News

Exposure to violence has long-term stress effects among adolescents

Elizabeth Susman and colleagues find enduring negative effects of exposure to violence up to a year after the initial event.

Penn State mourns alumni leader and philanthropist Verne Willaman

Penn State, the Eberly College of Science, and the Huck Institutes have lost a leading advocate and supporter with the passing of Verne M. Willaman, a class of 1951 graduate and retired chairman and president of Ortho Pharmaceutical Corporation.

Acoustic tweezers capture tiny creatures with ultrasound

A team of bioengineers and biochemists including Tony Jun Huang and Steven Benkovic has created a dime-sized device that uses ultrasound to manipulate cells and small organisms.

Penn State is awarded a $5.8 million grant to expand its Galaxy biomedical analysis software

Anton Nekrutenko of the Center for Comparative Genomics and Bioinformatics, with co-developer James Taylor of Emory University, will continue to build new functionality into the Galaxy resource.

Crowdbreaks tracks disease trends through social media

The Salathe research group in the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics and the HealthMap team at Boston Children's Hospital collaborate to crowd-source disease surveillance using aggregated Twitter feeds, user-driven data refinement, and machine-learning algorithms.

HITS Fund is an initial success, set to make first payouts

Following a flood of outstanding proposals, the Huck Institutes' seed fund for innovative and transformational research is set to launch its inaugural round of projects with additional funding from the Eberly College of Science and the Materials Research Institute.

Grant proposals to the W.M. Keck Foundation continue

The initiative is ongoing, with a 3-5 year target for successful awards; the next submission cycle begins November 1, 2012.

New BioChip may make diagnosis of leukemia and HIV faster and cheaper

Tony Jun Huang and his colleagues, including Wafik El-Deiry, have developed a faster, cheaper and portable alternative to the current flow cytometry technology used to diagnose HIV and leukemia.

Two Penn State biomedical researchers receive a Gates Foundation grant

Andrew Patterson and Gary Perdew have been awarded a grant from the Grand Challenges Explorations program to test their approach toward reducing illness and death from gastrointestinal diseases in infants and children.

A strategy is discovered to activate genes that suppress cancer

A team of researchers led by Yanming Wang of the Huck Institutes' Center for Eukaryotic Gene Regulation and Gong Chen of the Department of Chemistry has found that by inhibiting the PAD4 enzyme they can reactivate tumor-suppressing genes to destroy cancerous cells.