SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, has announced Morgan Fogarty, who is expected to receive her PhD in Imaging Science from Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) in February, as the recipient of the 2025 SPIE-Franz Hillenkamp Postdoctoral Fellowship in Problem-Driven Biomedical Optics and Analytics. The annual award of $75,000 supports interdisciplinary problem-driven research and provides opportunities for translating new technologies into clinical practice for improving human health. Fogarty will be recognized at the Sunday evening plenary session during SPIE Photonics West, scheduled for 26 January 2025.

A multidisciplinary team led by Ken Shepard, a pioneering researcher in bioelectronics at Columbia Engineering, has won an award of up to $41 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to build a wireless bioelectronic device to treat obesity and diabetes. The team was selected by ARPA-H’s Resilient Extended Automatic Cell Therapies (REACT) program to create bioelectronic devices that enable people to administer treatments of biologic drugs without the need for injections.  Instead, engineered cells act as cell factories to produce the drugs, negating the need for the chemical modifications required to make such biologics shelf-stable, which often results in reduced efficacy.

Researchers have pioneered a new technique at the Swiss Light Source SLS called X-ray linear dichroic orientation tomography, which probes the orientation of a material’s building blocks at the nanoscale in three-dimensions. First applied to study a polycrystalline catalyst, the technique allows the visualisation of crystal grains, grain boundaries and defects - key factors determining catalyst performance. Beyond catalysis, the technique allows previously inaccessible insights into the structure of diverse functional materials, including those used in information technology, energy storage and biomedical applications. The researchers present their method in Nature.

The black box of the human brain is starting to open. Although animal models are instrumental in shaping our understanding of the mammalian brain, scarce human data is uncovering important specificities. In a paper published in Cell, a team led by the Jonas group at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) and neurosurgeons from the Medical University of Vienna shed light on the human hippocampal CA3 region, central for memory storage.

A team of researchers led by Carnegie Science biologists has identified genes that enable a beneficial bacterial species to colonize specific regions of the gastrointestinal tract. Their work could revolutionize our understanding of how the composition of the gut microbiome is determined and open the door to microbiome engineering—creating probiotics that are optimized for specific niches in the human gut.