Research

West Virginia University will resume in-person undergraduate classes on the Morgantown campus Monday, Sept. 28.

Widespread COVID-19 testing may be an obvious way to control an outbreak in a long-term care facility. But communication among the facility’s staff, its residents and the residents’ family members is crucial, too. A new study led by Carl Shrader, a physician and researcher in the Department of Family Medicine in the West Virginia University School of Medicine, revealed the role that communication played in quashing a COVID-19 outbreak at Sundale, a long-term care facility in Morgantown.

A critical advancement for astrophysics research led by a team of West Virginia University physics and astronomy students will allow astronomers to be seven times faster in mapping a galaxy. The new radio camera at the Green Bank Telescope is the first of its kind in the U.S.

As the United States experiences mass racial unrest and nationwide protests, equity issues have become elevated in the American consciousness. According to Erin McHenry-Sorber, an associate professor of higher education in the West Virginia University College of Education and Human Services, this reckoning with racial and economic inequity isn’t just happening in urban areas.

A $4.8 million trust gift from longtime West Virginia University supporter David G. Allen is benefitting five programs across campus that reflect his diverse interests in education, health, athletics and more.

Artificial intelligence can do more than recommend a song or suggest what to write in an email. It might even be able to predict outcomes in COVID-19 patients. Larissa Casaburi—a researcher in the WVU School of Medicine—and her colleagues are using artificial intelligence to study how being a coal miner affects COVID-19 outcomes. She’s also investigating the ways smoking, vaping and having chronic lung disease influence how COVID-19 patients fare.

Scientists have long debated the respiratory workings of sea scorpions, but a new discovery by a West Virginia University geologist concludes that these largely aquatic extinct arthropods breathed air on land.

West Virginia University School of Public Health professor Lauri Andress is studying how chronic stress from living with racism and discrimination can lead to poorer health outcomes for Black mothers and their babies.

The presence of ticks have increased in recent years, as Lyme disease cases have tripled in the U.S. since the late 1990s. A team of WVU researchers, with the aid of a $1.9 million grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is developing a vaccine that may prevent humans from contracting the tick-borne illness.

Former West Virginia University president Gene Budig died Tuesday (Sept. 8) at 81. Budig was president of two other universities—Illinois State and Kansas—was a newspaper editor and author and the former president of baseball’s American League.