Pitt Research

For people born with Chiari malformation type 1—a skull abnormality that pushes the back of the brain down into the opening at the base of the skull—a new study shows that surgical intervention may not only relieve classic physical symptoms, but also may improve patients' memories and psychological health. “Many clinicians don’t recognize cognitive and psychiatric symptoms as components of a Chiari diagnosis,” says senior author Robert Friedlander, chair of neurological surgery and co-director of the UPMC Neurological Institute. “Our study makes it clear that those symptoms should not be ignored and that there is a population of patients who might see significant improvement in symptoms after surgery.” Nearly 90% of patients who participated in the study had improvements in their cognitive function or psychiatric symptoms, with approximately one third showing improvements in both. https://lnkd.in/e86H2VrD

Fang Zheng Peng, University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) for his contributions to the development of high-powered electronic technologies for advanced power grid and energy conversion. His research on multilevel inverters for static synchronous compensator (STATCOM) applications are widely used to this day and incorporate his patented technology. https://lnkd.in/eKeHpkJE

Evan Schneider, assistant professor of physics and astronomy in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, earned a 2025 Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The prestigious fellowship recognizes promising early-career research scientists for their creativity, innovation and research accomplishments. Schneider uses supercomputers, including the world’s first and fastest exascale supercomputer, to understand the processes responsible for shaping galaxies. The code she developed, called Cholla, was used to perform early tests on Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s exascale Frontier supercomputer before it was officially deployed. In 2022, her Cholla code, which models galaxies over a nearly unfathomable range of time and distance scales, earned Schneider a Packard Fellowship, making her the first Pitt faculty member to earn the distinction in 25 years, and the first woman at the University to ever do so.

Genomics holds immense potential for intervention and treatment of diseases like cancer and diabetes. Beyond that, genomics also provides insight into how genes influence the structures and appearance of parts of the body—known as morphology. As with other research based in genomics, studying morphology calls for massive data sets and advanced computation. Mary Marazita studies the genomic markers associated with malformations of the human face and head. Marazita is co-director of the Center for Craniofacial and Dental Genetics, as well as Distinguished Professor of Oral Biology in the University of Pittsburgh School of Dental Medicine, and professor of human genetics in the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health. “The CCDG primarily studies craniofacial birth defects—such as cleft lip, cleft palate and craniosynostosis, in which the bones of a baby’s skull fuse together before the brain has stopped growing,” Marazita explains. “Complementing that, we study genomic markers associated with normal facial development, and dental and oral diseases such as cavities and periodontal disease. Our mission really is to identify genetic causes of complex human conditions and traits that affect normal development of the craniofacial and oral complexes.”

University of Pittsburgh researchers Anne B. Newman and Toren Finkel want us all to live long and prosper. “Most people will have a period of poor health at the end of their lives no matter how long they live,” says Newman. “But the goal of what we call ‘healthspan’ is to optimize health for as long as possible.” Newman is principal investigator of a WoodNext Foundation-funded clinical trial to determine whether treatment to reduce inflammation can improve physical function in older adults. “Aging is one of the least understood biological processes,” adds Finkel. “It’s something—if we’re lucky—we all do, yet we don’t understand why or how.” Finkel and Newman are longtime colleagues and collaborators whose aging research focuses on the intersection of biological systems and populations. “Aging impacts everything, but much of aging research has focused on disease and illness,” says Newman. “The focus of my work has been to try to understand health by doing studies in people who are out and about living their lives as they age.”

Jennifer Whiting, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, is recognized as one of the most influential voices in the field of ancient philosophy. She stands out for the way she links current debates about the nature of friendship and personal identity to scholarly readings of Plato and Aristotle. Much of Whiting’s work is inspired by Aristotle’s conception of the ideal friend as an “other self.” Many scholars, influenced by their readings of Aristotle as a rational egoist, read this concept as fundamentally egocentric: one’s friend is an extension of oneself. But Whiting resists this notion, both in itself and as a reading of Aristotle, because it involves a kind of “colonizing ego.” In her view, Aristotle thinks that a person should love himself not because of who he is but on account of his virtuous character. Therefore, a virtuous person will love their “other self” in the same way, on account of her virtuous character. This idea yields what Whiting calls an ethocentric—or character-centered—view. For 40 years, Whiting has been prodding students from all walks of life to engage in dialogue both with each other and with influential thinkers of the past.

As a geologist, Michael Ramsey, professor of volcanology and planetary science in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, studies volcanoes to understand their behavior and minimize risks for people living nearby. Using his background as an engineer, he has developed unique instruments that allow him to gather data in the field, in the lab and from about 400 miles above ground, on satellites in low-Earth orbit. “My work has involved space since my days as a first-year graduate student,” Ramsey says. His very first grant as a principal investigator was funded by NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and nearly 30 years later, so are his four most recent research projects. The importance of space across disciplines as different as geology, astronomy, manufacturing or medicine, was a motivation for Ramsey to join with researchers from other disciplines in an effort to bolster Pitt’s commitment to space-based research. Ramsey has gathered data using satellites pointing away from Earth, too. He has analyzed images of Mars, the Moon and, as part of a recent project, is using computer modeling to review historical data of lava flows from Venus. The results should help illuminate how long eruptions take if Venus is in fact still volcanically active. NASA has two missions to Venus, sometimes called “Earth’s twin,” planned by 2030. “We’re trying to give them a feel for what’s actually going on there,” Ramsey says. “For planetary science, satellite data are typically the only data we get.”

The?Pitt Research Concierge Program?is pleased to announce the launch of the?Proposal Repository. This resource provides faculty access to a continually updated collection of awarded proposals from major funding agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, other federal funding agencies and various foundations. The repository is designed to assist faculty with their grant-writing skills by reviewing awarded Pitt proposals from various disciplines to support proposal writing efforts. Visit the repository to explore awarded proposals >> https://lnkd.in/ep6MhzTe

University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering researcher Peyman Givi is part of international team assembled from University of Oxford, University of Hamburg and Cornell University that has used quantum-inspired computing to drive major advances in simulating turbulence. Predicting the dynamics of turbulent fluid flows has long been a central goal for scientists and engineers. Yet, even with modern computing technology, direct and accurate simulation of all but the simplest turbulent flows remains impossible. Normally, simulating turbulence probability distributions requires solving high-dimensional Fokker-Planck equations—something infeasible to do using classical methods. To overcome this, the team applied a quantum-inspired computing technology developed at the University of Oxford. This method uses “tensor networks” to represent the turbulence probability distributions in a hyper-compressed format that enabled their simulation. According to the researchers, the approach not only questions the current limits of turbulence simulation, but also open the door towards simulating other chaotic systems that can be described probabilistically. https://lnkd.in/eJtMXYtc

Alison Langmead wants the world to think differently about artificial intelligence. She doesn’t even like the phrase “artificial intelligence.” She’d prefer people to focus instead on the humanity in AI so that they better understand the term and quell concerns that these technologies could run amok. “Computers are human all the way down,” says Langmead, clinical professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, with a joint appointment in the University of Pittsburgh School of Computing and Information. “Digital computing was our idea, starting from the original thought about how to model arithmetic through electricity and logic. Year after year, we have layered new forms of abstraction on that original idea, modeling more than just arithmetic and building up to what’s now known as AI. There is a deep, layered history of human decision making.” Langmead believes that current hype, misunderstandings and even panic regarding AI are worthy of deep, multidisciplinary investigation. The problem is socio-technical and political in nature, she adds, not just a computer science issue.