Award Data

Many industrial processes involve the transfer of heat from one medium to another. Thermal fluids and heat exchangers are often used as part of these processes. However, besides water or aqueous solutions, the other thermal fluids have thermal properties much lower than water, so larger heat exchangers or pumps are required. This project will develop a nanofluid with a nano-sized phase-change ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): One of the largest bottlenecks in high-throughput protein structure determination (structural genomics) and in subsequent drug targeting (pharmocogenomics) is the acquisition of soluble correctly folded functional protein products. Unfortunately, a large amount of the protein expression systems that are commonly used yield insoluble or soluble misfolded protein ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): One of the primary and disabling clinical manifestations of Parkinson's disease (PD) is locomotor dysfunction, such as small, variable stride length and freezing of gait. Treatment of PD to a large extent focuses on replacing depleted dopamine at the striatum to maintain mobility for as long as possible. Clinical assessment relies on brief observation and frequ ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): It is anticipated that only a third of today's high school students will go onto college despite consistent data that support the benefit of post-secondary education for individuals. Concurrently, daily Internet use among adolescents is nearing the fifty-percent mark, with broadband Internet steadily growing toward ubiquity. This project aims to leverage the ma ...

Energy usage will continue to increase at a dramatic pace for the foreseeable future, endangering the security, economy, and environment of the nation. One means of meeting this challenge is the replacement of liquid transportation fuels based on petroleum with cellulosic bioethanol. However, cellulosic ethanol remains too costly to be commercially feasible, in part due to the generation of orga ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The integrated scientific team of INphoton, LLC will develop standard operating procedures for intravital multiphoton microscopy assays quantifying fluorescent drug delivery, cellular uptake, intracellular distribution, metabolism, and physiologic/therapeutic effects within the kidney of live rats. Refinement of some existing assays will be necessary for commer ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Our long term goal is to develop cellular based immunotherapy for the treatment of malignancy. One approach to enhancing the effects of cellular immunotherapy is via gene therapy. We are currently focused on enhancing the antitumor effects of adoptive T cell therapy using lentiviral vector-mediated genetic modification of cells to express a universal T cell rec ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Chronic sleep disturbances are experienced by 40% to 70% of the oldest people in the population, over 65 years. Light treatment devices are available in the market, but they are expensive, are generally glaring because they use inefficient light sources. Further, they require that users be seated in front of the device for at least 30-60 minutes, reducing compl ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The spatial resolution and acquisition times for magnetic resonance imaging and spectroscopy could be improved through the application of more powerful and rapid magnetic gradients, thereby potentially leading to improv ed cardiac imaging and delineation and detection of cancers. Unfortunately, gradient field strength is limited by concerns about potential neur ...