A group led by Sara E. Mason at the University of Iowa has obtained renewed funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation to study the environmental safety and human health effect of nanomaterials. Mason’s group is part of a national consortium called the Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology.

To address concerns around patient privacy and data security in medical artificial intelligence, Stephen Baek, assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Iowa, along with UI investigators Xiaodong Wu, professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Nick Street, professor of business analytics, has received a $1 million phase one grant from the National Science Foundation to lead a multi-university and industry collaboration to develop a new machine learning platform to train medical AI models with data from around the world.

Technology developed at Iowa is used to develop artificial intelligence software that can detect potential safety risks ranging from weapons to slip and fall hazards.

At the University of Iowa’s National Advanced Driving Simulator (NADS) research center, more than 40 faculty, staff, and students use a 93-ton moon-lander-looking machine and a variety of vehicle cabs to study the way people drive. This test rig—called NADS-1—rides on seven belts (six on the x-axis, one on the y). All in, this costs about $80 million, but it allows researchers to perfect today’s automated driving tech in a safe, controllable way.

National Advanced Driving Simulator Director Daniel McGehee made recommendations for human subjects testing in driving research for the COVID-19 era to the Transportation Research Board during its mid-year meeting earlier this month. How to keep people safe in driving research—in both simulators and on-road vehicles—is not something that has been widely shared or standardized in the research community. In many tests, multiple people are in the vehicle. 

A study by Corinne Peek-Asa in the College of Public Health finds that farmers who are injured on the job take an hour longer to get to a trauma center because of the isolation of their jobs and distance EMTs must travel. 

Common for undergraduates, internships have never been a routine part of doctoral study. But they should be — both to give our Ph.D.s more career options and to help departments build connections with the world around us. Beginning in 2019, the university’s Obermann Center for Advanced Studies began offering internships to doctoral students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, as part of a program jointly funded by Iowa’s graduate school and a four-year grant from the Mellon Foundation.

New research at the University of Iowa College of Engineering will study the connections between reduced air pollution due to COVID-19 shutdowns and sharp decreases in precipitation in the western United States.

New research from the University of Iowa shows parents who teach children ahead of time how to properly choose gaps in traffic can help them learn more quickly how to cross roads safely. The study found that timely instruction from parents led to improvements in children’s road-crossing abilities.