Frank van Breukelen (Life Science) has received a four-year National Science Foundation research grant totaling $797,810 to study hibernation in tenrecs.  Tenrecs are esoteric mammals from Madagascar that have a unique form of hibernation. These animals are able to hibernate or maintain active body temperatures from at least 12-28 °C. His…

Steve Rowland (Geoscience) and a team of undergraduate students from the College of Sciences recently announced the discovery of fossilized reptile footprints northeast of Las Vegas that are 60 million years older than the earliest dinosaurs. Rowland presented the work in October at a meeting of the Society of Vertebrate…

Ai-Sun Tseng (Life Sciences) was a speaker at the biennial International Xenopus Conference in Kolymbari, Crete, and at the 2016 Southwest Regional Society for Developmental Biology meeting in Salt Lake City. She presented her laboratory's recent research studies on vertebrate eye regeneration.

Rebecca Martin (Physics & Astronomy) received a three-year, $297,116 grant from the NASA Exoplanets Research Program to study planet formation in binary star systems. About half of observed exoplanets are estimated to be in binary star systems rather than around a single star like our Sun. Planet formation in binary star systems may be…

Helen Wing (Life Sciences) is serving as a special editor of an issue of the journal Genes that focuses on "Virulence Gene Regulation in Bacteria." As special editor, Wing is responsible for:   Preparing a brief introduction of this special issue. Making decisions on the manuscripts based on the articles received.…

Allen Gibbs (Life Sciences) published An Experimental Evolution Test of the Melanism-Desiccation Hypothesis in Insects in PLoS One. This study challenges a long-standing idea in insect physiology, that darker insects will survive better in drier conditions. Co-authors included Subhash Rajpurohit, a former post-doctoral researcher in the Gibbs lab…

Daniel Mast and Bradley Childs (Chemistry) won awards in the 2016 Innovations in Fuel Cycle Research Awards sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), office of fuel cycle technologies. Mast was awarded a first-place prize in the open competition in the category of nuclear science and engineering. His award-winning research paper, “…

Martin Schiller (Nevada Institute of Personalized Medicine) and the Schiller Laboratory of Applied Bioinformatics, Christy Strong (Life Sciences), Ronald Benjamin, Omoyemwen Igbinedion (both Nevada Institute of Personalized Medicine), and peers at other institutions recently published a review article titled “TALEN Gene Editing Takes Aim on HIV”…

Bing Zhang (Physics & Astronomy) and Xuefeng Wu, former UNLV postdoctoral research associate now with Purple Mountain Observatory, China, and He Gao, a UNLV Ph.D. graduate now at Beijing Normal University, China, recently published a paper in Physical Review D to test Einstein’s weak equivalent principle using gravitational…

Doctoral student Carmen Vallin (Life Sciences) was awarded the American Society for Microbiology Robert D. Watkins Graduate Research Fellowship. The program provides a total stipend of $63,000 ($21,000 a year) for a three-year period and is aimed at highly competitive graduate students. Vallin was awarded this…

Lars Walker (Life Sciences) is co-editor of Long-Term Ecological Research Changing the Nature of Scientists, an insiders' views of ways that that long-term collaborative ecological research has shaped science and scientists in the U.S. Long-Term Ecological Research network. Walker also was a co-author on Chapter 1 (Changing the…

James Pollard (Geoscience), program director of his department's partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service forest inventory and analysis (FIA) program, has entered into a new funding agreement with FIA for $1.5 million per year. This joint venture will enable UNLV researchers to continue…