Award Data

The quantification of in situ fine root phenotypes is an important task in the comprehensive study of natural and agricultural environments and critical to under- standing how plants respond to various changes in those environments, especially as those changes relate to energy and environmental challenges Mini-rhizotron experiments enable nondestructive imaging of in situ root systems, but their a ...

The demand for increased brightness of synchrotron light sources is driven by advancement of novel experimental techniques to study nanomaterials, micro- and nanocrystals, and interactions of atomic and molecular structures Strong demand has pushed technologies of low emittance electron sources, novel concepts in electron storage rings, free electron lasers (FELs) and undulators – the primary so ...

The immense growth in weather and river sensor data availability along with increases in computational power and algorithmic sophistication have enabled the widespread application of physical, machine learning, and artificial intelligence algorithms to river forecasting. The forecasts produced by widely varying model approaches are inherently limited in different ways, such as by the number and qu ...

With the electrification of transportation, the increased number of portable and connected devices, and the modernization of our grid to include energy storage coupled with renewable energy sources, increased demands of power, energy, lifetime, cost, and safety performance metrics for electrochemical energy storage are at an all-time high. Specifically of interest to the US DOE Vehicle Technologie ...

Over 468 billion cubic feet of natural gas was flared in the United State in 2018. This emitted nearly 25 million tons of CO2 while wasting an important domestic energy resource. This “stranded” natural gas, co-produced by shale oil wells, was flared because it is not cost-effective to transport due to low energy density. Although it would be highly desirable to convert this currently flared n ...

Research Summary: The KRAS proto-oncogene is one of the most critical genes in cancer, yet it has also proven to be among the most elusive. Nearly all (98%) of KRAS missense mutations occur in codons 12 or 13, which leads to constitutive KRAS activation and promotion of numerous cancer hallmarks. Although kinase inhibitors have revolutionized treatment of some subsets of cancers driven by other mo ...

Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) affects ~15-50 individuals per million and claims ≥20,000 lives annually in the United States. It affects every ethnic group, race, age and gender, and devastates high-risk patients afflicted with HIV, systemic sclerosis, and sickle cell disease. The disease affects more women than men; adult PAH patients do not live more than five years after the diagnosis. ...

ABSTRACT Microscale simulations have been applied to a number of complex microfluidic systems and biological applications, but existing methods are limited in the scale and scope of problems that are addressable. Thermodynamically constrained averaging theory (TCAT) is an established approach that can be used to formulate customized macroscale models that are consistent with microscale physics and ...

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Peripheral artery disease (PAD) affects nearly 12 million people in the United States. One of the most common surgical therapies is peripheral artery bypass grafting (PABG). Some patients are eligible for less invasive treatment options like angioplasty, but patients with calcified lesions are not. In patients that do receive PABG, approximately 20% fail within the first y ...

Project Summary NeuroGT, Inc is a new start-up company founded by Dr. Haiyan Fu, Associate professor in the Gene Therapy Center at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with the mission of develop and commercialize effective gene therapy products to treat rare neurogenetic diseases in humans. The goal of this project is to develop an effective gene therapy product targeting the root cause f ...