Researchers at the University of Notre Dame received $222.7 million in research award funding for the 2021 fiscal year. This amount is more than $42 million more than the previous record, and the first time that the University has surpassed $200 million.

Tengfei Luo, professor in the department of aerospace and mechanical engineering, is studying how bubbles form and function in order to improve diagnostic capabilities for life-threatening diseases, including certain cancers. Luo worked with Space Tango to design and build an automated experiment housed inside a cube, known as a CubeLab, to be initiated by astronauts aboard the International Space Station. An equipped camera and thermal heating technology provide Luo with images, temperature, and pressure readings in real time.

A recent study published in Science is the first to show that most bacteria in the gut microbiome are definitively heritable from a long-studied population of baboons as part of the Amboseli Baboon Project. Elizabeth Archie, professor in the department of biological sciences, and researchers from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Sainte-Justine Research Center, Duke University, Princeton University, the University of California San Diego, and the University of Minnesota found that 97 percent of microbiome traits, including overall diversity and the abundance of individual microbes, were significantly heritable.

Nathan Meikle, a postdoctoral research associate in Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business, and co-authors from the Rochester Institute of Technology, the University of Hawaii, and the University of Utah have published a study in the Academy of Management Journal, that found that publicly endorsing — or amplifying — another person's contribution while giving attribution to that person, enhances the status of both parties. In addition, ideas that were amplified were rated as higher quality than when they were not.

Led by Notre Dame's AEGIS research team and implemented by the Kenya Medical Research Institute, the first of four planned trials to evaluate spatial repellent products and their ability to reduce malaria infections is set to begin. The program will measure the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of a scalable repellent developed and donated by SC Johnson for public health purposes. Other consortium members and project partners include Catholic Relief Services, fhiClinical, the Malaria Research and Training Center from the University of Bamako in Mali, the National Dengue Control Unit of Sri Lanka, and Notre Dame’s Center for Research Computing.

Harindra Joseph Fernando, the Wayne and Diana Murdy Endowed Professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering and earth sciences, partnered with researchers from the Naval Postgraduate School, the University of California San Diego and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Utah to study fog that forms over shallow seas. The study will also look into the dynamics of coastal ice fog, with the ultimate goal of improving sea fog predictability. The proposal was one of 25 finalists selected by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative.