UB has been awarded a highly competitive grant by the National Science Foundation to establish a national institute to develop artificial intelligence systems that identify and assist young children with speech and/or language processing challenges. The five-year, $20 million effort will address the nationwide shortage of speech-language pathologists and provide services to children ages 3 to 10 who are at increased risk of falling behind in their academic and socioemotional development.

UB researcher Sathy Balu-Iyer has been awarded a three-year, $1.5 million grant to continue his work on enabling a patient’s immune system to accept treatment for hemophilia. The award comes from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of the National Institutes of Health, and the research will focus on developing a way to deliver Factor VIII, a blood-clotting protein, by desensitizing the immune system so that it does not reject this lifesaving therapy.

UB biochemist Gabriela K. Popescu is leading research on fast neurotransmitter brain receptors that is focused on gaining the basic knowledge necessary for the design of more effective therapeutic approaches for many neuropsychiatric conditions. Her longtime work in the field has been recognized with the highly competitive National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) Research Program Award (R35). She is the first SUNY-affiliated recipient of the award, which provides “longer-term support and increased flexibility to investigators whose outstanding records of research achievement demonstrate their ability to make major contributions to neuroscience.”

Eduardo Mercado III, professor of psychology, College of Arts and Sciences, has received a 2023-24 Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship for his “Singers as Sentinels” project that will study how humpback whales can provide warnings of changing ecosystems.

“[We’re] trying to understand what the fundamental adaptations in the human body that make us good at throwing are,” Department of Anthropology assistant professor Nicholas Holowka says. To do that, he explains, “You need equipment that lets you collect data outside of a lab, and then you also need equipment that is very specifically designed to study what’s happening within the fingers.”

Braden Linn, visiting assistant professor in the School of Social Work and the grant’s principal investigator has been awarded a $421,000 grant to support an innovative project that will explore how a person’s emotional changes during the early stages of recovery from alcohol use disorder (AUD) can influence the potential success of their recovery. Linn says there are more than 22 million people who identify as being in recovery [from substance abuse]. “But we don’t have a lot of ways to support this population,” says Linn, an expert in AUD treatment and novel intervention development. “That’s what we want to change.”