A soldier’s injury sent him back to a family workshop to build his own wheelchairs
Cooper was a young Army sergeant stationed in Germany in 1980 when a bicycle accident left him paralyzed from the waist down. Wheelchair technology at the time was primitive. Chairs were heavy, unreliable, and built with no particular urgency to work well. Upon his return to the United States, he enrolled at California Polytechnic State […]
Light-seeking algae gave us a switch for nerve cells
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2026 is awarded for optogenetics — a method that makes it possible to show how nerve cells shape memories, feelings and behaviours in the living brain. Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel discovered a remarkable protein, channelrhodopsin, in a single-celled alga. Karl Deisseroth transformed the protein into a light-controlled […]
Stanford professor Karl Deisseroth, Ph.D. ’98, M.D. ’00, wins 2026 Nobel Prize for new way to study the brain using light
In 1992, Karl Deisseroth, Ph.D. ’98, M.D. ’00, arrived at Stanford to begin his MD-PhD training. By 2005, in a lab of his own on campus, he showed that a protein borrowed from pond algae and a flash of blue light could make cultured rat neurons fire on command. On Monday, that work earned the […]
UB researchers grow salivary mini organs from pluripotent stem cells
Extreme dry mouth, caused by radiation for cancer treatment and autoimmune diseases such as Sjögren’s disease, radically affects quality of life for sufferers. It can hamper speaking, swallowing and eating, and for years has seemed an intractable problem. Attempts to stimulate the salivary glands to produce more saliva or to create artificial saliva have been […]
Creating novel nanotechnologies for targeted drug delivery, vaccines, and other biomedical applications.
Liangfang Zhang is a chemical engineer and bioengineer creating novel nanotechnologies for targeted drug delivery, medical countermeasures such as vaccines and antibacterial and antiviral drugs, and other biomedical applications. Zhang develops cell membrane coated nanoparticles that can achieve unprecedented levels of interaction with biological systems like the human body. His efforts to translate his lab […]
Stanford Medicine team creates advanced model for studying brain development, disorders
Stanford Medicine scientists have chalked up a major advance in growing human brain cells outside of the human brain — and outside of laboratory glassware. In a study published online Sept. 16 in Nature, the researchers succeeded in transplanting self-organizing bits of laboratory-grown human brain tissue called cortical organoids into mice specially bioengineered and bred […]
AI Digital Twins Get Better and Better: Cancer in Crosshairs
Electrophysiologist Jonathan Chrispin, MD, wanted to do more. He was standing in the electrophysiology lab at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, catheter in hand, about to ablate a patient’s ventricular tachycardia (VT) — a potentially fatal arrhythmia caused by electrical circuits looping through scar tissue left behind by a heart attack. In a standard procedure, […]
AI Digital Twins Get Better and Better: Cancer in Crosshairs
Electrophysiologist Jonathan Chrispin, MD, wanted to do more. He was standing in the electrophysiology lab at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, catheter in hand, about to ablate a patient’s ventricular tachycardia (VT) — a potentially fatal arrhythmia caused by electrical circuits looping through scar tissue left behind by a heart attack. In a standard procedure, […]
Eric Perreault named new CEO of Morgridge Institute for Research
Eric Perreault, a research executive, academic leader and biomedical engineering professor at Northwestern University, has been selected as the third chief executive officer of the Morgridge Institute for Research, beginning early in 2027. The Morgridge Institute is an independent biomedical research organization closely affiliated with the University of Wisconsin–Madison, with the purpose of advancing frontiers […]
King Salman International Award for Disability Research Announces Winners of Fourth Edition
Chairman of the Board of the King Salman International Award for Disability Research Ahmed Al-Rajhi announced the winners of the fourth edition of the award, which attracted broad international participation, with 770 nominations received from 111 countries across all six continents, representing more than half of the world’s countries. Al-Rajhi emphasized that the fourth edition […]