Struggling to make sense of a large amount of student evaluations from her UA introductory biology course, Associate Vice Provost in the Office of Instruction and Assessment and BIO5 member, Dr. Lisa Elfring, developed a way to visualize the feedback. This kind of presentation provides her with the ability to create and test hypotheses of what students thought of a course.
Imaging and genomic technologies have dramatically increased the amount of information generated and used to make clinical decisions for diseases like Alzheimer's. “There is an untapped opportunity to leverage existing data from longitudinal cohorts, from the postmortem human brain, and from clinical trials to help the field advance our shared goals more effectively than we otherwise could,” said BIO5 member Dr. Eric Reiman, Executive Director of the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute.
The Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), an affiliate of City of Hope, has identified a polio-like virus as a potential cause of an outbreak of a disease known as Acute Flaccid Myelitis (AFM), a crippling condition that causes muscle weakness and paralysis usually among children. Dr. Bonnie LaFleur, UA Professor of Biostatistics and BIO5 member, aided in data analysis for the study.
UA researchers are building a quantum hub known as Inquire, which will be the world's first shared research and training instrument to help researchers in diverse fields benefit from quantum resources. The interdisicplinary research team includes Dr. Jennifer Barton, Director of the BIO5 Institute and UA Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Biosystems Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Dr. Marek Romanowski, BIO5 member and Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, and Materials Science and Engineering.
UA ecologist and member of the BIO5 Institute, Dr. Ramona Walls is co-author on a recent Nature Ecology and Evolution paper, "Measuring species traits for biodiversity policy goals". This new research is part of collaboration with scientists around the world in an effort to study how species are responding to global changes in habitat, environment and climate.
The KEYS Summer Research Internship Program lets high school students work alongside university faculty in top research labs. “Our interns learned to use tools that data scientists use every day...Their contributions will be used by many of the researchers that take advantage of our open access platform,” said Nirav Merchant, BIO5 member, CyVerse Co-Principal Investigator and Director of Data7.
Drug interactions can pose a serious risk to patients when they are not identified and addressed. That is why a team of UA researchers, including BIO5's Dr. Vignesh Subbian, are developing a drug interaction knowledge database, combined with clinically validated algorithms, which is expected to increase the specificity of warnings concerning dangerous drug combinations.
A UA team, headed by Dr. Michael S. Barker, BIO5 member and assistant professor and director of bioinformatics in the UA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, has found that polyploidy, the duplication of whole genomes, has occurred many times during the evolution of insects, the most diverse group of animals.
The recent revolution in artificial intelligence won’t be spawning computers hell-bent on doing in the human race. Instead, artificial intelligence, or AI, will be working with us and not against us, in what BIO5's Mihai Surdeanu, UA associate professor of computer science, terms “intelligence augmentation,” or IA.
BIO5 Institute member and Director of the Division of Population Genetics at the UA Center for Applied Genetics and Genomic Medicine, Dr. Rick Kittles probes African-American genetic ancestry for data that could help resolve health disparities in communities of color.
