Eberly News

For Duncan Lorimer and Maura McLaughlin, working at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico set off a sequence of life events that would include marriage, children, finding a home at West Virginia University, an out-of-this-world scientific discovery and, now, earning a highly prestigious award described as the “Nobel Prize of the East.”

Faculty and student researchers at WVU and any other university or college in West Virginia can now request access to the new high performance computing cluster called Dolly Sods. 

What do caves and human geography have in common? That’s what West Virginia University’s María Alejandra Pérez, Associate Professor of Geography at the Eberly College of Arts & Sciences, will be considering as she studies “ecologies of participation” in karst regions of Puerto Rico.

West Virginia University biologists will tap local eighth graders for help on research studying what happens when acid rain stops falling.

While solutions for addressing the opioid crisis often involve either beefing up law enforcement or widening the scope of health services, West Virginia University researchers said they believe the best approach is a synergistic mix of both.

Decades-long searches for new quantum materials may now take much less time, according to a West Virginia University researcher who is speeding up the tedious process.

Quantum materials such as giant magnets and superconductors may help in discovering new, faster technologies and energy-efficient electrical systems. 

In prior research, Jonah Katz, associate professor in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, had observed unusual patterns for consonants between vowels across “language after language.” Katz’s observations led him to question what most linguists believe: that these aspects of speech are learned by internalizing abstract rules about how to deal with, say, a “t” sound when it is between vowels within a word, as opposed to when it starts or ends a word.

Tatiana Trejos, assistant professor in the West Virginia University Department of Forensic and Investigative Science, and graduate student Meghan Prusinowski have developed a one-of-a-kind method that can help piece together a crime scene by literally piecing the evidence together. Or not.

Professor Katie Corcoran of the WVU Eberly College of Arts and Sciences will analyze national Medicaid data to evaluate how patients’ gender and race affect doctors’ diagnostic accuracy and speed, asking whether marginalized patients with symptoms that aren’t clear cut are more likely to experience diagnostic delays than patients from non-minoritized groups.