UNM Researchers Awarded $1.1 Million Grant to Build Optical Scanning NanoscopeResearchers at the University of New Mexico received a three-year, $1.1 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation to support a research program within the Department of Physics. The program, titled “A Facility to Perform Bio-molecular Imaging: Real Time Phase Mapping of Biological Dynamics,” is designed to provide real-time images of biological processes at nano and pico scale resolutions, a feat never achieved before.
It is anticipated that this new phase mapping method will have an impact on medical imaging similar to that of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
New Mexico’s new supercomputer, the third fastest in the world, completed its first scientific application test run by an outside user. A weather forecast project by Professor Joseph Galewsky, UNM Earth and Planetary Sciences department, tracked how a hypothetical winter storm would play out over nearly three weeks in an area that would cover much of the Western Hemisphere.
The test run was accomplished in three hours and nine minutes, and about one month after the supercomputer, named Encanto, arrived in New Mexico. Galewsky’s project is part of the ongoing acceptance testing overseen by the New Mexico Department of Information Technology.
Andrew Schuler, assistant professor in the Department of Civil Engineering, was awarded the 8th Annual Paul L. Busch Award from the Water Environment Research Foundation (WERF) for his research on the biological processes in wastewater treatment.
Schuler will use the $100,000 award to make use of recent advancements in materials sciences for the improvement of growth systems that are submerged in solutions.