
Outcomes of the 2017 Global Research Council meeting co-hosted by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
Comprising the heads of research funding agencies worldwide, the Global Research Council (GRC) is an organisation dedicated to fostering multilateral research and collaboration across continents to benefit both developing and developed nations. The GRC holds annual...
Meredith Frie – A Hidden Threat to Herd Health: Evidence for the Damaging Effects of Bovine Leukaemia Virus
Diseases of agricultural animals are of major concern to people around the world, and thus a principle focus of many research programs. Research on the Bovine Leukaemia Virus (BLV) has been often overshadowed by other diseases that affect cattle, but new evidence...
The STEM Education Coalition
The STEM Education Coalition was founded more than 15 years ago with a mission to raise awareness in the U.S. Congress, the administration, and on the state level about the critical role that STEM education plays in enabling the U.S. to remain the economic and...
Dr William Ray – Using Computer Graphics to Visualise the Invisible
Biophysicist Dr William Ray and colleagues at The Ohio State University and the Battelle Center for Mathematical Medicine at The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, develop novel approaches to graphically visualise what happens to...
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Professor Steven Greco – Landscape Ecology: The Sense of Space
Developing sustainable solutions to environmental decline will need a holistic understanding of socioecological connections in time and space. Professor Steven Greco and his team at UC Davis use spatial analysis and visualisation techniques, to improve our...
The Society for Conservation Biology
The Society for Conservation Biology (SCB) was founded in 1985, when many scientists felt called to action by the Earth’s rapidly disappearing biodiversity. Scientists saw their study sites changing or disappearing over very short periods of time, and were...
Travis M Whitfill | Azim Munivar – Harnessing Skin Bacteria to Fight Skin Disease
The brainchild of Azim Munivar and Travis M Whitfill, Azitra Inc. is a microbiome start-up with big ambition. Beginning with eczema and Netherton’s Syndrome, the Azitra team are set to change the landscape of skin disease treatment. Azitra Inc. is a company with one...
Dr David Peebles – The Chicken in the Egg: Hacking Early Development to Improve Adult Chicken Health
Chicken meat is one of the world’s most relied upon animal food sources, and a major factor in economics and food security for many people. Dr David Peebles at Mississippi State University has dedicated his career to the unique physiological and nutritional needs of...
Dr Michael Stout | Dr Blake Wilson – Protecting United States Rice with Integrated Pest Management Strategies
US rice production is threatened by the expansion of the Mexican rice borer, and a host of other pests. Dr Michael Stout, Dr Blake Wilson and their colleagues at Louisiana State University are investigating integrated pest management strategies to reduce the...
Taher Saif | Dr Andrew Holle – Mechanobiology – Exploring the Mechanics of Cell Behaviour
Understanding how cells interact with the physical world around them is at the core of mechanobiology, a growing subfield connecting the arenas of cell biology and bioengineering. Two leading researchers, Professor Taher Saif and Dr Andrew Holle, with the support of...