Category: Research and Innovation

Person in white cleanroom suit, safety glasses, and gloves operates a computer console in a high-tech research lab.

Notre Dame researchers to advance quantum microscopy, biosensing technology, and electronics fabrication with support from NDnano

Notre Dame Nanoscience and Technology (NDnano) has announced the awardees of the inaugural Notre Dame Nanofabrication Facility (NDNF) Support Grants. The grant program is designed to catalyze new research involving the NDNF, a world-class, 9,000 square-foot teaching and research …

University of Notre Dame launches Morphogenetic Bioengineering Initiative to advance research in healing and disease

The University of Notre Dame has launched the Notre Dame Morphogenetic Bioengineering Initiative (ND-MBI), a cross-disciplinary program that links artificial intelligence and mechanistic bioengineering to better understand how cells communicate with each other to build, maintain, and …

An East Asian man in a lab holds a clear dish containing a wired device with colorful components, smiling faintly.

Ink-based thermoelectric technology could be solution for replacing problematic refrigerants

Today’s refrigerants, which are specialized working fluids used in air conditioners, refrigerators, and heat pumps, come with a host of issues including leakage, emissions concerns, flammability, and limited reclamation of used refrigerants. However, a recent study by University of …

A smiling engineer in a green blazer and glasses stands in a lab with students in white coats working at equipment.

Notre Dame engineer receives inaugural ARPA-H Emerging Health Innovators award to power lymphatic disease research

As many as 10 million people in the United States live with lymphedema, a chronic condition causing severe, painful swelling of the limbs. Secondary lymphedema occurs when a person’s lymph nodes are damaged, blocked, or impaired. Globally, the most prevalent trigger of secondary lymphedema is …

Yanliang Zhang

Notre Dame Engineering and Harvard Medical School collaborate on 4-year NIH project to create lab-grown organs

While scientists have successfully printed small patches of human tissue, scaling those tissues into full-sized organs has remained elusive. In natural organisms, every cell must be within roughly 100 to 200 micrometers—about the thickness of two human hairs—of a blood vessel to receive oxygen …

A pipette places drops of green liquid onto a microscope slide containing a small device

Heart-on-a-chip device identifies youth-enhancing “cocktail” to repair old hearts

The heart is a pump that wears out over time—that, at least, was the prevailing view. New research has shown that the heart’s aging results from changes in intercellular communications, which tell heart cells, sometimes even healthy ones, to stiffen and break down. By decoding these complex …

Katharine White and Donny Hanjaya-Putra

Notre Dame researchers uncover the molecular driving force behind hallmark of aggressive, metastatic cancers

To invade healthy tissues and continue growing, aggressive cancers mimic and circumvent the body’s native piping system of veins and arteries. Through this process, known as vasculogenic mimicry (VM), tumor cells form fluid-conducting channels that transport blood, oxygen, and nutrients directly …

A young woman looks at a microscope slide that has a dab of clear gel in the middle of it

3D-bioprinted model offers new way to study and treat obesity-related heart disease

Heart disease is the leading cause of death among people with obesity, a condition affecting one in eight people worldwide. Studies show that fat around the heart can fuel inflammation, damage heart muscle cells, disrupt heart rhythm and increase the risk of heart failure, but the precise …

Two researchers in white lab coats and safety glasses work in a lab. A man in blue gloves uses a tool to transfer liquid into a small container near a multi-well plate with reddish liquid. A woman observes him, smiling softly.

Physical pressure on the brain triggers neurons’ self-destruction programming

To think, feel, talk and move, neurons send messages through electrical signals in the brain and spinal cord. This intricate communication network is built of billions of neurons connected by synapses and managed and modified by glial cells. When neurons die, this communication network is …

Two blue, gloved hands hold the superblack material

Robust, low-cost superblack material leverages fundamental geometry and engineering methods

Cave entrances often appear black and forbidding.  Light enters, but little escapes, absorbed as it “bounces around” the interior. To trap light in much the same way, engineers at the University of Notre Dame have devised a superblack material from a matrix of microscopic, …