Award Data

In resource limited settings, rapid and accurate diagnosis of infections is critical for managing potential exposures to highly virulent pathogens, whether occurring from an act of bioterrorism or a natural event. This is especially important for hard to detect intracellular bacterial and alphavirus infections, that overlap symptomatically and often treated empirically due to a lack of reliable an ...

There are currently no vaccines or therapeutics available for Marburg Virus Disease (MVD). Given the specter of weaponization and the terrible morbidity and high mortality rate of MVD, this represents a critical threat to the operational readiness of the Warfighter. While traditional vaccines have contributed greatly to public health, they have some limitations especially in the context of operati ...

Through this STTR contract, we propose to evaluate the efficacy of our vaccine, FlowVax Marburg, in nonhuman primates (NHPs). This will be achieved through four Tasks. In Task 1, we will manufacture the vaccine in a quantity sufficient for the animal studies. In Task 2, we will perform MHC genotyping on a representative population of NHPs and, based on results, select a set of MHC-matched NHPs for ...

Current state-of-the-art object detection algorithms are almost exclusively based on Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN). These algorithms all require a large amount of labeled examples for each of the object categories they can recognize. These algorithms will fail for novel objects that only very few or even no prior examples are available. These algorithms are also far less accurate when c ...

Improving the effectiveness of counter-WMD operations requires improved understanding of weapon-target interaction. Specifically, time-resolved measurements of temperature and composition are required to allow temporal evolution of a detonation fireball. To address this need, SA Photonics will develop MONITOR, a laser-based temperature diagnostic that will enable wide dynamic range temperature mea ...

A novel diagnostic system based on the monolithic quantum cascade laser technology is proposed, enabling probing of points across the entire MIR absorption spectrum of CO for optimal temperature sensitivity across the entire 300 – 3000 K range with MHz time resolution. The proposing team has the capability to design QCL structures that provide strong output over the spectral range of interest in ...

We seek a proof-of-concept study for the development of a new platform technology for the rapid and complete inactivation of pathogen infectivity for vaccine development of medically important micro-organisms (e.g. viruses, bacteria and parasites). A recently discovered reconstituted Mn+2-decapeptide phosphate complex (Mn-Dp-Pi) of the radiation-resistant bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans was foun ...

Terrorist use of radioactive nuclear materials via nuclear and/or radiological dispersion devices (dirty bombs) is a serious threat. Therefore, it is critical to detect the proliferation of nuclear material. Critical challenges facing this objective include: (a) high sensitivity detection of signature emissions (e.g., gamma rays) from common radioactive isotopes behind shielding, and (b) cost-effe ...

Objectives and Intellectual Merit: The infrastructure of modern civilization is a set of complex systems1 that dynamically interact across multiple layers of abstraction. Researchers from many disciplines2 are designing analytical tools for predicting the global and local behaviors of these complicated, multi-layer networks. Easily usable, available (open source) and inter-operated tools are neede ...