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Research and TechnologyJames Cowan, oceanography professor, and Kim DeMutsert, a graduate student, published a study taking issue with reports claiming Gulf fisheries were near collapse. Brent Christner, assistant professor of biological sciences, discovered evidence of rain-making bacteria in the atmosphere. Human Ecology Professor Loren Marks, along with two colleagues, published one of the first – if not only – positive studies on strong, marriage-based African American families. LSU is one of only 21 universities nationwide to be designated a land-grant, sea-grant, and space-grant institution. It holds the Carnegie Foundation’s designation as a Doctorate-granting University with very high research activity. LSU currently ranks among the top 30 public universities in total research awards. The University's total federal funding; from agencies such as the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Homeland Security; has increased 86 percent or more than $90 million over the last five years. Imagine controlling a world of widespread high-performance computing and networking devices from one laptop. The Highly-Available Robust Co-allocator, or HARC, designed by Jon MacLaren at the LSU Center for Computation & Technology, performed this feat at the Supercomputing 2006 conference in Tampa, Florida. HARC bypasses the barrage of telephone calls and e-mails required for reserving time on multiple computers—an aid to research worldwide. The LSU School of Veterinary Medicine has researchers that are working on such diseases as brain tumors, herpes viruses, cardiovascular disease, Lyme disease, cystic fibrosis, and cancer. Dr. Shulin Li, a professor in the Department of Comparative Biomedical Sciences at the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine, is conducting research on a combination of chemo- and cytokine gene therapies that could reduce cancerous tumors and make patients immune to a tumor recurrence. Each year, the Laboratory for Creative Arts & Technologies at LSU’s Center for Computation & Technology hosts the Red Stick International Animation Festival. Activities of the festival include film screenings, workshops, and lectures from leading animators in the entertainment industry. LSU’s Peter Chen's original paper on the Entity-Relationship model (ER model) is one of the most cited and influential papers in the computer software field and one of the Top 10 Downloads from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Digital Library. Researchers at the Louisiana Emerging Technology Center, the LSU biotechnology business incubator, are busy turning one kind of cell into another. The benefits of this technology may prove enormous for the treatment of diseases or trauma that destroys specific kinds of cells, including Alzheimer’s and cancer. NuPotential, the nascent company co-founded by Pennington Biomedical Research Center’s Ken Eilertsen, expects that reprogramming healthy cells to replace damaged ones will add a revolutionary new tool to medical science. LSU has played a key role in unlocking primate DNA that could help develop vaccines to combat AIDS and other diseases. The results of the massive multi-institutional DNA project studying the rhesus macaque monkey were published as the cover story of Science magazine on April 13, 2007. The LSU Department of Physics & Astronomy, widely regarded as one of the best in the nation, is a leader in Gravitational Wave Research. LSU researchers and professors were featured in Science for locating what is believed to be the world's earliest known meteor strike. Asian soybean rust, a dreaded disease that has ravaged soybean producing areas throughout the world, was first discovered in the continental U.S. in November 2004 by Raymond Schneider, a professor in LSU's Department of Plant Pathology and Crop Physiology. LSU holds 219 patents in a variety of fields of study.
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