Student holding test tubes and examining their content

College of Sciences News

In the College of Sciences, discovery and education go hand-in-hand to provide innovative and engaging learning environments to enable students to go on to successful careers as researchers, educators, private-industry scientists, and health professionals.

Current Sciences News

students walking down stairs past UNLV signage, with the Flashlight sculpture in the background
Campus News |

A selection of prominent headlines featuring UNLV experts from July and August.

Center for Urban Water Conservation plants
Research |

As allocations from the Colorado River further squeeze the Las Vegas Valley’s water resources, innovation from UNLV's Center for Urban Water Conservation may ease the burden on plants and communities.

A desert cottontail rabbit in the landscaping.
Campus News |

Meet some of the Mojave Desert critters that call our campus home.

Polaroid photos of students against a cassette tape background
People |

UNLV students set the tone for their post-grad futures through internship experiences across the country.

Danny Villanueva talks with students visiting Ash Meadows
Research |

Daniel Villanueva returns to the School of Life Sciences to help address challenges facing the endangered Devils Hole pupfish.

UNLV letters placed in front of rocky landscape at Red Rock state park
People |

Created in honor of longtime staff member, a new geoscience scholarship celebrates 50 years of change while helping the next generation of scientists.

Sciences In The News

KSNV-TV: News 3

NASA is quickly moving forward with plans to establish and build a Space Academy for the U.S. Space Force, similar to the existing military academies for the Air Force, Army and Navy.

PetHelpful

Don’t brush it off as just another bird. From scientific reasons to ancient spiritual symbolism, here is what that repeated visitor is really trying to tell you.

Live Science

While Earth's atmosphere protects us from harmful cosmic rays, other cosmic particles are passing through us every second.

Yahoo!

From high in the hills around Las Vegas, tourist Choune Osterero gazes down at the line of chalky mineral deposits left on the rocks around Lake Mead as the level of America's largest reservoir has dropped over the last quarter of a century of drought.

WTVG 13 Action News

The next time you’re in one of Toledo’s 19 Metroparks, you might see a bunch of 4 feet tall plastic tubes with trees growing out of them. But that’s not litter: those plastic tubes are actually helping the trees grow.

Science

Discovery in hamsters suggests path toward inducing hibernation in mammals that don’t do it naturally.

Sciences Experts

An expert on the evolution of bird, bat, and insect species.
Lachniet is an expert in paleoclimatology, quaternary geology, climate change and stable isotope geochemistry.
User icon
An expert on water resources, paleoclimatology, and environmental pollution. 
Carrie Tyler is a marine conservation paleobiologist.
An internationally recognized expert in astrophysics.
An expert in insect physiology and evolution.

Recent Sciences Accomplishments

Robert Pelletier (PhD Biological Sciences, Spring 2026), Michael D. Treat, Frank van Breukelen, and Jef Jaeger (all School of Life Sciences) recently published a paper in the Journal of Experimental Zoology, titled "Higher Energy Demands and Lower Body Condition in a Hot Spring: Comparing Relict Leopard Frogs at Two Thermally Contrasting Sites."…
Doctoral student Natasha Sushenko (Life Sciences) won the International Society for Extremophiles Poster Award 2026 for her poster presentation titled "Folate auxotrophy in Atribacterota reveals a widespread and underappreciated microbial cultivation problem" at the 15th International Congress on Extremophiles 2026, held in Seoul, South…
Distinguished professor Brian Hedlund and doctoral student Natasha Sushenko (both Life Sciences) presented their research at the 15th International Congress on Extremophiles 2026, held from September 13th-17th in Seoul, South Korea. Hedlund presented an invited thematic keynote lecture entitled "Polysaccharide Metabolism by the Aerobic…
The paper “Machine Learning over Encrypted Data: A Survey of Fully Homomorphic Encryption for AI Systems,” coauthored by Dillon Davidson, Matthew Jackson, Zuobin Xiong, and Junggab Son (all Computer Science), has been accepted for publication in Artificial Intelligence Review, a leading journal with an impact factor of 18.8.
Satish C. Bhatnagar (Mathematical Sciences) was invited to become a charter member of the Board of Editors of a new journal, Vedic Science Journal (India). Also, for the last twenty years, he has been on he Board of Editors of Ganit Bharati, Bulletin of the Indian Society for History of Mathematics.
Ernesto Abel-Santos (Chemistry and Biochemistry), Rochelle Hines (Psychology), Brach Poston (Kinesiology and Nutrition Sciences) and Manoj Sharma (Social and Behavioral Health) have been awarded a $2,189,956 National Institutes of Health (NIH) T32 grant, the Graduate Research Training Initiative for Student Enhancement (GRISE), for 2026-31. The…