UB, Hauptman-Woodward land $22.5M renewal from National Science Foundation
Published September 27, 2018 This content is archived.
An article in Business First reports UB and Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute have received a five-year, $22.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to continue work that created the BioXFEL Research Center, and quotes Edward Snell, BioXFEL director, a professor in UB’s department of materials design and innovation, and president and CEO of HWI.
BioXFEL, short for Biology with X-ray Free Electron Lasers, uses X-ray free electron lasers, which produce intense X-rays in extremely short pulses, said Snell.
“X-ray lasers provide two huge advantages over conventional methods,” he said. “They are intensely bright beams that allow us to see much smaller things, like nanocrystals. And their pulses are incredibly short, which allows us to see critical processes, like how drugs bind, at rates as fast as a billionth of a billionth of a second.”
Venu Govindaraju, vice president for research and economic development, said, “BioXFEL Center scientists have made revolutionary advances in just a few years, using X-ray lasers to probe phenomena previously hidden from view. With these incredibly powerful new tools, they are helping us better understand some of society’s most intractable health and science problems.”
An article also appeared on Research & Development.
