Innovation & Research

Pitt Professor of Social Work Daniel Rosen and his colleagues have secured a $1.25 million federal grant to not only strengthen opioid abuse training for 70 master of social work students, but to put them in some of Allegheny and Beaver County’s highest areas of overdose deaths and also to train the staff manning the School of Social Work’s community partner organizations.
Headshot of Ruslan Medzhitov
Ruslan Medzhitov, a Yale University researcher who transformed the understanding of how the immune system detects infections, which paved the way for therapies for a wide range of diseases, received the 2019 Dickson Prize in Medicine, the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine’s highest honor.
Garrett Coyan at the 2019 Pitt Innovation Challenge
To address the critical need for long-lasting heart valve replacements, a team of Pitt researchers created a mesh that harnesses the body’s own healing power.
A strawberry poison frog, color morph red, sits on a leaf in a forest
Animals that seek mates and fight rivals that resemble their parents could be setting the stage for the formation of a new species, research from Pitt biology graduate student Yusan Yang and associate professor Corinne Richards-Zawacki indicates.
The CyteSolutions Lens
Dry eye affects millions of Americans a year, but available treatments can require continuous application. A Pitt bioengineering student and an eye doctor with the School of Medicine make up part of a team that invented a more efficient and sustained treatment delivery method.
Stephen Wisniewski speaking at the Advanced Analytics Summit.
As Pitt's Advanced Analytics Summit returns this week for its second year, more than 30 academic institutions will gather to explore how to better use deep data in higher education.
The HIV Detective is a solution being developed for early, rapid diagnosis of HIV. The handheld testing platform would allow health care workers to gather a few drops of blood onto a sensor and provide results in one minute instead of the 24 hours currently required. This leap forward in testing is possible due to another recently developed Pitt technology — a THC breath test.
J.T. Borofka
Pitt's Michael Palladino is the only researcher actively pursuing a cure for triosephosphate isomerase deficiency. Eleven-month old J.T. Borofka has this severe metabolic disorder, which is characterized by a shortage of red blood cells (anemia), neurological problems, infections and muscle weakness that can affect breathing and heart function. It is so rare that only eight known cases exist around the world — four of which have been identified in the United States.
The question for regenerative medicine research is “‘What can we do in space that we can't do on Earth that makes a difference?’" said William Wagner, director of the McGowan Institute, which has joined with the International Space Station U.S. National Laboratory to look for answers. "That's a pretty exciting question, because it's currently unanswered."
Gelsy Torres-Oviedo in white jacket over blue shirt, standing on a rooftop overlooking Pitt campus with Cathedral of Learning prominently in the background
For stroke survivors whose ability to walk has been impaired by neurological damage, rehabilitation using robotics has proven to be an effective therapy to improve their gait. However, one of the major issues with this type of rehabilitation is that following training with a robotic device, motor improvements are not maintained in the patient’s daily life. Gelsy Torres-Oviedo, of Pitt's Swanson School of Engineering, is applying a novel approach to improve locomotor learning in stroke patients.