Foundations and nonprofits

Mapping an entire (fly) brain: A step toward understanding diseases of the human brain
Oct. 2, 2024
Author
Written by Liz Fuller-Wright, Office of Communications

For many heartbreaking diseases of the brain — dementia, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and others — doctors can only treat the symptoms. Medical science does not have a cure.

Why? Because it’s difficult to cure what we don’t understand, and the human brain, with its billions of neurons connected by a hundred trillion synapses, is almost…

Mapping an entire (fly) brain: A step toward understanding diseases of the human brain
Oct. 2, 2024
Author
Written by Liz Fuller-Wright, Office of Communications

For many heartbreaking diseases of the brain — dementia, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and others — doctors can only treat the symptoms. Medical science does not have a cure.

Why? Because it’s difficult to cure what we don’t understand, and the human brain, with its billions of neurons connected by a hundred trillion synapses, is almost…

Princeton Professor Ruha Benjamin awarded MacArthur ‘genius’ grant
Oct. 1, 2024
Author
Written by Rebekah Schroeder, Office of Communications

Ruha Benjamin, the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, has been awarded a 2024 MacArthur Fellowship for “illuminating how technology reflects and reproduces social inequality and championing the role of imagination in social…

Initiative aims to make Princeton a leader in AI accelerated engineering
Sept. 18, 2024
Author
Written by Allison Gasparini, Center for Statistics and Machine Learning

As a part of a broad set of investments around artificial intelligence, Princeton University has launched AI for Accelerating Invention, an initiative to achieve faster breakthroughs across engineering disciplines, including biomedicine, robotics and nuclear fusion.

“What we have the…

Researchers bend DNA strands with light, revealing a new way to study the genome
Sept. 9, 2024
Author
Written by Wright Seneres, Princeton Entrepreneurship Council

With the flick of a light, researchers have found a way to rearrange life’s basic tapestry, bending DNA strands back on themselves to reveal the material nature of the genome.

Scientists have long debated about the physics of chromosomes — structures at the deepest interior of a cell that are made of long DNA strands tightly coiled around…

Ilana Witten named HHMI Investigator
July 23, 2024
Author
Written by Liz Fuller-Wright, Office of Communications

Neuroscientist Ilana Witten, who investigates the brain circuits behind learning and decision-making, has been named a 2024 Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator.

Witten, a professor of neuroscience at Princeton University, is one of 26 new investigators from…

Graduate student Priscilla Louis earns prestigious HHMI Gilliam Fellowship
July 17, 2024

PNI graduate student Priscilla Louis, and her advisors, PNI associate director and associate professor…

Transforming troublesome seaweed into a feedstock of the future
July 17, 2024
Author
Written by Colton Poore, Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment

Since 2011, enormous seaweed blooms have spread across the Atlantic Ocean, spanning over 5,000 miles from West Africa to the Gulf of Mexico.

Known as the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, the leviathan — visible from space — has wreaked havoc on environments and economies throughout the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico, where unprecedented…

Diversifying China’s Urban Heating Systems will Reduce Risk of Carbon Lock-in
July 8, 2024
Author
Written by Cara Clase, Ph.D., Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment

Since its implementation in 2017, China’s clean heating policy has considerably improved air quality.  However, the share of non-fossil sources in China’s urban district heating systems remains low.   According to a Princeton-led study (Link is external),…

Common plastics could passively cool and heat buildings with the seasons
June 27, 2024
Author
Written by by the Office of Communications

Researchers at Princeton and UCLA have developed a passive mechanism to cool buildings in the summer and warm them in the winter.

In an article published June 27 in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science, they report that by…