Category: Research

News about Research


Partnership Brings UA, Pakistan Researchers Together

From the April 2018 Desktop News | A professor at The University of Alabama is part of an international team performing geological research in northeast Pakistan aiming to understand where possible oil and gas deposits reside beneath the surface. Dr. Delores M. Robinson, UA professor of geological sciences, joined a researcher from Pakistan to discover potential of hydrocarbon at the base of the Himalayas. The project is part of the U.S.-Pakistan Science and Technology Cooperation Program, co-funded by the Department of State […]

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UA Book Helps Solve 87-Year-Old Fossil Mystery

From the March 2018 Desktop News | In the world of paleontology, mysteries abound. Apart from questions about their makers, fossils sometimes create their own mysteries after they are collected. The 2016 University of Alabama Press book, Footprints in Stone: Fossil Traces of Coal-Age Tetrapods, recently helped solve a mystery at the American Museum of Natural History, AMNH, in New York City. The book was co-written by Dr.  Ronald J. Buta, UA professor of astronomy, and Dr. David C. Kopaska-Merkel, section chief […]

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Professor Publishes Book on WWI with Oxford University Press

From the March 2018 Desktop News | Dr. Andrew J. Huebner, an associate professor of history, recently published a book with Oxford University Press titled Love and Death in the Great War. Through the use of real stories and letters exchanged between loved ones, the book delves into the intricate relationship between World War I propaganda and the lived experience of the war itself. “I’ve been interested for as long as I can remember in the study of what we call ‘war […]

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UA Professor Publishes Book to Advance Earthquake Research

From the March 2018 Desktop News |Dr. Ibrahim Çemen, a UA professor of geology, recently published a book, Neotectonics and Earthquake Potential of the Eastern Mediterranean Region, detailing his research on earthquakes in the Eastern Mediterranean Region. Çemen, who specializes in structural and earthquake geology, said that the book grew out of a research symposium organized as part of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) annual meeting in San Francisco in 2013. Because of the high interest in the symposium, Dr. Çemen […]

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A&S in the News: February 11-17, 2018

Opera Theatre Orchestra, opera team up for Valentine’s show: Tuscaloosa News – Feb. 12 As symbols of love, diamonds display facets. Like life, they derive from carbon, trapped under extreme heat and pressure, but once stabilized — metastabilized, in fact — to equilibrium, they’re among the toughest substances in the world … John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” also being performed in Monday night’s collaboration between the Tuscaloosa Symphony Orchestra and The University of Alabama Opera […]

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Doctoral Student Wins National Travel Grant

From the February 2018 Desktop News | Every year the American Chemical Society Division of Polymer Chemistry selects two students from across the country as recipients for a travel grant to attend and present research at The National Meeting of the American Chemical Society. One of the two students selected for the 2018 conference is UA’s very own, Louis “Chip” Reisman. “I was honestly really surprised when I won the award,” Reisman said. “I felt like I had a strong application, but […]

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New Mothers, Affluent Areas Drive ‘Anti-Vaccine’ Sentiment on Twitter

From the February 2018 Desktop News | The anti-vaccination crowd is thriving on Twitter, where the negative sentiment clusters geographically across the United States, according to a recent study by an autism researcher at The University of Alabama. Dr. Theodore S. Tomeny, UA assistant professor of psychology, and colleagues used a machine-learning algorithm to examine nearly a half-million tweets over a five-year span that included mentions of “autism” and “vaccines.” Tomeny and co-author Chris Vargo, assistant professor of communication at the University […]

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Solving Galactic Mysteries a Few Minutes at a Time

William Keel

  From the February 2018 Desktop News | A project led by an astronomer at The University of Alabama will use 12-25 minute gaps in the regular imaging schedule of the Hubble Space Telescope to get a better look at oddities found in the sky. Dr. William C. Keel, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, led an effort to use Hubble to investigate unusual objects found by volunteer astronomers in a crowd-sourced astronomy project, Galaxy Zoo, and its companion Radio Galaxy […]

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UA Chemist’s Work in Understanding New Materials Gets Boost

From the January 2018 Desktop News | Dr. Jared Allred, assistant professor of chemistry at The University of Alabama, was recently awarded a grant from the 2017 Early Career Research Program sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy to investigate properties of novel metal compounds and develop a new way to analyze certain aspects of these materials. “Anytime you are working on new materials, you need to be able to understand the physics of what’s going on – the interactions,” Allred […]

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An Insomnia Label More Harmful Than Poor Sleep

From the January 2018 Desktop News | People who worry about poor sleep have more emotional and physical problems during the day than those who do not worry, regardless of how well either sleep, according to research conducted at The University of Alabama. In a review of more than a dozen sleep studies going back more than 20 years, Dr. Kenneth Lichstein, UA professor of psychology, defines something he calls insomnia identity, a person’s conviction of having poor sleep. This belief […]

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