CSCVR faculty member Firas Khatib and his colleagues encoded their specialized knowledge into the computer game Foldit, allowing citizen scientists to successfully design synthetic proteins for the first time. The initial results of this unique collaboration appear in the June 5 issue of Nature. By playing Foldit, citizen scientists are now able to help create novel vaccines, cancer therapies and more!

Dr. Bucci publishes paper in mBio on how microbiome affects Alzheimer's disease via immune regulation of anti-inflammatory pathways. Shakti Bhattarai an EAS/CSE PhD student in Bucci lab is co-first author and main data analyst. The paper can be found here.

Dr. Khanna publishes a Rapid Communication on the “singularity” as depicted in the Interstellar movie. His work shows that inside realistic black holes falling astronauts will encounter an “outflying singularity that is an effective shock wave in spacetime. The paper can be found here and the APS blog post here."

Masters physics student Gabriel Casabona has received the DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, a highly-prestigious four-year graduate fellowship awarded to approximately 25 recipients nationwide each year. The fellowship carries a generous stipend of $36,000 annually, paid tuition and fees at any Ph.D. granting-institution in the US, an annual academic allowance for professional development and computer equipment, and a 12-week practicum at a DOE national laboratory. Gabriel studies turbulence-driven detonation of thermonuclear supernovae with CSCVR faculty member Robert Fisher.

CSCVR faculty member, Scott Field, gave an ICERM Public Lecture on Discovering Black Holes and Gravitational Waves: Algorithms and Simulation. The event, which was attended by about 120 people, summarized the 100 years of work leading up to the recent Nobel-prize-winning gravitational wave detection. The talk especially focused on key contributions from mathematicians and computational scientists. The video can be viewed here.