Research

Not all West Virginians have the luxury of popping into a health clinic on a whim to get tested for COVID-19.

A West Virginia University professor who will focus on the increased visitor use in protected areas and greenspaces in Austria during the COVID-19 pandemic—including the negative effects — has been awarded a prestigious Fulbright Scholarship for the fall 2021 semester.

For 71 years, one West Virginia University plant pathologist has tinkered with the tomato, turning over multiple iterations resistant to blight and other vegetable diseases.

As the complexity of radiation therapy has grown, so too has the amount of data that goes into treatment machines. With more data comes more opportunity for errors in data transfer. Ramon Alfredo Siochi—WVU’s director of medical physics—is working to make those errors less likely. He led a task group to develop guidelines for checking the data’s accuracy before patients receive treatment.

Some LGBTQ+ people want to be part of faith communities. And though they have concerns about inclusion, they hope to find a faith community that feels like a home, based on West Virginia University research.

Even for those of us who dodged the virus itself, the COVID-19 pandemic hit us in more ways than one.

A coalition of West Virginia University researchers is working together to address the state’s most pressing water issues through Bridge, a campus-wide science and technology policy, leadership and communications initiative. The impetus for the initiative is to translate the work of WVU researchers to policymakers as part of the University’s land-grant mission.

Earth is a round planet where flat surfaces and perfect shapes are scarce, but assignments in many geometry courses are completed on grid paper with simplified line segments and symmetrical polygons.

Always near the top of the list for having the most pesticide residue, tomatoes have few ways of protecting themselves from pests. Now, one West Virginia University researcher is confident he will be able to develop a tomato that requires little to no pesticides.

Every day, our bodies face a bombardment of UV rays, ozone, cigarette smoke, industrial chemicals and other hazards. This exposure can lead to free-radical production in our bodies, which damages our DNA and tissues. A new study from Eric Kelley—a researcher with the WVU School of Medicine—suggests that unrepaired DNA damage can increase the speed of aging. His results appear in the journal Nature.