Research

The teacher in Mary Ann Beckwith emerges as she works in her sun-lit studio on a sunny, chilly December day. The award-winning watercolor artist discusses technique and Tech students.

"The students are bright, motivated, and willing to try most of the things I teach," she says. "Once they learn that failure is sometimes the result in a creative project and that they can make the next results better, they soar."

The professor of art has won the Distinguished Teaching Award at Michigan Tech, and her paintings have garnered acclaim across the nation.

A team of Michigan Tech mathematicians led by Professor Shuanglin Zhang, who was recently awarded the Richard and Elizabeth Henes Professorship in Mathematical Sciences, has developed powerful new tools for winnowing out the genes linked to some of humanity's most intractable diseases.

With one, they can cast back through generations to pinpoint the genes behind inherited illness. With another, they have isolated eleven genes associated with type-2 diabetes. The team spokesperson . . . 

Ravi Pandey was trying to determine if nanotubes would work as taxis to deliver chemotherapy drugs to tumors. Then he discovered something quirky about DNA that could revolutionize gene-sequencing technology.

Chemotherapy is a tried-and-true cancer therapy, but for many patients, the drugs are so toxic that the cure is worse than the disease. So, rather than dosing the entire person with healing poisons, scientists want to shuttle those drugs directly to the tumor, with carbon nanotubes serving as the shuttle.

First, however, they want to make sure they aren't making things worse. Nanotubes are, as their . . . 

Jeffrey Allen, assistant professor in mechanical engineering-engineering mechanics, has received a five-year, $400,000 National Science Foundation CAREER Award. His project will advance his investigations in capillary flow—how and why gases and liquids move (or fail to move) through tiny channels, such as those found in hydrogen fuel cells.

Two-phase flow, a branch of fluid mechanics, examines systems such as boilers, in which a gas and a liquid are present. Allen investigates two-phase flow through very narrow tubes, which has applications . . .