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Research Stories

News and Announcements, Press Releases, Research Stories

Georgia State Research Expenditures Top $200 Million For The First Time

Georgia State Research Expenditures Top $200 Million For The First Time

Georgia State University’s total research expenditures exceeded $200 million for the first time in fiscal year 2017, the National Science Foundation reports in the latest Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) Survey.

The university ranks 108th out of 902 universities in the U.S. for research expenditures, and rose 15 spots from last year.

From fiscal year 2010 to fiscal year 2017, expenditures increased by 248 percent, making Georgia State one of the nation’s fastest-growing research universities. For the past two years, Georgia State has been the highest-ranked institution without an engineering or medical school.

Research Stories

Minding the Brain

Minding the Brain

In 1998, neuroscience research in Atlanta was transformed by a jaw-dropping $37 million.

The grant was awarded by the National Science Foundation to fund the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience (CBN), established by Regents’ Professor of Neuroscience Elliot Albers and Tom Insel, then director of the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center at Emory University. (The inter-institutional collaboration is also supported by the Georgia Institute of Technology, Morehouse School of Medicine, and Atlanta University Center’s four member schools.)

“At a time when Georgia State was not a heavyweight in research, this was the biggest single grant ever to come to us,” says Nancy Forger, professor of neuroscience, director of the Neuroscience Institute and a Second Century Initiative faculty member.

News and Announcements, Research Stories

2CI Faculty Collaboration: LGBTQ Institute, Georgia State Release New Survey of LGBTQ Southerners

2CI Faculty Collaboration: LGBTQ Institute, Georgia State Release New Survey of LGBTQ Southerners

Transgender people in the American South reported nearly twice as much discrimination over the past year than lesbian, gay or bisexual people, according to a study conducted by the LGBTQ Institute at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights and Georgia State University. Second Century Initiative Professor Eric Wright worked with the LGBTQ Institute for this research.

The wide-ranging study also found that the most common forms of discrimination for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people in the South were being subject to slurs and jokes, rejection by friends and family and places of worship, and poor service at places of business.

The survey is one of the largest conducted, with more than 6,500 people taking part. Researchers worked with more 146 nonprofit organizations across 14 Southern states, including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia.

News and Announcements, Research Stories, Second Century Initiative

Stargazing’s New Age: The 2CI Astroinformatics Cluster

Stargazing’s New Age: The 2CI Astroinformatics Cluster

Astronomy was one of the first professions to use computers. When Halley’s comet made its 1758 pass, astronomers divided up the computations required in order to determine its orbit. More than 150 years later, around the time that Georgia State was founded in 1913, Harvard astronomer William Pickering became the first to employ human “computers” — women paid low wages to sort and classify objects in glass-plate photographs.

Today, highly sensitive space telescopes such as NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory collect more than a terabyte (or one million million bytes) of data every day, more than any human can successfully sift through. To keep up with the data deluge, astronomers must now use complex algorithms, machine learning and immense computing power. Yet these whopping data sets are also making it possible for scientists, including researchers at Georgia State, to mine incredible new insights about life in our solar system and beyond.

Georgia State’s Second Century Initiative (2CI), the predecessor initiative to the Next Generation Program, was key to starting this innovative and exciting research effort– astroinformatics.

News and Announcements, Press Releases, Research Stories

2CI/Next Gen Researcher Gets $2.4 Million Grant To Study Diabetic Vascular Diseases

2CI/Next Gen Researcher Gets $2.4 Million Grant To Study Diabetic Vascular Diseases

Dr. Ming-Hui Zou, director of the Center for Molecular and Translational Medicine at Georgia State University, has received a four-year, $2.4 million federal grant to study cardiovascular complications in diabetes.

The grant from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health allows Zou to continue his research, which has been funded since 2004. He is a strategic hire under the Second Century Initiative and Next Generation Program.

The study will investigate how high glucose promotes dysfunction of mitochondria, the cell structures that produce the energy cells need to survive. It will also explore how mitochondrial fission, or division into two or more independent structures, results in atherosclerosis, the buildup of fats, cholesterol and other substances in and on the artery walls, and dysfunction of endothelial cells, which line the interior surface of blood vessels and lymphatic vessels.

Feature Stories, News and Announcements, Research Stories

2CI Faculty Member and Colleagues Counter Traditional Thinking on E-Cigarettes

2CI Faculty Member and Colleagues Counter Traditional Thinking on E-Cigarettes

In the decade that e-cigarettes have been on the market, they’ve gone from an obscure quit-smoking aid to a ubiquitous “lifestyle” product that’s particularly popular among young people, thanks in part to a slick, youth-oriented marketing campaign.

This has created a divide among public health experts about the best way to regulate what is now a $5 billion industry in the U.S. Because while vaping may be a safer, healthier alternative for smokers who want to quit, it’s also attracting teenagers and young adults who otherwise might never light up.

A new study co-authored by the Second Century Initiative’s Jidong Huang and his colleagues at the university’s School of Public Health casts doubt on vaping’s major purported health benefit — helping smokers ditch cigarettes. The researchers examined the responses of more than 850 smokers who participated in an initial survey in 2015 and a follow-up survey a year later and found that 90 percent of those who used both traditional cigarettes and e-cigarettes were still lighting up at the end of the year.

Faculty Profiles, News and Announcements, Research Stories, Second Century Initiative

2CI Collaborative Research Excellence: Social Media and the Growth of E-Cigarettes

2CI Collaborative Research Excellence: Social Media and the Growth of E-Cigarettes

Reports that use of electronic cigarettes is declining may not have accounted for explosive growth in sales of the JUUL device, a novel product that has benefited from social media marketing campaigns to reach young consumers, according to a study led by researchers at Georgia State University’s School of Public Health.

Feature Stories, News and Announcements, Research Stories, Second Century Initiative

A 2CI Scientist’s International Collaboration and a Neuroscience Breakthrough: How the Brain Controls Flexible Learning

A 2CI Scientist’s International Collaboration and a Neuroscience Breakthrough: How the Brain Controls Flexible Learning

A Second Century Initiative researcher at Georgia State University is a member of an international team of scientists who have made an important breakthrough in understanding the mechanisms in the brain that control cognitive flexibility.

Dr. Angela M. Mabb, a 2CI faculty member at Georgia State, collaborated with researchers at the University of Bradford and the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. Their results were published in the Cell Press journal Neuron.

The study highlights the importance of a protein known as Arc in learning and memory and shows that proteins not only need to be switched on, but also need to be removed at the correct times for proper learning. More important, these findings show for the first time that the dynamic expression of a single protein has profound implications in replacing a previously learned task with a new one.