To celebrate Alzheimer’s and Brain Awareness month, USC Stevens Center was honored to welcome Dr. Thomas Chen from Keck Medicine and the leadership team from NeOnc Technologies to the Stevens Center Office to discuss licensing and sublicensing opportunities from their portfolio of products. Announced back in April, the exclusive licensing agreement between USC and NeOnc Technologies was considered the largest IP transfer of its kind for both the development and commercialization of chemotherapies related to brain and central nervous system diseases. From this innovative collaboration that took place between USC and NeOnc, to USC launching a prototype for testing on the International Space Station, USC continues to maintain its ranking as one of the nation’s top universities.
Below is a compilation of the USC news and research that has been released in June.
- AI Sheds New Light on the ‘Code of Life’: USC Dornsife researchers employ artificial intelligence to unveil the intricate world of DNA structure and chemistry, enabling unprecedented insights into gene regulation and disease.
- First USC Research Prototype Launches for Testing on the International Space Station: A unique docking system, known as CLINGERS, designed to facilitate sensing and docking operations in space, is USC’s first experimental research prototype to be tested on board the International Space Station.
- Advancing Computer Vision One Pixel as a Time: USC Viterbi researchers propose a novel framework to address challenges in computer vision.
- Unraveling the Historic Journey of the Mung Bean: A Tale of Evolution, Migration and Climate Adaptation: USC Dornsife researchers are using genomic testing to uncover two game-changing variants for crop breeders in the face of climate change.
- Farms of the future: How the mung bean, chickpea and kelp can survive climate change: USC Dornsife professor Sergey Nuzhdin discusses how the evolution of crops may point toward their sustainable future.
- Quantum Computers Are Better at Guessing, New Study Demonstrates: USC researchers leverage techniques to manage error accumulation, demonstrating the potential of quantum computing in the error-prone NISQ era.
- USC Stem Cell’s journey towards 1,000 mini-kidneys begins with $1 million from KidneyX: With a new $1 million prize from the Kidney Innovation Accelerator, or KidneyX, a team of USC Stem Cell scientists led by Nils Lindström in collaboration with Leonardo Morsut are on a quest to build a kidney that resembles the real thing in function, but not in form.
- So You’d Like a Job at the Largest Aerospace Company in the World?: Back in March, representatives from Boeing Company and USC Viterbi School of Engineering convened to celebrate the launch of Boeing’s new Accelerated Leadership Program (ALP), an innovative educational opportunity that invites sophomore students from partner universities to a wide range of engineering and product-focused activities, including access to top-level leadership that will help develop future Boeing leaders.
- Get Ready for a World of Self-Growing and Healing “Living” Materials: New research at USC Viterbi School of Engineering seeks to upcycle waste materials by harnessing the power of microorganisms.
- The Future Foretold: Researchers at USC’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI) use AI to predict societal events from various sources, including structural data, news feeds, blogs, social media, web search queries and other publicly available information.
- In memoriam: Chemist’s research advanced energy storage solutions and powered Mars rovers: Late scientist Sri Narayan, former USC Dornsife professor of Chemistry and Director of the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute, earned an appointment to the National Academy of Inventors. Dr. Narayan passed away on May 24, 2023, and was recognized by many as a “thoughtful scientist and generous human,” and his innovative research which transformed fuel cell, battery and sustainability technologies will live on.
- To Learn how Gen Z consumes media, the USC Center for Public Relations and Day One Agency go right to the source: USC Annenberg’s Center for Public Relations and Day One Agency released a first-ever mobile ethnographic study that examines the sate of the next generation’s media diets, how they consume news, how and why they spend time online, and who influences them.
- Putting the Rational Thinking Skills of Language Models to the Test: USC Viterbi ISI researcher Mayank Kejriwal and incoming PhD student at USC set off to discover if language models can be trusted to reason like humans do and whether or not they are good at making decisions.
All of the above stories can be found on the USC News Website, which also showcases stories and research done in the fields of arts, business, health, and so many more.
Photo by iStock and USC Dornsife.