Jeremy Smallwood (Astronomy), Sara Black (History), Tyler Stalbaum (Mechanical Engineering), and Cheryl Anderson (Anthropology) are the recipients of this year's Graduate College Outstanding Thesis & Dissertation Awards. Each year the college gives four awards — within each category, one for STEM and one for non-STEM. This year’s winners are…

The National Science Foundation will fund Kurt Regner and Eduardo Robleto's (Life Sciences) proposal, REU SITE: Mechanisms of Evolution (DBI 1757316 - $333,830).  REU Sites offer paid summer undergraduate research internships supplemented with workshops on careers in science.  The overarching goal of this proposal is…

Casey Dakus (Fine Arts), Annie Lu, (Business), Schetema Nealy (Sciences), and Kaela Palmer (Liberal Arts) have been chosen to receive the spring 2018 Southwest Travel Awards. They were selected from almost 100 student applicants. Recipients of the awards receive a round-trip travel voucher from Southwest Airlines to allow them to travel…

Bing Zhang (Physics and Astronomy) recently published a paper in the journal Nature Communications. The most important discovery in astronomy in 2017 was the groundbreaking discovery of a gravitational wave event GW170817 due to the merger of two neutron stars as well as its associated short GRB (gamma ray burst) 170817A and other…

Erin Cassin (Life Sciences) attended and presented her work at the Emerging Researchers National Conference in STEM in Washington D.C., earlier this month. Her work is based on a collaborative project between the lab of professor Philippos Tsourkas and the lab of professor emeritus Penny Amy in the School of Life Sciences. Cassin, an undergraduate…

Jacklyn Newsome (Life Sciences) successfully defended her master's thesis in the Schiller Laboratory of Applied Bioinformatics in December. She worked on personalized diets and a new single-cell technology called the GigaAssay. Both have been licensed commercially.  

Ai-Sun "Kelly" Tseng (Life Sciences) and members of the Tseng laboratory recently published a research article titled "A Model for Investigating Developmental Eye Repair in Xenopus" in the journal Experimental Eye Research. This study showed the unexpected finding that frog embryos can fully regrow their eyes after injury. The authors also…

Hong Sun (Chemistry and Biochemistry) and her laboratory's research were featured in the most recent issue of Research Features for their model on target acid sphingomyelinase (ASM) for anti-cancer therapy. Titled, "Acid Sphingomyelinase – A Novel Target for Anti-Cancer and Degenerative Diseases?," their research explores how ASM…

Innovation (Research & Economic Development), the university's research magazine, recently received a Bronze Award of Excellence from District VII of the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). CASE Awards of Excellence showcase best practices in alumni relations, fundraising, public/government relations, advancement…

Bing Zhang (Physics and Astronomy) and a team of researchers recently published a paper in Nature Astronomy. The paper is titled, "Transition from Fireball to Poynting-flux-dominated Outflow in the Three-episode GRB 160625B," and was led by former UNLV Ph.D. student Bin-Bin Zhang. In the paper, the research team discovered for the first…

Jenifer Utz (Life Sciences) has been awarded $649,407 from the National Science Foundation Division of Undergraduate Education for a project titled "Developing the Skill and Will to Succeed in STEM." Katie Rafferty, Christy Strong, Donald Price (all Life Sciences), and Matt Bernacki (Educational Psychology and Higher Education) are Co-PIs.…

Arthur Baragar (Math) recently spoke at the Princeton/Institute for Advanced Studies number theory seminar. His talk was titled "From Counting Markoff Triples to Apollonian Packings; a Path via Elliptic K3 Surfaces and their Ample Cones."