The big winners at this year’s New York Business Plan Competition are Juniyali Nauriyal and Sushant Kumar, both PhD students in the lab of Jaime Cardenas, assistant professor of optics.

They described a novel way to securely attach optical fibers to integrated photonic devices. Currently, companies use glue, which requires long cure times, and often shifts in position and shape, leading to low yields, inconsistent device performance, overheating, and excess energy use.

Nauriyal and Kumar, cofounders of the Photonect start-up company, use lasers to weld the glass of optical fibers to the glass of mode converters in the devices. In their pitch, Nauriyal and Kumar said the new fusion splicing technology connects the fibers 10 times faster, improves device performance fourfold, and leads to a 50 percent reduction in costs.

Learn more here about their journey from great idea to a grand prize, and the support and resources they received at the University along the way.

New research published in JAMA recommends daily steroid doses for children with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), marking a significant change in how the disease is treated.  Medical Center neurologist Robert Griggs and Michela Guglieri, with Newcastle University in the U.K., led the study, which was conducted by a global team of researchers dedicated to improving care for this fatal disease.

“Corticosteroids are likely to remain the main treatment for DMD worldwide for the foreseeable future, so it is critical that we establish a standard of care that is backed by scientific evidence,” says Griggs. “This study shows that health concerns over the daily use of corticosteroids are overstated and that there is a clear benefit in terms of improved motor and pulmonary functions. These findings clearly support the daily regimen over an intermittent one as an initial treatment for boys with DMD.”

DMD is a condition found almost exclusively in boys and characterized by muscle weakness. The symptoms eventually spread to the heart and muscles responsible for breathing, and the disease is often fatal by the time the boy reaches his late teens.  An estimated 28,000 people in the U.S. suffer from the disease.

There is currently no universally accepted standard for steroid use in DMD.  A global survey of physicians who treat DMD found 29 different regimens, with the most common being ten days on and ten days off.  This intermittent dosing regimen was put in place in an effort to limit the potential side effects associated with prolonged steroid use in children, such as weight gain, stunted growth, and loss of bone density.

Griggs and Kate Bushby with Newcastle University initiated the phase 3 clinical trial conducted through the Muscle Study Group, an international network of muscular dystrophy researchers. The new study followed 196 boys with DMD at 32 research sites across North America and Europe for three years. Participants were assigned to three groups consisting of daily regimens of prednisone or deflazacort, or intermittent prednisone. The researchers found that the daily regimens of both drugs significantly slowed disease progression as measured by strength testing and muscle function, as compared to the intermittent group. While the daily regimen increased side effects overall, there were minimal serious side effects. Learn more.

Scientists rely increasingly on models trained with machine learning to provide solutions to complex problems. But how do we know the solutions are trustworthy when the complex algorithms the models use are not easily interrogated or able to explain their decisions to humans?

That trust is especially crucial in drug discovery, for example, where machine learning is used to sort through millions of potentially toxic compounds to determine which might be safe candidates for pharmaceutical drugs.

Andrew White, associate professor of chemical engineering, and his lab have developed a new “counterfactual” method, described in Chemical Science, that can be used with any molecular structure-based machine learning model to better understand how the model arrived at a conclusion.

Counterfactuals can tell researchers “the smallest change to the features that would alter the prediction,” says lead author Geemi Wellawatte, a PhD student in White’s lab. “In other words, a counterfactual is an example as close to the original, but with a different outcome.” Learn more.

Jean-Joel Legre, a doctoral student in earth and environmental sciences, presents his project on seismic activity in West Africa.

More often than not, earthquakes are caused by energy released from the sliding of rocks due to the movement of Earth’s tectonic plates. So, what’s with all the seismic activity in West Africa, a region that isn’t near a plate boundary? In the past 10 years, the number of mobile internet subscriptions has more than doubled and, in many cases, replaced traditional broadband at home. But at what cost? Suppose Facebook announces a data leak. Does this make you worried about the data security at Twitter or Google? 

Doctoral students at the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, the Department of Economics, and at the Simon School explored these questions with the support of 2021 awards from the data grant program. Launched two years ago by the River Campus Libraries (RCL), the program helps undergraduate and graduate students in Arts, Sciences & Engineering, the Warner School of Education, and Simon Business School purchase the data sets they need to complete their research.

“It was great having applicants from multiple disciplines,” says Sarah Siddiqui, a STEM librarian at the RCL. “This was the first time we received an application from a STEM discipline. We’re happy to be able to offer this support, and we hope students continue to use this resource for their research in the future.”

Learn more here about the projects by Jean-Joel Legre, a doctoral student in earth and environmental sciences; Lipeng Chen, Woosuk Choi, and Lena Harries, doctoral students from the Department of Economics, and Ruiqi Wu, doctoral student at the Simon School.

The UR Medicine Recovery Center of Excellence is hosting “Taking Action: National Rural Substance Use Disorder Health Equity and Stigma” from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. next Wednesday through Friday, May 18-20, at the Eastman School of Music and virtually.

The event will feature keynote speakers from across the country, including Uchè Blackstock, whose organization Advancing Health Equity is working to dismantle racism in health care; Sam Quinones, author of the award-winning book Dreamland and The Least of Us; and representatives from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Register for free and add to Outlook calendar. Learn more about the summit here.

Promoting research via social media is a necessary skill for all faculty.

A Junior Faculty Biomedical Research Association webinar, from 4-5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, May 18, will feature a panel of public relations experts and faculty who use social media regularly. They will discuss:

• institutional social media efforts.
• how early-stage faculty can promote their research on social media.
• various ways to use social media to enhance the impact of your research.

The webinar is co-sponsored by the URSMD Office for Faculty Development and the UR CTSI’s Rochester Early-Stage Investigator Network.

Register for a virtual webinar to learn how research participants rate their clinical trial experiences, presented by Carrie Dykes, operational director of Research Services at the University’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute. The webinar will be held from 8-8:50 a.m. on Tuesday, May 24.

Dykes will present data from an ongoing project which surveys research participants of Medical Center clinical trials as part of a multi-institutional collaborative initiative called “Empowering the Participant Voice.”

Do you have leftover study supplies from a closed study hanging around your office? Unexpired tubes from a kit that expired? To reduce waste and help each other, a spreadsheet was created and posted on Box.

Anyone can access this file to see what is available or to add to the spreadsheet. For assistance or questions, contact Cate Concannon. If you don’t have a Box account, email the ISD Help Desk.

An NSF grant in augmented and virtual reality awarded to the University is entering its 3^rd year.  PhD students from multiple departments, including electrical and computer engineering, optics, biomedical engineering, brain and cognitive sciences, computer science, and neuroscience are invited to apply for extra training in AR/VR.

Applicants will receive instruction and hands-on experience with high-tech equipment used across industries today. You will have the opportunity to participate in industrial internships at companies such as Meta-FaceBook, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Vuzix, which support this program.

The deadline for paid fellowship applications, offered to US citizens and permanent residents only, is July 25. The deadline for the general trainee program is Aug. 15. Apply here. More information about the program, including how to apply for a paid fellowship, is available here. Individual questions? Contact Kathleen DeFazio, program coordinator.