The National Academy of Sciences has announced LCID Faculty Member Dr. Nancy A. Moran as recipient of the 2023 Selman A. Waksman Award in Microbiology. Established by the Waksman Foundation for Microbiology, the Selman A. Waksman Award is a prize of $20,000 that is presented to recognize a major advance in the field of microbiology.
In its announcement, the NAS cited Moran’s trailblazing research on the evolution and biology of the intimate symbiosis between insect hosts and bacteria that has expanded understanding of microbial symbiosis and bacterial genome
LCID Faculty Member Dr. Jason S. McLellan has been named the 2023 recipient for both the Welch Foundation’s Norman Hackerman Award in Chemical Research as well as the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology. The two awards were given in recognition of McLellan’s work as a pioneer in structure-based vaccine design. His work has been instrumental in the development of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines in addition to on-going research towards an effective RSV (Respiratory Syncytial Virus) vaccine that has gone through a successful phase three trial.
INS Graduate Student Dylan Kirsch published an article in Behavioural Brain Research entitled "Neural underpinnings of expecting alcohol: Placebo alcohol administration alters nucleus accumbens resting state functional connectivity".
This research probed the neural basis of the "placebo response phenomemon" whereby an individuals’ beliefs about whether they have consumed alcohol, irrespective of the actual presence of alcohol, can determine level of alcohol consumption and impact social behavior. Results suggest the placebo response to alcohol is
This weekend graduate student Nick Chen presented a new study examining the indirect effects of couple relationship education on fathers' parenting at the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapy (ABCT) annual convention in New York Cty. This work was conducted with Dr. Williamson and our collaborator Dr. Justin Lavner.
I recently pulled the eBird dataset into postgresql and decided to look at which day of the year has the most recorded species in Parulidae. Its April 17th. This is for Chambers and Galveston counties that include Anahuac, the Bolivar, and Galveston Island. It turns out calculating warblers-per-minute effort is useless without doing rarefaction. The vast number of lists in April along the coast wash out any signal as you run out of warblers to see pretty quickly.
