News Posts

Officials from Syracuse University and the Northeast Clean Energy Council (NECEC) last week signed a memorandum of understanding forming a collaborative partnership between both organizations. The agreement aims to raise the visibility and impact of emerging research on clean climate technologies; increase engagement in the region for governments and businesses looking to meet their net-zero carbon transitions through clean energy policies and innovations; and create career-building experiential opportunities for students. Read more.

Tao Wen, assistant professor in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, and colleagues are working with the Democratized Cyberinfrastructure for Open Discovery to Enable Research (DeCODER) project—a joint effort of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the San Diego Supercomputer Center, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Syracuse University, Virginia Tech, Texas A&M and the University of California, Berkeley. The combined team of software cyberinfrastructure scientists and geoscientists began their four-year project on Oct. 1 and will endeavor to standardize and unify the descriptions of data and tools, facilitating the creation of efficient scientific search engines. Wen was awarded a $460,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for his part in the project. He will lead the low-temperature geochemistry team, working in tandem with Professor Shuang Zhang of Texas A&M and graduate and undergraduate students from both schools. Read more.

University chemistry professors Ivan Korendovych and Olga Makhlynets, and a team of researchers from Yokohama City University in Japan and Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie in Belgium, devised a simple method that uses nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) directed evolution to improve enzyme engineering. In a proof-of-concept study, the team converted myoglobin, an oxygen storage protein, into the fastest artificial enzyme ever reported. Their results were recently published in the leading journal Nature. Read more.

Syracuse University’s Lender Center for Social Justice has been awarded a $2.7 million grant from MetLife Foundation to launch several new research initiatives to accelerate efforts to address the racial wealth gap and help dismantle the root causes of wealth disparity. The Lender Center will use the three-year grant to address what the foundation calls a persistent crisis that continues to undermine social and economic opportunities for underserved and underrepresented communities throughout the United States. The projects will include new research on the topic, discussions among social justice leaders to gain added insights on the issue, and new data-collection and evidence-gathering activities to illustrate the racial wealth gap’s impacts. Read more.

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Professor Quinn Qiao and a research team from the College of Engineering and Computer Science recently published two papers in Advanced Materials, collaborations with Peking University and other universities in Europe. Both papers focus on the organic solar cell (OSC), which is a photovoltaic device that converts solar energy to electrical energy. The first paper, “Quasi-Homojunction Organic Nonfullerene Photovoltaics Featuring Fundamentals Distinct from Bulk Heterojunction,” discusses the unconventional organic solar cell’s structure with more intrinsic charge generation and less charge recombination. The second paper, “Simultaneously Enhancing Exciton/Charge Transport in Organic Solar Cells by an Organoboron Additive,” provides a facile strategy of morphology optimization to improve the performance of OSCs. In both cases, the solar cell’s power conversion efficiencies (PCE) increase, which means they can convert solar energy to electrical energy more efficiently. Qiao’s group confirmed the mechanism of better performance for the solar cell from experiments. Read more.