In recent decades, conflicts over land-use in North America have accelerated and intensified. These disputes bring together a complex set of concerns regarding energy, the environment, labor and security, but perhaps most interestingly, have also sparked a new wave of Native American political mobilization. Robert Nichols investigates these conflicts by situating them in a longer historical lineage, asking: “How has the historical development of Anglo-American property relations come to inflect and inform contemporary struggles over land?

Social isolation is a critical challenge for mental health and wellbeing, amplifying depression, substance use disorders, and even mortality. Lana Yarosh investigates how computing technologies can help by combining human-centered investigations with the design of novel computing technologies. She designs, builds, and deploys technologies to support social connectedness in critical contexts, including parent-child separation in divorced families, intergenerational mentorship between community elders and children, and peer support communities for recovery from substance use disorders.

Soft materials are a broad class of condensed matter, which has important technological applications and forms the basis of most biological systems. Xiang Cheng studies the physics of soft materials in experiments, with a special emphasis on the flow behaviors of particle suspensions and polymeric fluids. Using state-of-the-art imaging techniques including confocal microscopy, high-speed photography and holography, he investigates the structural origin of soft material flows and aims to design complex fluids with controllable fluid properties.

The spread of infectious disease spread in human and animal populations is of growing concern. However, disease dynamics in complex ecological systems are often challenging to study. Mathematical models allow for virtual experiments not otherwise feasible in the real world. Meggan Craft’s research integrates field-based empirical data with theoretical models to ultimately devise more effective disease control strategies. This research has beneficial applications for animals of conservation concern, domestic animals, food security, and public health.

Jed Elison is advancing an interdisciplinary program of research, situated at the intersection of infant social cognition, the development of the social brain, and the emergence of clinically impairing behaviors during the toddler and preschool-age periods. Much of his work focuses on identifying neural biomarkers of autism prior to the overt manifestation of the disorder, a goal that will foster new approaches for strategic prevention of neurodevelopmental disorders.

A central challenge in evolutionary biology is understanding how processes in the distant past have shaped the patterns observed today. How do the diverse reproductive strategies found in flowering plants affect speciation and extinction? How are the geographic distributions of species shaped by the physical environment and other species? Emma Goldberg's work addresses these questions by developing computational tools to analyze the evolutionary relationships among species, and mathematical models of adaptation and competition.

Fluid flow phenomena occur over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales across different disciplines in science and engineering. However, current flow diagnostic tools are insufficient to provide key measurements needed to address a number of basic problems in the field of fluid dynamics. Jiarong Hong’s research focuses on developing innovative flow imaging techniques to understand the fundamental physics involved in complex fluid behaviors for practical applications in renewable energy and high speed transportation.

Who should be held responsible for mass atrocity? International criminal courts typically focus on prosecuting senior leaders, who are generally far from the physical scene of the crimes and remote from the victims who experience them, leaving other alleged perpetrators to domestic accountability processes. Does the failure to prosecute lower level offenders distort historical and political reality, betray victim expectations, and defeat the possibility of transitional justice?

Creativity is the current battleground for economic competitiveness. It is for this reason that Barry Kudrowitz seeks to understand how we evaluate and teach creativity. Kudrowitz's research involves the assessment of practices used in team-based idea generation and creativity testing. A focus of this effort is in exploring how play and humor can be used to fuel innovation in both industry and academia.

The Pomerantz lab seeks to perturb the physical interaction between proteins termed transcription factors by designing small drug-like molecules. These interactions dictate the information flow inside cells that can ultimately lead to disease. Given that transcription factors represent a major class of potential drug targets, new approaches using fluorine, a unique element on the periodic table, could significantly increase the repertoire of drug targets opening up new avenues for drug/probe discovery.