As a new year begins, the research efforts of the University’s various schools and academic departments are continuing to forge ahead, contributing to what Vice President for Research Tom Skalak called progress in key areas of interest.
Skalak, who emphasized that “the deans of the [University’s] schools have the job of building their schools,” noted that there is “a lot of creativity and initiative within each school” to provide public service and research opportunities for students. Many current projects face the “complex problems facing society” and, as a result, cross disciplinary boundaries, Skalak said. As an example, he named a team in biomedical engineering — a department already spans both the Medical School and the Engineering School — that includes faculty from both of these schools as well as students from the Darden School.
This team, which sometimes includes external corporate partners, has produced projects such as a new MRI technology that can image the human heart in such a way as to display both the heart muscle itself and the blood vessels within the heart, Skalak said.
This development, Skalak said, could simultaneously allow users to determine whether the heart is beating properly while checking for problems in areas such as the coronary arteries that feed blood to the heart itself. Concerning the corporate side of the issue, Skalak noted that this technology has been licensed to Siemens Corporation.
“The point is,” Skalak said, “that this is a great example of a diverse team coming together to lower health care costs, which benefits our state and our nation and ... would deliver better health care to the person that walks into U.Va. Medical Center.”
Another joint activity involving multiple schools within the University is a project known as ecoMOD, which involved a collaboration between the Architecture School and the Engineering School, said Phil Parrish, principal scientist in the University’s materials science and engineering department. Parrish said ecoMOD involves designing and building more sustainable houses from a modular design after which there would be evaluations of the design process.
As part of the modular construction movement, Parrish said, ecoMOD, which has constructed three houses and is now working on a fourth, has constructed modules for homes at central locations and then shipped them to the actual house sites to piece the modules together into a functioning house. This process, Parrish said, not only greatly improves the efficiency of home construction but also has allowed ecoMOD to “demonstrate new concepts” to modular builders with each new house the project has built.
In this respect, Parrish said, ecoMOD has been part of a larger energy leadership movement within the University. For example, Parrish noted that Asst. Architecture Prof. John Quale, who has also been prominent in the ecoMOD project, has traveled to Southwest Virginia with representatives from Skalak’s office to develop prototypes to improve upon the housing options available in the region. Parrish said this also served as a platform to encourage economic development, engage modular home builders in the area and create a business model that could be taken to other parts of the country.
Such wide-ranging efforts, which look at a multitude of challenges while proposing solutions on a variety of fronts, are not limited to the ecoMOD project and related initiatives. Skalak noted, for example, that his office is involved in creating “pan-University efforts,” wherein researchers from multiple schools may study some of the pressing issues facing modern society.
The challenge of meeting the demands of present-day issues, Skalak said, may also be affected by the changing political landscape in Washington.
“We believe that with [President-elect Barack] Obama taking office, there will be some transitions in our federal government’s emphases in science, engineering and other forms of University scholarship,” Skalak said, noting that his office expects “an emphasis on developing alternative energy and improving energy conservation measures.”
In addition, Skalak said, his office expects an emphasis on safety and security, both in the field of developing “safe and secure homeland defense systems” and in developing and improving cyber security systems. This is expected to coincide with an increased emphasis on bioscience research, health information technology and public health.
“And I think the final thing [is that] there’ll be a renewed emphasis on federal government realizing that the pipeline for innovation is fundamental research and the physical and biological sciences,” Skalak said.
Alongside this overall theme of innovation, Skalak noted that his office, in practicing another aspect of “research enhancement,” often works to transfer technology developed in University laboratories out into the wider world.
For example, Skalak said, University researchers may join partnerships with “work from the Commerce School and the Darden School” and then “find their way into corporate research agreements or ... fund startup companies.”
Many of these school and department-affiliated research projects, Skalak said, are also assisted by his office’s overarching goal of research enhancement, which in this case largely refers to the procurement of external funds to make up for shortcomings in federal, state or corporate funds.
These external sources of funding, which Skalak said include foundations and other donors, tend to be necessary for researchers in the humanities, visual arts and social sciences. Despite these departments’ tendency to have less access to funding, Skalak said, their research can still have great impacts on society.
Some of these projects, while academic in focus, have also taken on a much grander scope thanks to modern-day technology. Examples of this include the work done by the University’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities and the Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship.
IATH Assistant Director David Koller described the institute’s mission as one of providing information technology to humanities scholars. He noted that the institute has about a dozen full-time employees who provide advanced technology support in areas such as Web design, 3D computer graphics and 3D scanning of real-life objects.
In reference to these 3D scans, Koller noted that he is leading the High Performance Computing for Processing and Analysis of Digitized 3D Models of Cultural Heritage project, which received a grant last month from the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Because of this grant, the project will have access to federal supercomputer facilities. This is particularly important, Koller said, because the 3D scanning devices gather hundreds of thousands of points of data per second, meaning that a desktop computer would be incapable of efficiently processing the data.
Another University project in the humanities whose broad scope was enabled by modern-day information technology is the Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship.
NINES founder and former codirector Jerome McGann, who was also a cofounder of IATH in 1992, said the project serves as an online database of hundreds of thousands of resources on British and American 19th-century studies resources. The works — which include such resources as fiction, nonfiction, primary resources and secondary resources — span the “long 19th century,” or the period of time from about 1780 to 1920, McGann said.
McGann, who founded NINES after receiving a distinguished achievement award from the Mellon Foundation in 2002, estimated that there are about 300,000 to 400,000 objects aggregated with NINES, and he expects that by the end of the year there will be several hundred thousand more.
As may be expected, the increased scope brought about by technological innovations spans beyond the humanities and the social, physical and biological sciences. University astronomers, for example, will be undertaking a survey of more than 100,000 Milky Way red giant stars — stars approaching the later years of their life cycles — in order to gain insight into the origins and evolution of galaxies.
This survey, known as the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment, has the goal of discovering how elements are formed and distributed across the galaxy, said Astronomy Prof. Steven Majewski, the primary author of APOGEE’s research on this subject. He noted that most chemical elements past the first few entries in the periodic table were formed inside stars through the process of nuclear fusion.
Majewski explained that different elements burn to produce different patterns of lines in the electromagnetic spectrum, noting that this allows instruments to identify the chemical composition of stars.
He explained, however, that interstellar dust clouds interfere with visual light observations of distant stars. The work in APOGEE, Majewski said, will compensate for this by focusing in measurements in the infrared spectrum, which has a wavelength longer than that of visible light.
The instruments used by APOGEE also will be able to identify the spectra of up to 300 stars at a time, Majewski said. The ability to identify more stars at greater distances will, Majewski noted, contribute to the experiment’s greater scope when compared to previous astronomical surveys.
APOGEE is focused on red giant stars because of their much greater brightness when compared to smaller stars, Majewski said. He explained that some challenges in the survey would arise from factors such as the much shorter life cycles of higher-mass stars. It will be a challenge, Majewski said, to determine how much the survey is representative of the galaxy as a whole, especially because the 100,000 surveyed in the project will still be a small percentage of the galaxy’s total population of stars.
Nevertheless, Majewski said, APOGEE is part of a greater movement in the field of astronomy toward “bigger and bigger projects” that are moving away from the old trend of one professor doing work alone with a small team.
“This is a very big problem that’s sort of hot in the field right now,” Majewski said. “Understanding how stars form, how dusts form ... that requires a new approach and level of understanding.”
In regards to new research approaches, the University launched its Science and Art Project last month, Skalak said. That project’s goal, Skalak said, is to bring together the diverse perspectives of scientists and artists in order to allow them to collaborate on projects of their choosing.
“What we’re doing on the Web site is ... creating an open collaborative space so that people can come together,” Skalak said.
Among the examples of such possible collaboration, Skalak noted, include cases in which a researcher in neuroscience might come together with someone in theater or drama to study the human response to performances. He also mentioned that a computer scientist and artist may look at the problem of Internet traffic in different ways or that a sculptor may collaborate with a plant biologist out of an interest in portraying how genetic modifications of plants may be expressed in sculpture.
“The basic idea was to recognize that creativity and innovation are an important part of all the disciplines that we’ve just been discussing,” Skalak said, concluding that “the goal is to expand new ideas and creative work.”
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