Tulane researchers, from left, Lisa Molix, Tiffany Lin and Emilie Taylor Welty stand in front of a vacant pedestal at the intersection of Canal Street and the newly renamed South Norman C. Francis Parkway. The pedestal was home to the Jefferson Davis Monument until it was removed in 2017. (Photo by Paula Burch-Celentano)
Researchers from the Tulane University School of Architecture and the School of Science and Engineering are embarking on a project that they hope answers questions about racial injustice and its impact on the design of urban spaces, monuments and memorials.
The project, “Public Space and Scrutiny: Examining Urban Monuments Through Social Psychology,” won a 2020 SOM Foundation Research Prize, created by the architectural firm Skidmore Owings and Merrill to advance the design profession’s ability to address the world’s most critical issues.
Tulane University will fund three new multidisciplinary Research Centers of Excellence focused on personalized medicine, sex differences in medicine and emerging infectious diseases all distinct research challenges relevant to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The centers are a new effort launched by the Office of Research to mobilize investigators from different fields of study across the university to focus on specific, complex research challenges facing society.
“Tulane Research Centers of Excellence will focus on convergence research, which is research driven by a specific and compelling problem that also deeply integrates investigators from different schools, backgrounds and expertise,” said Dr. Giovanni Piedimonte, vice president for research. “Given the global impact of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the first cycle of the program will fund centers that initially focus on aspects of COVID-19, but their research missions are broad enough to continue well past the pandemic.”
When four biomedical engineering students from Tulane University were chosen for an internship at the Southeast Louisiana Veterans Health Care System (SLVHCS) last summer, they were tasked with identifying an unmet clinical need – something that would not only save money for the agency but improve patient care and satisfaction.
They brainstormed multiple ideas, ultimately settling on a project they dubbed “Socket To Me” improving the costly and time-consuming process of manufacturing lower limb prosthetic sockets.
With a grant from the National Institutes of Health, they spent the summer transforming their idea into an actual design a winning design.
At the SLVHCS’s recent Performance Excellence Fair, the team of Kali Dancisak, Carly Harad, Ava Heller and Marjie Williams, won first place out of more than 40 department entries. Judging was based on such factors as patient outcomes and satisfaction, cost-effectiveness, increased workforce efficiency and engagemen
The National Institutes of Health has selected Tulane National Primate Research Center to lead a new partnership between the seven federally funded National Primate Research Centers to combine their efforts to accelerate promising COVID-19 vaccine and drug research.
The NIH contract, awarded at $1.7 million for the first year, has the potential to reach up to $6.5 million over a four-year funding period.
Tulane will play a leading role in coordinating the evaluation of promising COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics for COVTEN (Coronavirus Vaccine and Therapeutic Evaluation Network). The partnership will standardize research protocols and methods of data collection, share preliminary data and best practices across centers, and minimize the use of nonhuman primates by having single control groups across multiple studies. The centers, which normally conduct research independently, aim to harmonize their studies to provide more useful comparative data.