The National Institutes of Health has awarded UGA two grants totaling $1.2 million for instrumentation to advance chemical analytical capabilities of biomedical researchers across campus. Jeff Urbauer (left) received funding for an NMR console, and Jon Amster (right) was funded for a new mass spectrometer.

Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU), has selected Prof. Shanta Dhar to receive the Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award to pursue novel research in the field of cardiovascular diseases. With this award, Prof. Dhar, an assistant professor for one year at UGA, is being recognized as one of the top junior research faculty in the country; she is one of only 30 scientists to win the Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award this year.

A University of Georgia researcher has invented a new technology that can inexpensively render medical linens and clothing, face masks, paper towels—and yes, even diapers, intimate apparel and athletic wear, including smelly socks—permanently germ-free.

During the four years that Michelangelo Buonarroti spent painting the frescoes on the ceiling of Rome’s Sistine Chapel, odds are he wasn’t thinking about chemistry. But he certainly knew how science and art came together and what he had to do if he wanted his work to last.

New research just published in the journal Science by a team of chemists at the University of Georgia and colleagues in Germany shows for the first time that a mechanism called tunneling control may drive chemical reactions in directions unexpected from traditional theories.

The finding has the potential to change how scientists understand and devise reactions in everything from materials science to biochemistry.

In an economic climate in which many science departments are struggling to hire new faculty, the Department of Chemistry was able to hire two highly sought-after tenure track faculty members in the field of inorganic chemistry.

Chris Reisch has come full circle. Five years ago, as an undergraduate and then a graduate student, he was part of a UGA research group that identified the first step in the pathway by which bacterioplankton control how much sulfur is released into the ocean's food web. Science published that study in 2006.

As a teenager, Gary Douberly had a knack for taking mechanical things apart and putting them together again. He applied this talent while earning a Ph.D. in chemistry, designing and building instruments to carry out original experiments in laser spectroscopy. Now, under a $618,505 CAREER Award provided by the National Science Foundation, this University of Georgia assistant professor of chemistry will map the structures of biomolecules using an instrument he developed from two technologies.

Like a blood-borne army, immunoglobulin G belongs to a class of antibodies that binds to viruses, fungi, bacteria and other foreign particles to initiate their destruction. It does this by attaching to unique features on the invader's cell surface and signaling its presence to defensive cells. Precisely how this latter step happens is not entirely clear to scientists. However, finding how this happens could lead to the development of ways to boost weakened immune systems and treat such diseases as rheumatoid arthritis.