May 7, 2012 – U.S. soldiers are increasingly weighed down by batteries to power weapons, detection devices and communications equipment. So the Army Research Laboratory has awarded a University of Utah-led consortium almost $15 million to use computer simulations to help design materials for lighter-weight, energy efficient devices and batteries.
"We want to help the Army make advances in fundamental research that will lead to better materials to help our soldiers in the field," says computing Professor Martin Berzins, principal investigator among five University of Utah faculty members who will work on the project. "One of Utah's main contributions will be the batteries."
Of the five-year Army grant of $14,898,000, the University of Utah will retain $4.2 million for research plus additional administrative costs. The remainder will go to members of the consortium led by the University of Utah, including Boston University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Pennsylvania State University, Harvard University, Brown University, the University of California, Davis, and the Polytechnic University of Turin, Italy.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced a $25 million five-year initiative to help scientists better extract insights from today's increasingly massive research datasets, the Scalable Data Management, Analysis, and Visualization (SDAV) Institute. SDAV will be funded through DOE's Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program and led by Arie Shoshani of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). As one of the nation's leading funders of basic scientific research, the Department of Energy Office of Science has a vested interested in helping researchers effectively manage and use these large datasets.
University of Utah Receives $2.9 Million Grant for Groundbreaking Down Syndrome Research. Studies including Utah families will provide insights into the human brain and treatment strategies for mental disability SALT LAKE CITY – A multidisciplinary team of University of Utah investigators has received a grant for innovative research that will shed new light on the genes that cause Down syndrome (DS), as well as the defects of brain development and function that lead to intellectual disability. The $2.96 million grant co-funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will support cross-disciplinary research that studies not only genes and brain structure, but also the circuitry and chemical signals within the brain that lead to the development of DS.
Art Talk Thursday, March 15th, 6-7pm.
Science and art come together this month at the Kimball Art Center's Badami Gallery. SCI Institute: The Art of Science is on display through April 7th, 2012. Some of the world's most recognized scientists in the computing and imaging field have their ground breaking work on display.
As internationally acclaimed leaders in scientific visualization, researchers at the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute at the University of Utah work constantly to develop new and better ways to visualize and communicate the results of scientific inquiry.
Although their visual designs are created to serve science, many of SCI's visualizations of computer simulations of combustion or bioelectric activity in the heart and brain, or of data ranging from a galactic scale down to a cellular level, can also be viewed as works of art.
Brain Imaging Differences Evident at 6 Months in High-Risk Infants Who Later Develop Autism A new study led by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found significant differences in brain development starting at age 6 months in high-risk infants who later develop autism, compared to high-risk infants who did not develop autism.
The study was published online on Feb. 17 at AJP in Advance, a section of the website of the American Journal of Psychiatry. Its results are the latest from the ongoing Infant Brain Imaging Study (IBIS) Network, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health and headquartered at UNC. Piven received an NIH Autism Centers of Excellence (ACE) program network award for the IBIS Network in 2007. ACE networks consist of researchers at many facilities in locations throughout the country, all of whom work together on a single research question.
October 31, 2011 – People living in the Beehive State might easily pair the words "Utah" and "ski" in a word association game, but not so much for "Utah" and "SCI." --something organizers of the new open house called SCIx hope to change. SCIx will take place on November 4th. For a list of presentations and full schedule.
September 20, 2010 -- University of Utah faculty develop a wealth of software, and they now have a resource that will help them organize, refine and make it more commercially viable. That resource is the Software Development Center, which will open its doors this month in a newly remodeled space in the Technology Commercialization Office located at 615 Arapeen Drive in Research Park. The Software Development Center is a joint effort between the University of Utah's Technology Commercialization Office (TCO), which manages all intellectual property on campus, and the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute.
SCI will host an open house for Vis Week conference attendees October 28th from 6:30 pm to 9:00pm. Busses will be available to transport guests from the conference to the SCI Institute. Boarding will begin at 6:15pm and will run continuously with the last bus leaving SCI at about 8:45 or 9:00.
SCI faculty Chuck Hansen's career in visualization is prominently featured in the 2010 College of Engineering Research Report.
See: Scientific Visualization: Analyzing and Understanding Complex Data (pdf).