A few years ago, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Sasha Wagner, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences, proved false what scientists had thought for years. Soot-like molecules that formed an ancient carbon pool deep in the Pacific Ocean did not, in fact, originate from wildfires on land.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Oshani Seneviratne, director of health data research at the Institute for Data Exploration and Applications (IDEA), and Lirong Xia, associate professor of computer science, have been awarded $363,343 from the Algorand Foundation. The award is part of an $8 million grant to fund blockchain research through a project led by Vassilis Zikas, associate professor of computer science and security researcher at Purdue University.

News headlines on extreme weather, melting ice caps, and threatened species are daily reminders of our changing environment. The profound scale and intensity of these challenges may leave one to wonder, “What should we do first?” Researchers recently developed formulas that help answer that question, effectively creating a method to triage declining ecosystems by measuring and comparing their distance to tipping points.

Thanks to a $304,084 Major Research Instrumentation award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is now home to a state-of-the-art single-crystal X-ray diffractometer.

Dr. Yangyang Xu, assistant professor of mathematical sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has received a $250,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to research challenges associated with distributed big data in machine learning.

The COVID-19 pandemic, bigger and more frequent wildfires, devastating floods, and powerful storms have become unfortunate facts of life. With each disaster, people depend on the emergency response of governments, nonprofit organizations, and the private sector for aid when their lives are upended. However, a complicating factor in delivering that aid is that people tend to disperse with such disasters.  

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Scott Forth, assistant professor of biological sciences, and Peter Kramer, professor of mathematical sciences, have received a $359,572 grant  from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop a better understanding of a cellular process that, when errors occur, is linked to cancer.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s School of Science has appointed two new department heads. Mohammed Zaki now leads the Department of Computer Science and Gyorgy Korniss leads the Department of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy.

About 201 million years ago, volcanic eruptions covered an area roughly the size of South America in lava as Pangaea started to split. The Earth was changed. In the years that followed, 40% of all four-legged land animals were wiped out in the End Triassic Extinction (ETE). The exact cause was unknown.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute researchers Gaetano Montelione and Christopher Cioffi will use a five-year, $3.5 million grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to develop a low-dose, oral COVID antiviral drug that can be administered at home. Dr. Montelione is the Constellation Endowed Chair of Structural Bioinformatics and Dr.