Accolades

Michael Hatridge, assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, has been named a principal investigator in a $115 million U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science initiative to advance quantum computing research. The Co-design Center for Quantum Advantage, led by the Brookhaven National Laboratory, will feature five National Quantum Information Science Research Centers designed to advance and scale quantum computing capabilities. Under the grant, Hatridge will help his center develop devices for connecting quantum computers into large-scale machines and amplifiers designed to read bits of quantum data.

Spyridon Lagaras, assistant professor of finance in the Katz Graduate School of Business, has been awarded a $220,000 Knowledge Challenge grant from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation for "Securing the Gig: Entrepreneurship and the Rise of the Platform Economy,” a joint project with Matthew Denes of Carnegie Mellon University, Margarita Tsoutsoura of Cornell University and the National Bureau of Economic Research.

“The proposed project will investigate the effect of the gig economy on entrepreneurship using detailed administrative microdata from the Internal Revenue Service,” said Lagaras. “We plan to study how the gig economy affects entry into entrepreneurship, nascent firm growth and their sources of capital/funding.”

Together with funding from CMU's Block Center for Technology and Society and the Annie E. Casey Foundation, their gig economy research has received nearly $400,000 in funding.

Read more about the award in this Katz school news feature.

The School of Education has been awarded three grants totaling $255,000 to lead new innovations in K-12 education. The funding comes from the Grable Foundation as part of the Tomorrow campaign, which is awarding 17 grants to nonprofit organizations across Western Pennsylvania over the next year to advance the future of learning.

The three grants that the School of Education received were the most awarded to any organization under the campaign, and will help support the following projects:

• Ignite Learning Teacher Mentorship Program: an opportunity for practicing teachers, pre-service teachers and university professors to take advantage of culturally relevant training and professional development opportunities.

• A Social-Emotional Learning Tutoring Network: Through the Center for Urban Education, the new program will enlist retired Black educators to offer tutoring support to those who work with Black students, especially those in Pittsburgh Public Schools.

• School Board Leadership College: The School of Education’s Forum for Western Pennsylvania School Superintendents and Pitt’s Institute of Politics will create a school board leadership college for school board members.

For more about the funded projects, visit the School of Education website.

Led by Remake Learning, the Tomorrow campaign is supported by the Grable Foundation, ASTC, Global Minds Initiative, Kidsburgh, KnowledgeWorks, Project Fuel, The Saturday Light Brigade and transformED.  

With increasingly diverse classrooms and workplaces comes the challenge of effective, inclusive communication among classmates and colleagues. The coronavirus has not only prompted conversations about public health but also about inequities embedded in society, tying into larger conversations about race, ethnicity, discrimination and institutionalized racism. 

To help with this, and to create safe, healthy and inclusive environments, the Pitt Humanities in Health group has created the Cultural Engagement Playbook, a multimodal training approach to engage trainees in person, virtually or both in a purposeful cultural self-examination of how their own lived experiences influence their attitudes, with the goal of encouraging empathy for others, critically examining their own biases and gaining an appreciation of diversity and a greater sense of community.  

The team includes lead innovator Abdesalam Soudi, who is the primary investigator in the Humanities at Work project and lecturer in Pitt’s Department of Linguistics in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences; Shelome Gooden, assistant vice chancellor for research for the humanities, arts, social sciences, and related fields and a linguistics professor; and Jeannette South-Paul, professor and chair emeritus of family medicine in the School of Medicine.

Two dedicated entrepreneurial mentors are guiding the process and as part of the Pitt Ventures First Gear Program. The project also received NSF I-Corp funding to help validate the market-readiness of the innovation.

For licensing information, contact Carolyn Weber, technology licensing associate, cweber@innovation.pitt.edu, in Pitt’s Innovation Institute.

The Institute for Cyber Law, Policy, and Security (Pitt Cyber) has added a new slate of researchers to its team of Pitt Cyber Affiliate Scholars. Affiliate scholars are selected for excellence in cyber-themed research and teaching and work to serve as sources for transdisciplinary collaboration and innovation within the University and beyond.

The Fall 2020 Affiliate Scholars are:

• Max Goplerud, an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences

• Lucas Mentch, an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics in the Dietrich School

• Lara Putnam, a UCIS research professor in the Department of History n the Dietrich School

• Malihe Alikhani, an assistant professor in the School of Computing and Information

• Eleanor Mattern, a teaching assistant professor in the School of Computing and Information

• Morgan Frank, an assistant professor in the Department of Informatics and Networked Systems in the School of Computing and Information

• Jamie Sidani, an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine in the School of Medicine

• Cassie Quigley, an associate professor in the School of Education

• Tony Rodi, clinical associate professor of business administration in the Katz Graduate School of Business

• Candice Biernesser, a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Psychiatry

A Disability and Rehabilitation Research Project headed by Mark Schmeler, associate professor in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, has been awarded $2.5 million over five years from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research.

Schmeler, who is vice chair for Education & Training in the Department of Rehabilitation Science & Technology, and his team will investigate a new health coverage policy for custom manual and power wheelchairs for people with disabilities to improve their ability to live and participate in their communities.

The project summary says that current health policy for these devices is very restrictive to the point that they are not even covered for people to leave their homes to attend work or school, which conflicts with the spirit of the Rehabilitation Act.

Schmeler and his department are partnering with UPMC and UPMC Health Plan, along with Ohio State University, University of Michigan and key disability, industry and policy stakeholders to evaluate current policies and novel models with stakeholder input. They also plan to develop a standardized assessment and procurement protocol; perform analyses of existing datasets relevant to these devices; and evaluate the feasibility of a new model.

Michael Meyer, a professor in the English Department, Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences, has received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program award to Taiwan. Meyer will teach creative nonfiction writing at Taipei’s National Taiwan Normal University.

This project will continue Meyer’s cultural and educational engagement across the Taiwan Strait. In 1995, he was one of the first Peace Corps volunteers sent to China, and is the author of three award-winning books about the region — “The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed”; “In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China”; and “The Road to Sleeping Dragon: Learning China from the Ground Up.”

Derek Angus, professor and chair of the Department of Critical Care Medicine at Pitt and chief health care innovation officer at UPMC, will become a senior editor at the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Christopher Seymour, director of the Translational and Clinical Science Program at the Clinical Research, Investigation and Systems Modeling of Acute Illness (CRISMA) Center in Pitt’s School of Medicine and UPMC intensivist, will take Angus’ place as associate editor at JAMA, focused on critical care medicine.

“Derek is among the most prominent ICU physicians in the world and has helped JAMA recruit the best papers in this specialty,” said Howard Bauchner, JAMA’s editor-in-chief. “After consideration of many possible replacements, we have decided that Christopher Seymour — also from UPMC — will become an associate editor … Christopher has been an important contributor to JAMA as an author and reviewer and is a well-known trialist in the field.”

Angus joined UPMC and Pitt in the early 1990s after earning his medical degree and completing residency training in internal medicine at the University of Glasgow, UK. His specialties include epidemiologic, economic and health services research aspects of critical illness, with a particular focus on improving randomized control trials to better serve the sickest of the sick.

Seymour joined UPMC and Pitt nearly a decade ago after earning his medical degree and completing his residency at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, followed by a fellowship in pulmonary and critical care medicine at the University of Washington. His research focuses on the early recognition and treatment of sepsis and critical illness, using machine learning and translational science.

Read more about the appointments on the UPMC website.

The Center for Neuroanatomy with Neurotropic Viruses, a national research resource based at the University of Pittsburgh, recently received a five-year, $4.25 million award from the National Institutes of Health to continue its work.

The center provides the neuroscience community at Pitt and throughout the world with access to the highly specialized reagents, training and facilities that are necessary to use neurotropic viruses as transneuronal tracers. This technique is providing fundamental new insights into the functional architecture of sensory, motor, cognitive and affective networks in the central nervous system. For example, Pitt researchers led by center director Peter Strick discovered the mind-body connection between the gut and the brain using this approach. 

"We’ve developed a terrific tool for investigating neural networks in the brain and we are sharing it with investigators all over the world,” said Strick, who is also scientific director of Pitt’s Brain Institute and chair of Pitt’s neurobiology department in the School of Medicine.