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Five University of Pittsburgh faculty members will advance the futures of energy, health, and technology as part of Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) awards they received this year from the National Science Foundation. The awards fund junior faculty members’ emerging careers and include an education component that encourages outreach to women and underrepresented minorities.

Four recipients teach in Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering: Tracy Cui, an assistant professor in the Department of Bioengineering; Di Gao, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering; Lisa Weiland, an assistant professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science; and Jun Yang, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Rebecca Hwa, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science in Pitt’s School of Arts and Sciences, also received an award.

Pitt is among 22 schools to receive five or more of the nearly 400 CAREER awards granted so far this year—the award cycle ends Sept. 30. Matching Pitt with five awards are Cornell University, Harvard, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the University of Missouri at Columbia, and the University of Utah. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign tops the list with 16.

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The first evidence of a distinctive protein signature that could help to transform the diagnosis and improve the monitoring of the devastating lung disease idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is being reported by University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researchers in this month’s edition of PLoS Medicine, an open-access journal of the Public Library of Science.

In the paper, Naftali Kaminski, M.D., director of the Dorothy P. & Richard P. Simmons Center for Interstitial Lung Disease in the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and his colleagues describe a unique combination of blood proteins that appears to distinguish IPF patients from normal controls with extraordinary sensitivity and precision. … Continue Reading »

A groundbreaking study conducted by University of Pittsburgh Alzheimer’s disease researchers reported in the journal Brain (currently online) confirms that Pittsburgh Compound-B (PiB) binds to the telltale beta-amyloid deposits found in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease. The finding is a significant step toward enabling clinicians to provide a definitive diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease in living patients. Until now, the beta-amyloid deposits to which PiB binds have been confirmed, without question, only in the autopsied brains of patients afflicted with Alzheimer’s. The new findings, which correlate PiB-identified beta-amyloid deposits from living patients to their post-mortem autopsy results, will ultimately aid in the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, help clinicians monitor the progression of the disease and further the development of potential treatments. … Continue Reading »