Dr. Ronald Ackerman, director of Northwestern’s Institute for Public Health and Medicine (IPHAM) and the Center for Community Health, is into making house calls, but not the traditional home visits you might have in mind. Dr. Ackerman subscribes to the old adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. He and his colleagues at IPHAM have devised community-based research programs to identify people at risk for diabetes and have developed programs to encourage those people to change their lifestyles to prevent the disease. IPHAM has been a powerhouse for public health and scholarship. Between 2012 and 2017, its members have published more than 15,000 articles, which have been cited more than 227,000 times, and in 2017, its centers received nearly 600 research awards totaling $130 million. Read more about Dr. Ackerman and IPHAM here.
Sumit Dhar, chair of Northwestern’s Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, is sounding the alarm about hearingloss and ways to prevent it through early detection. He and his colleagues have developed tests that can detect the beginning of hearingloss before a person will likely notice it. These tests can be administered to people in their twenties and can play a valuable part in treatment to prevent the gradual loss of hearing over time — intervening before the deterioration is noticeable and possibly irreversible. As Professor Dhar says: “These new treatments need to be started in a preventive way rather than waiting to fix the organ when it’s half dead.” Read more about Dhar and the tests that can make a difference in your life here.
“Based on how compact or how open the structure is, that can possibly have an impact on how fast or how slowly the chocolate melts.” — Jan Ilavsky, Argonne X-ray physicist
The taste of a silky piece of rich chocolate is one of life’s great pleasures, and producing a smooth mouthfeel is an aspiration of every serious chocolatier.
As a part of our ongoing initiative to introduce students to STEM professionals from a wide variety of backgrounds, Horizon Therapeutics and The Chicago Council on Science and Technology visited Perspectives Math and Science Academy to talk to students about college and entering STEM fields. Watch the interview here and check for a new video each month.
What could ants and bees possibly have to do with computers and space exploration? You have to think outside the box to make the connections. The scientists at Argonne National Laboratory are doing just that as they work to design computer chips and Artificial Intelligence programs based upon neural networks found in insects. These chips and programs are expected to increase the flexibility of Artificial Intelligence programs to learn new things in different environments using smaller amounts of energy – just what is needed to explore the ever-changing conditions of outer space over the decades required for space probes to travel their flight plans.
