Brandon Williams (Chemistry and Biochemistry) and collaborators at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) published an article, "Steam Oxidation of Uranium Mononitride in Pure and Reducing Steam Atmospheres to 1200 °C.," in the Journal of Nuclear Materials. Williams is a first-year radiochemistry doctoral student. The research is a…

Artem Gelis (Chemistry and Biochemistry) recently published an article, "Recovery of High Specific Activity Molybdenum-99 from Accelerator-induced Fission on Low-enriched Uranium for Technetium-99m Generators," in Scientific Reports. The work is a funded collaboration with Niowave and Argonne National Laboratory and has been accessed 889 times and…

James Louis-Jean (Chemistry), a doctoral candidate under the guidance of  S.M. Balasekaran, Paul Forster, and Frederic Poineau published an article in collaboration with the Vietnam University department of inorganic chemistry, "Structural and spectral studies of hydrated hexaamminecobalt(III)–hexafluororhenate(IV)" in the Journal…

Mary Blankenship (The Lincy Institute, Brookings Mountain West, Economics, Chemistry) recently had a report published in the Brookings Institution blog, Up Front. The piece, Assessing the Social and Emotional Costs of Mass Shootings with Twitter Data, analyzes emoji and hashtag usage on Twitter after mass shootings and finds that society…

Gary Kleiger (Chemistry and Biochemistry) was awarded a four-year, $1.5 million R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health titled "How Ubiquitin-carrying Enzymes Contribute to Ubiquitin Ligase Specificity." He is the sole principal investigator on the grant. The funding will be used to explore how targeted protein degradation may lead to…

Alexander Barzilov (Mechanical Engineering), Artem Gelis (Chemistry), and Zaijing Sun (Health Physics and Diagnostic Sciences) gave recruitment presentations and answered questions about corresponding nuclear-related programs at the 2021 ANS Virtual Student Conference last week. UNLV is among the 11 top-tier universities invited to have university…

Sarah York (Chemistry & Biochemistry) has accepted a 2021 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. York's research is in chemistry education. Her dissertation research will focus on the use of systems thinking approaches to improve chemistry teaching and learning. Her advisor, MaryKay Orgill, found the…

Jun Yong Kang (Chemistry and Biochemistry) has been awarded a patent (10,927,135) granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for the invention “Metal-free Direct Arylation of Dialkyl Phosphonates for the Synthesis of Mixed Alkyl Aryl Phosphonates” Mixed phosphonates show a wide range of biological applications including…

Gary Kleiger (Chemistry) participated in an international collaboration with Brenda Schulman, director of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry. Published this week in Nature, their article describes at atomic structural resolution how enzymes called ubiquitin ligases function in human cells. How these enzymes work is…

James Louis-Jean (Chemistry) recently was published in the Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry for his work on isotope analysis of nuclear materials with collaborators at Los Alamos National Lab. His other accomplishments include receiving the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Fellowship in fall 2020, the African American…

Ashkan Salamat's (Physics and Astronomy) recent research about room-temperature superconductivity with colleague Ranga Dias from the University of Rochester was announced as one of 10 finalists in Physics World magazine's Breakthrough of the Year for 2020.  The announcement of the Breakthrough of the Year …

Gary Kleiger (Chemistry and Biochemistry) is a co-corresponding author on a paper titled "Linkage-Specific Ubiquitin Chain Formation Depends on a Lysine Hydrocarbon Ruler" that was in the journal Nature Chemical Biology. Alums Nicholas Purser, '19 BS Biology; Nicole Burton, '20 BS Chemistry; and Daniel Houston, '09 BA Psychology and BS Biology,…