North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University has announced a strong start to the new school year, showing the kind of progress typical of a growing doctoral research university.
Faculty researchers at N.C. A&T won $113.3 million in research funding in FY26, which represents an increase of $17 million compared to the previous year, due to a record 511 research proposals.
Its new financial year is already underway, including a $17 million award to set up a health disparities research center and another grant in the eight-figure range still awaiting action.
The Georgia Institute of Technology has announced that a group of students from the School of Industrial Design worked with a provider of senior rehabilitation and nursing homes to design gardening tools that help residents with disabilities.
The students developed plant-care tools and a wheelchair attachment that lets residents of the rehabilitation facility take plants with them.
The U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science has invited researchers to apply for its Graduate Student Research program.
The program allows U.S. graduate students to carry out part of their research at a Department of Energy national laboratory or one of its host sites.
The University of Virginia has announced that it is adding 36 NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchips to its brain data analytics infrastructure.
The technology is available to researchers across the university and enables interdisciplinary research and collaboration, creating opportunities to advance brain science and improve human health.
The High-End Instrumentation Grant awarded by the National Institutes of Health to a professor from the UVA School of Data Science and Psychology has made it possible for the new GPU cluster to help researchers analyze complex brain datasets at an unprecedented speed and scale.
The cluster is one of the most powerful university-based neuroscience computing resources in the country.
The resource will support artificial intelligence, machine learning, and high-performance computing projects aimed at understanding brain function, connectivity, and disease.
Understanding brain function and connectivity.
Yale School of Medicine has received nearly $25 million in grant funding from the Aligning Research to Impact Autism initiative.
The press release states that the grant's impact will extend beyond the School of Medicine, leading to knowledge that can support earlier detection, clearer biomarkers, and more accurate interventions for people with autism and their families.
Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder which has an effect on communication, social interaction and behavior and also involves variations in learning, attention, sensory processing, sleep or motor skills.
The Centers for Disease Control state that one in 31 children in the United States has autism.
The World Health Organization believes that about one in 100 children around the world is affected.
The award will assist in promoting autism research and in enhancing the understanding of its initial origins in the developing brain.
Even though there has been progress in neuroscience over many decades, researchers do not have a time-lapse 'map' of the developing human brain.
One professor points out that even though humans have detailed maps of the Earth, our map of the brain—particularly that of the developing brain—is still incomplete.
The earliest stages of brain development are hard to study directly since brain maturation takes place over almost twenty years and there is limited access to developing human tissue for research purposes.
At the same time, it is also during the period when autism-related differences first appear that the brain is undergoing its most rapid changes.
Many neurons and most of the synaptic circuits are formed in the first years of life, so adult brain models cannot be simply reduced in size in order to understand the brain of an infant or toddler.
Researchers will advance their work on the development of the human brain's neural circuits.
The grant is co-led by professors in neuroscience, comparative medicine, genetics, psychiatry, and stem cell and regenerative biology, and it will allow researchers to advance their work on the development of the human brain's neural circuits by bringing together experts from different disciplines and institutions.
Their aim is to better understand how brain development occurs and how autism arises. The grant will support a coordinated effort by integrating experiments, imaging, computation, and clinical partnerships to establish a reference and turn it into discoveries.
This award, part of ARIA's Human Developmental Neurobiology Research Hub, will support projects intended to provide practical tools and resources: a high-resolution map of the developing brain's wiring and a cellular and molecular model showing where autism differs from typical development.
These projects are part of a wider collaboration involving four projects with Harvard University and feature patient-derived brain organoids to link genetics, development, and clinical features.
Generative AI is used to predict interventions and prioritize therapeutic targets.
Generative AI is used to predict interventions and prioritize therapeutic targets, focusing on creating foundational maps and models of the developing human brain and clarifying how and when autism differs from typical development.