Freelance Science Writer
A small sampling of press releases I’ve written. Not always updated regularly! Check my Facebook page for a more complete listing of recent pieces.
U Chicago PME / August 4, 2022/ It’s a brainy Band-Aid, a smart watch without the watch, and a leap forward for wearable health technologies. Researchers at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) have developed a flexible, stretchable computing chip that processes information by mimicking the human brain. The device, described in …
UTSW / May 11, 2022 / For three decades, scientists have debated the underlying cause of Gulf War illness (GWI), a collection of unexplained and chronic symptoms affecting veterans of the Persian Gulf War. Now researchers at UT Southwestern have solved the mystery, showing through a detailed genetic study that the nerve gas sarin was largely responsible for …
Gladstone Insitutes / March 30, 2022 / When mice with atopic dermatitis—a common type of allergic skin inflammation—are treated with drugs that target the immune system, their thickened, itchy skin generally heals quickly. But scientists have now discovered that the same treatment in obese mice makes their skin worse instead. That is because obesity changes …
Salk Institute / October 14, 2021 / The latest research has implications for understanding sensory disorders and building better prosthetics and robots that can fine-tune their movements based on what they touch.
Gladstone Institutes / October 11, 2021 / The race to develop drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease, which currently affects an estimated 6 million Americans, has been slow-going. Now, researchers have found a possible treatment for the neurodegenerative disease in a surprising place: a database of drugs already approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
UT Southwestern / April 30, 2021 / UT Southwestern scientists successfully employed a new type of gene therapy to treat mice with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), uniquely utilizing CRISPR-Cas9-based tools to restore a large section of the dystrophin protein that is missing in many DMD patients. The approach, described online today in the journal Science Advances, could lead …
Broad Institute / April 27, 2021 / A study of antibody-producing B cells from patients who recovered from COVID-19 reveals a new cross-reactive antibody and what makes some B cells more effective at neutralizing the virus.
Stanford Medicine / December 12, 2017 If there was a Mafia crime family of the virus world, it might be flaviviruses. Dengue, Zika, West Nile and yellow fever virus — to name the more notorious public health gangsters of this clan — are all mosquito-borne flaviviruses, and they’re notoriously hard to take out. Researchers struggle …
Salk Institute / November 9, 2017 Every day, websites you visit and smartphone apps that you use are crunching huge sets of data to find things that resemble each other: products that are similar to your past purchases; songs that are similar to tunes you’ve liked; faces that are similar to people you’ve identified in …
Rockefeller University / April 6, 2017 / If you’ve been a night owl all your life and mornings are your nemesis, you may be able to blame a gene mutation for all those late nights. Researchers at The Rockefeller University have discovered that a variant of the gene CRY1 slows the internal biological clock—called the …