Research Notes
Technology Gives Boost to Fiber Lasers
A technology developed by Govind Agrawal, a professor of optics at Rochester, may point the way to making a class of high-powered lasers more efficient and even more powerful as communication tools. Agrawal and colleagues have designed a new way to reflect light more effectively inside the glass of fiber lasers, allowing the lasers to deliver higher wattages. The technology could make possible new applications, such as high-bandwidth laser communication with a planetary rover several million miles away.
Rochester to Help Coordinate National Parkinson’s Effort
Data about all Parkinson’s disease patients who are taking part in National Institutes of Health studies across the country will be directed toward Rochester, thanks to the Medical Center’s selection as a new Parkinson’s Disease Data and Organizing Center. The administrative entity, funded with a five-year, $5.7 million grant from the NIH, eventually aims to collect information from all the clinical studies of Parkinson’s that the agency funds.
Study: Nurses’ Visits Improve Lives
Pregnant women who were visited by nurses had fewer subsequent pregnancies, longer intervals between births of their first and second children, longer relationships with current partners, and fewer months of using welfare and food stamps. Those are some of the most recent findings by School of Nursing researchers led by Harriet Kitzman, professor of nursing and pediatrics and coinvestigator on the study published in the journal Pediatrics. The results are the latest from 20 years of nursing school research that’s being used by programs at 170 sites nationwide, backed by $13 million in grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
‘Slow Light’ Research Speeds Up
Rochester researchers are getting a chance to show how some of their work, like bringing light to a near halt, could help transform telecommunications and computing. Spurred by a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency award for $6.5 million over the next four-and-a-half years, a multi-institutional team led by Robert Boyd, professor of optics and physics, is exploring ways to slow light to 127 miles per hour—5.3 million times slower than normal. Such work has implications for the way information is processed in communications, computing, and other fields.
Touching Research: How White Blood Cells Navigate
How do white blood cells protect people from invaders like the flu? According to a Rochester team of biomedical engineers and scientists, the difference between good health and chronic conditions like heart disease and diabetes often comes down to the right interaction among blood cells, a process that the researchers are exploring through a five-year, $11.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. Led by Richard Waugh, chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering, the team is focusing on white blood cells known as neutrophils, which are the body’s first responders to inflammation and infection, and how those cells interact with blood vessel linings.
Researcher Receives 10-Year Award
A Medical Center researcher exploring ways to prevent the ravages of stroke and Alzheimer’s disease has been awarded a rare, 10-year MERIT award from the National Institute on Aging. Berislav Zlokovic of the Department of Neurosurgery received the award, worth approximately $5 million in funding during the next 10 years, to further his research studying the role of blood vessels in diseases like Alzheimer’s.
