In a report published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, West Virginia University researcher Michael McCawley and his colleagues pinpoint shortcomings in how miners’ exposure to respirable coal-mine dust is monitored. Inhaling this dust over time leads to black lung disease.
Research
For the second year in a row, researchers from West Virginia University have taken home the hardware from the Composites and Advanced Materials Expo. Hota GangaRao, the Maurice and JoAnn Wadsworth Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at WVU, and doctoral candidate Praveen Majjigapu, won the Most Creative Application Award in the design category for their patented NextGen Multifunctional Composite System.
Dr. Geri Dino and the West Virginia Prevention Research Center team have received over $1 million in CDC funding for the continuation of their administrative core, the core research project Activate! as well as a special interest project to conduct a community-based chronic pain self-management program in West Virginia.
Antar Jutla, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, will partner with researchers at the University of Maryland, led by Professor of Microbiology Anwar Huq, to look at ways in which the frequency, intensity and duration of extreme weather events are likely to affect the ecology of pathogenic Vibrio bacteria in the Chesapeake Bay, which is already experiencing twice the global average rate of sea-level rise.
Associate Professor Alfgeir Kristjansson, Ph.D., and adjunct faculty members Megan Smith and Michael Mann – formerly full-time faculty in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences – will serve as external evaluators for the project.
Brianna Mayfield, a master’s student in applied and environmental microbiology in the Davis College of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Design, has been investigating the plant-microbe interactions of bioenergy crops grown on reclaimed mine lands.