Forró to head Notre Dame’s new Stavropoulos Center for Complex Quantum Matter

Forró to head Notre Dame’s new Stavropoulos Center for Complex Quantum Matter

László Forró, professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Institute of Physics of Condensed Matter in Switzerland, has been named the inaugural director of the new Stavropoulos Center for Complex Quantum Matter at the University of Notre Dame, beginning in the fall of 2021.

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Hildreth to serve as interim dean, McDowell as interim associate dean of research in the College of Science

Hildreth to serve as interim dean, McDowell as interim associate dean of research in the College of Science

Michael Hildreth, associate dean of research in the College of Science at the University of Notre Dame, will serve as interim dean of the College of Science beginning January 1, 2021. That day, Mary Ann McDowell, associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, will begin serving as interim associate dean of research in the college.

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Science and Engineering Scholars Program propels students to success

Science and Engineering Scholars Program propels students to success

“This program is, wow,” said Chelsea Popoola, a math major who plans to attend medical school. The small classes allowed her to learn the material in a tight-knit environment. “I wish I had better words to explain how much this program has done for me. Whenever we need help with anything, there are many people willing to help.”

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How T-cell targets look in three dimensions may facilitate new cancer vaccines

How T-cell targets look in three dimensions may facilitate new cancer vaccines

T-cells, which hunt for traces of disease within other cells, work by identifying fragments of outsider proteins on a diseased cell’s surface and then go in for the literal kill.

With cancer, some of the mutated fragments of outsider proteins, called neoepitopes, can be recognized by T-cells and are ideal candidates for cancer vaccines. Unfortunately, those candidates are difficult to predict from genetic data alone.

 

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Common cholesterol drugs could slow spread of breast cancer to brain

Common cholesterol drugs could slow spread of breast cancer to brain

A new study from the University of Notre Dame shows drugs used to treat high cholesterol could interfere with the way breast cancer cells adapt to the microenvironment in the brain, preventing the cancer from taking hold. Patients with breast cancer who experience this type of metastasis typically survive for only months after the diagnosis.

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Understand and Fight: Notre Dame researchers and the COVID-19 pandemic

Understand and Fight: Notre Dame researchers and the COVID-19 pandemic

The hero in Mary Shelley’s “The Last Man,” her second sweeping political science fiction after “Frankenstein,” is left alone in Rome, in a post-apocalyptic world. A global plague apparently took the lives of everyone else, yet he discerns a duty to forge ahead, no matter what.

Published in…

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Researcher discovers key to how a cell wall promotes bacterial replication

Researcher discovers key to how a cell wall promotes bacterial replication

There are more bacteria in our mouths than the population of people on the planet, and no matter how clean our houses are, they’re brimming with various types of these micro-organisms. Still, despite bacteria’s ubiquitous influence, there’s so much that scientists do not know about them, according to University of Notre Dame chemist Shahriar Mobashery.

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Physics researchers study reasons for biomolecule fragmentation from radiation

Physics researchers study reasons for biomolecule fragmentation from radiation

Sylwia Ptasinksa 250

Sylwia Ptasinska, associate professor of physics, published research in Physical Review Letters that begins to explain how low-energy electrons cause damage to DNA and proteins, molecules of life. She and her collaborators selected three formamide molecules to serve as models for proteins.

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Notre Dame researchers collaborate in discovery of potential stroke therapy

Notre Dame researchers collaborate in discovery of potential stroke therapy

Mobashery And Chang At Computer

A study by researchers at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Missouri at Columbia shows in mice that early administration of a potent compound may increase the window of time in which some stroke patients can receive tPA, a therapeutic that dissolves blood clots.

 

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Enzyme in bacteria initiates repair of cell walls damaged by antibiotics

Enzyme in bacteria initiates repair of cell walls damaged by antibiotics

Shahriar Mobashery

Beta-lactam antibiotics, including penicillin, are one of the most widely used class of antibiotics in the world. Though they’ve been in use since the 1940s, scientists still don’t fully understand what happens when this class of drugs encounters bacteria. Now, researchers at the University of Notre Dame have elucidated how an enzyme helps bacteria rebound from damage inflicted by antibiotics not strong enough to immediately kill the bacteria on contact.

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Biophysicist Patricia Clark awarded $1.1M Keck grant for protein folding study

Biophysicist Patricia Clark awarded $1.1M Keck grant for protein folding study

Patricia Clark 250

Patricia Clark, Rev. John Cardinal O’Hara, C.S.C., Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Notre Dame, has been awarded a $1.1 million, four-year grant from the W. M. Keck Foundation to develop an innovative approach to replicate in test tubes a universal component of protein folding within cells.

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Smallest-scale work in electrochemistry leads to sizable research strides

Smallest-scale work in electrochemistry leads to sizable research strides

Paul Bohn 250

At a few billionths of a meter, a nanopore is too tiny to see and too tiny to image easily. These miniscule cavities, when created in synthetic materials, are incredibly powerful. One of Notre Dame’s research groups is among the earliest to investigate electron transfer reactions inside nanopores, and therefore was invited to share their insights in a perspective paper published in ACS Central Science.

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Notre Dame study uncovers keys to earliest stages of animal development

Notre Dame study uncovers keys to earliest stages of animal development

Huber Dovichi 250

Research completed at the University of Notre Dame that tracked the maturation of the frog oocyte to an egg, followed by fertilization and progression to the two-cell embryo, provides a valuable foundation for developmental biologists who study the earliest stages of animal development.

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Graduate science and engineering joint annual meeting allows students to share research

Graduate science and engineering joint annual meeting allows students to share research

Cose Jam 250

The graduate joint annual meeting of the College of Science and the College of Engineering (COSE-JAM) drew 45 poster presentations and 14 oral presentations during the event in Jordan Hall on Friday, Dec. 8. The event, similar to the popular undergraduate College of Science Joint Annual Meeting held each year in May, provides graduate and postdoctoral students the opportunity to present their research to their peers as well as to undergraduate students and faculty.

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