Computer science, engineering, statistical and biomedical researchers from 11 universities will spend the next four years developing innovative tools to make it easier to gather, analyze and interpret health data generated by mobile and wearable sensors. The Mobile Sensor Data-to-Knowledge (MD2K) team, led by University of Memphis computer scientist Santosh Kumar, will receive $10.8 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop novel big-data solutions for reliably quantifying physical, biological, behavioral, social, and environmental factors that contribute to health and disease risk.
Using X-rays and neutron beams, a team of researchers from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, University of Utah and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have teased out new information about Protein Kinase A (PKA), a ubiquitous master switch that helps regulate fundamental cellular functions like energy consumption and interactions with hormones, neurotransmitters and drugs.
Pharmaceutical companies will collaborate with researchers at the University of California, San Diego to provide previously unreleased proprietary data for drug discovery through a new $3.7 million effort funded by the National Institutes for Health. The project, which is led by UC San Diego principal investigators Rommie Amaro, Victoria Feher and Dr. Michael K. Gilson, includes a major subcontract to Rutgers University, directed by Dr. Stephen K. Burley of the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics Protein Data Bank.
President Obama’s BRAIN Initiative, a federal research effort designed to help researchers answer fundamental questions about how the brain works, has in recent months awarded scientists at UC San Diego with more than $10 million in grants, cementing the campus’s reputation as one of the world’s top centers for neuroscience research.
Two professors of psychiatry at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have been honored by the New York City-based Brain & Behavior Research Foundation for their work studying the genetics, dysfunction and treatment of schizophrenia, a chronic and severe brain disorder affecting roughly 1 percent of the general population or approximately 3 million people.
Accessing two previously untapped streams of satellite data, scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and their colleagues have created a new map of the world’s seafloor, creating a much more vivid picture of the structures that make up the deepest, least-explored parts of the ocean. Thousands of previously uncharted mountains rising from the seafloor and new clues about the formation of the continents have emerged through the new map, which is twice as accurate as the previous version produced nearly 20 years ago.
