Points of Distinction

KU libraries continue to be leaders in the Open Access movement. KU was the first public institution in the United States to adopt an open access policy and became one of the first American universities to sign the Berlin Declaration on Open Access Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.

The goal of open access is to make scholarly research more accessible to a broad section of researchers and the public by using the advantages provided by digital and electronic communication.

KU faculty ranked second nationwide for the number of prestigious Fulbright awards they received, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Nine KU faculty members received the awards, which enable recipients to teach and conduct research overseas for a year.

KU's Center for Research on Learning has been granted $12.5 million to help the nation’s largest federal training program for skilled and semi-skilled workers better prepare young people for jobs in construction and health care.

Under the five-year federal Department of Labor contract, the center will lead a consortium charged with training Job Corps staff and contractors to use more effective teaching methods for the 60,000 persons ages 16-24 who enroll in Job Corps programs each year. Many of them are from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and have had limited success in school.

Daryl Mellard, director of the center's Division of Adult Studies, is executive director of the Consortium for Excellence in Job Corps Staff Development. The consortium's five other participating organizations are in Washington, D.C., Maryland, Georgia, and Denver.

Black scientists were significantly less likely than their white counterparts to receive research funding from the National Institutes of Health, according to an analysis of data from 2000 to 2006.

KU professor of economics Donna Ginther was the lead author on the study commissioned by the NIH; it appeared in the Aug. 19 issue of the journal Science.

The researchers found a 10 percentage point gap in research funding — even after taking into consideration demographics, education and training, employer characteristics, NIH experience and research productivity.

“In order to improve the health outcomes of all Americans, it's important for the biomedical workforce to reflect the diversity of the population,” Ginther said. “As the population becomes increasingly diverse, we will continue to get further from that goal unless the research community intervenes.

All NIH grant applications from 2000-2006 were reviewed in the two-year study of 83,000 submissions.

KU's Department of Special Education has been ranked No. 2 in the number of published journal articles by Science Watch.

Articles by researchers and faculty published in peer-reviewed journals are an important indication of a university's contributions to a field of study. Also in the top 5: Vanderbilt University, the University of Texas-Austin, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Louisiana State University.

U.S. News and World Report egularly ranks KU’s special education master's program No. 1 in the nation among public institutions.

Robert C. Rowland, professor of communication studies, has received the 2011 Douglas W. Ehninger Distinguished Rhetorical Scholar Award from the National Communication Association.

The award is the NCA's top research award in rhetorical studies. It honors an outstanding scholar who has done research in rhetorical theory, rhetorical criticism, or public address studies.

A team of four students won the 2011 Nurture Collegiate Healthcare Design Competition with its proposal on how to improve the environment in waiting rooms at neonatal intensive care units. The team beat 46 entries from around the world.

Valentino J. Stella has received the Distinguished Pharmaceutical Scientist Award from the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists. Stella is the University Distinguished Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry.

The award is the highest honor granted by the association, which bestows the award no more than every two years and only when a worthy candidate is identified.

Skye Leedahl, doctoral student in social welfare from Minot, N.D., is one of two students in the nation to receive the John A. Hartford Dissertation Fellows Award for her research of the social world of older adults in nursing homes. 

The two-year award, administered by the Gerontological Society of America, provides up to $50,000 for Leedahl’s research, which is focused on 30 nursing facilities in a 15-county region of northeast Kansas. Leedahl’s goal is to use her findings to help improve the quality of life for seniors in nursing homes.

The International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University has ranked the Northern Sierra Madre Forest Monitor Lizard (Varanus bitatawa), a giant fruit-eating lizard discovered in the Philippines last year by KU researchers, a Top 10 New Species list for 2011.

The International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University has picked a unique monitor lizard from the Philippines as one of its "Top 10 New Species" for 2011. The 2-meter-long lizard was discovered and described last year by researchers from the University of Kansas in conjunction with colleagues from the National Museum of the Philippines.

The Northern Sierra Madre Forest Monitor Lizard (Varanus bitatawa) inhabits trees in the forests of the Northern Sierra Madre mountain range of Luzon. According to KU researchers, it is one of three giant fruit-eating monitor lizards threatened by destruction of their forest habitats and, to a lesser degree, by hunting and the pet trade.

Emily Scott, associate professor of medicinal chemistry at the University of Kansas, has received national recognition for her research on the structure and function of cytochrome P450 enzymes — proteins responsible for the breakdown of drugs and other foreign chemicals in the body.

Scott has been named a recipient of the 2011 Drug Metabolism Division Early Career Achievement Award from the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics.

The exciting scientific discovery was fried and served with tomato and lettuce on the side.

At least that’s how University of Kansas graduate student Jesse Grismer first heard of a species of lizard heretofore unknown to scientists — it was featured on the menu of a restaurant in the remote Ca Mau province of southern Vietnam.

Grismer and his father — a herpetologist at La Sierra University in Riverside, Calif. — jetted to Vietnam in search of the unknown lizard based on a lead by a fellow scientist and family friend, Ngo Van Tri of the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology.

Among national public research universities, KU ranks 44th in federal funding for science and engineering research, according to the National Science Foundation. KU's funding in 2009 totaled a record $124.7 million.

Three University of Kansas researchers and a KU alumnus are part of a monumental $120 million multi-university undertaking to overhaul how reading is taught to U.S. children by 2015.

The Reading for Understanding Research Initiative is funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences.

Trung Van Nguyen, professor of chemical and petroleum engineering, has received a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to study improvements to storing energy from renewable power sources.

The project centers on designing a bigger, better battery to store the power generated from solar and wind energy for use when the source is not readily available or needed. Nguyen said it would also allow for more efficient use when green power is generated.

KU is one of four universities collaborating on the four-year NSF-funded project.

Mountain rodents called marmots are growing larger, healthier, and more plentiful in response to climate change, according to a researchers at the University of Kansas. 

Nature, one of the world’s foremost scientific journals, published the results of the groundbreaking study. It is the first to reveal that changes in seasonal timing can increase body weight and population size simultaneously in a species — findings likely to have implications for a host of other creatures, especially those that hibernate.

Established by Kenneth Armitage, KU professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology, the decades-long investigation tracks yellow-bellied marmots in Colorado.

University of Kansas geologists have embarked on the first phase of a $4.2 million, three-year project designed to make it easier and more profitable to power electric plants with geothermal energy.

Geothermal energy uses the heat from subterranean hot springs and other geothermal sources to generate power. Today, geothermal plants provide electricity to customers in only six states, but the potential is far larger. KU geology professors and students started work this summer in Nevada’s Clayton Valley, 150 miles from Reno. Their first task is to create detailed maps of the surface and subsurface.

The effort is one of only 24 projects funded by the U.S. Department of Energy under its Innovative Exploration and Drilling Program. KU’s Department of Geology received $2.4 million in federal stimulus funding to help pay for the project.

Using powerful lasers, Hui Zhao, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas, and graduate student Lalani Werake have discovered a new way to recognize currents of spinning electrons within a semiconductor.

Their findings could lead the way to development of superior computers and electronics. Results from their work in KU’s Ultrafast Laser Lab will be published in the September issue of Nature Physics, a leading peer-reviewed journal, and was posted online in early August.

Zhao and Werake research spin-based electronics, dubbed “spintronics.”

“The goal is to replace everything — from computers to memory devices — to have higher performance and less energy consumption,” said Zhao.

University of Kansas graduate student Laura Peterson is one of only seven students in the nation to receive a prestigious predoctoral fellowship from the American Chemical Society’s Division of Medicinal Chemistry.

Peterson, a fourth-year doctoral student from Colorado Springs, Colo., will receive a $24,000 stipend with the award. She was recognized for her work in the lab of Brian Blagg, professor of medicinal chemistry.

“Our lab focuses on heat shot protein 90,” Peterson said. “We investigate small molecules that have the potential for the treatment of several diseases, including cancer and neurodegenerative diseases. We are interested in how these compounds interact with Hsp90 and what biological effects result from this interaction.”

Hsp90 is a protein necessary for cancer cells to proliferate. Peterson and Blagg take natural and synthetic compounds, modify them and investigate their ability to prevent the growth of cancer cells with the goal of discovering new drugs to treat cancer.

A University of Kansas doctoral student in chemical and petroleum engineering is one of only two scientists in the nation to receive the American Chemical Society's prestigious Kenneth G. Hancock Memorial Award, presented by the society's Green Chemistry Institute.

Mahdav Ghanta was recognized for his research at the Center for Environmentally Beneficial Catalysis, where he and team members  developed a nature-friendly way to make the industrial chemical ethylene oxide that at could significantly reduce the carbon footprint of antifreeze, plastic bottles, sports gear, detergents, and paints.

Ghanta received the honor June 21 at the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Awards Ceremony in Washington, D.C.

John Karanicolas, assistant professor of molecular biosciences and bioinformatics, has received a Sloan Research Fellowship, which provides $50,000 in research support over two years.

The prestigious fellowships are given to young faculty members performing promising research in physics, chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, and neuroscience.

Karanicolas' research studies how cells communicate with each other in the brain.

The Hall Family Foundation of Kansas City has committed $18 million to the KU Cancer Center and the Midwest Cancer Alliance, opening doors to innovative cancer treatment and research for the heartland region.

The gift will help the cancer center in its goal of achieving designation as a Comprehensive Cancer Center from the National Cancer Institute. The Midwest Cancer Alliance links discoveries made in the lab at KU to a network of hospitals and health care organizations in Kansas and western Missouri.

A $20 million, five-year award for climate change and renewable energy research will link four universities: KU, Kansas State University, Wichita State University, and Haskell Indian Nations University, along with several in-state and out-of-state companies.

The research, funded by the National Science Foundation, will

• predict the effects of climate change
• assess how farmers decide which crops to grow
• explore the use of nanotechnology to harness solar energy, and
• investigate climate change and energy issues on Native American lands, while developing a pathway for Native Americans to earn doctoral degrees.

A spike in global temperatures and carbon dioxide levels 55 million years ago resulted in soil-dwelling creatures decreasing in size by nearly half, according to KU research.