Virginia Tech Foundation, Inc.

Can #foods be addictive? Can sound heal? What if we could predict when your heart is more likely to stop? How does the fluid that flows in our mostly liquid bodies affect deadly diseases? "Pocket Science," a new short-form podcast produced by the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC, digs into those questions and seeks answers from the institute’s world-class investigators, who also explain their research into these systems and how to better treat the diseases that impact them.

A look at Virginia Tech’s past decade, an analysis of the present, and a vision for the future served as the structure for President Tim Sands’ annual State of the University address. President Sands said he wants to continue placing emphasis on growing Virginia Tech’s innovation network, which extends beyond Blacksburg and beyond the Washington, D.C., area. Examples of the university’s current outreach include Virginia Cooperative Extension (Official) offices in every county of the Commonwealth of Virginia; the graduate education and research network in the D.C. area; the global presence in Europe, Africa, and India; and the health science and technology hub in Roanoke. https://lnkd.in/efxbAaN7

Children's National Hospital and Virginia Tech are expanding their research partnership, building on a successful collaboration established in 2019. This partnership will advance pediatric health through innovative discoveries and therapies with an initial focus on pediatric cancers, including brain tumors. The partnership brings together Children’s National, ranked among the nation’s top pediatric hospitals by U.S. News & World Report, and Virginia Tech, a leading academic research institution. Together, they aim to deliver transformative advancements to enhance outcomes for children facing devastating diagnoses.

Through a multi-university collaboration, researchers at Virginia Tech have discovered a new, solid lubricating mechanism that can reduce friction in machinery at extremely high temperatures. It works well beyond the breakdown temperature of traditional solid lubricants such as graphite, and the findings were published in Nature Communications. 

Notwithstanding the poor quality of life, chronic kidney disease’s cost to the health care system is also a major problem, estimated to be $87.2 billion in 2019. Webster Santos, Virginia Tech professor of chemistry, is developing a molecule to disrupt the cellular signaling that occurs when a patient has #kidney disease. By targeting the #transporter responsible for the cellular signaling, a protein called Spns2, Santos and his research team can inhibit this step in the signaling process and fight back against the negative immune response that results in kidney #disease.

Relapse is common when someone is trying to quit, regardless of whether they’re giving up opioids or alcohol or cigarettes. To better inform treatment, researchers with the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC’s Addiction Recovery Research Center wanted to better understand how the experience of quitting differed across substances. 

Several hundred bees in rural Pennsylvania and rural New York are sporting tiny #QR codes on their backs. More than the latest in apiarian fashion, the little tags serve a scientific purpose: tracking when bees go in and out of their hives to better understand how long honey bees spend foraging for food outside of their hives. The work, a collaboration among entomologists and electrical engineers at Penn State University, is the first step in solving a long-standing mystery of how far #bees travel from their hives to collect pollen and nectar. The researchers are now collaborating with a team at Virginia Tech to assess how foraging duration times match decoded waggle dances. Next, the researchers said they hope to tag and track other bee species, as well as other types of honey bees, such as drone bees or queen bees to learn more about those aspects of the colony. They also plan to host workshops for scientists and beekeepers to learn how to build and use their own monitoring systems.

In an unprecedented new study in the journal Cell Reports by Cell Press, researchers have shown #neurotransmitters in the human brain are released during the processing of the emotional content of #language, providing new insights into how people interpret the significance of #words. The work, conducted by an international team led by Virginia Tech scientists, offers deeper understanding into how language influences human choices and mental health.

Enter Falcon, Virginia Tech’s newest GPU cluster, which came online in December 2024 and is now available for use by faculty and students through Advanced Research Computing. Falcon is composed of 52 nodes, each with four GPUs, for a total of 208 GPUs. To maximize flexibility in the types of research that can be conducted using Falcon, there are two types of GPUs within the cluster.

Virginia Tech faculty and student expertise was recently on display for government and industry leaders brought together by Amazon. #Hokies presented their research related to the use of machine learning in the cloud to enhance #wireless communication applications at Amazon Web Services 2024 AI/ML (artificial intelligence and machine learning) Conference in September. Along with the research, the event highlighted the partnership between the Virginia Tech National Security Institute and Amazon. The students and faculty who presented are a part of the Emerging Technology Research Fellowship, which is a joint effort between Amazon Web Services and institute’s Ted and Karyn Hume Center for National Security and Technology to get students experience deploying state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms in the cloud for distributed radio frequency spectrum sensing.