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����������ý�Ļ���Ʒ Provost Russell Moore today announced the appointment of Massimo Ruzzene to the position of vice chancellor for research and innovation and dean of the institutes, effective March 20.

Pam Ronald, distinguished professor in the Department of Plant Pathology and the Genome Center at the University of California, Davis, will deliver this year’s Rose M. Litman Memorial Lecture in Science on April 27.

“Since the discovery of DNA in the 1950s, we have amassed an amazing amount of knowledge about how biology works at the molecular level,” said DeDecker, a teaching associate professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at ����������ý�Ļ���Ʒ. “We are now in a position to use that knowledge to actually build new life—to engineer organisms to do new things that can address some of the world’s biggest problems.”

Beginning this year on April 27, the Research & Innovation Office will host the Rose M. Litman Memorial Lecture in Science, bringing national research leaders to ����������ý�Ļ���Ʒ annually. The Litman Lecture celebrates the legacy of an exceptional scientist and educator with a lifelong passion for research, and a firm commitment to keeping rigorous inquiry at the heart of university life.

The Research & Innovation Office has announced several leadership transitions within the campuswide Innovation & Entrepreneurship Initiative, with Stan Hickory stepping into the role of director of the initiative, a position held by Chris Gustavson since 2019.

The Research & Innovation Office has announced the establishment of a new Workforce Innovation Director position dedicated to helping ����������ý�Ļ���Ʒ fulfill local and state needs for next-level talent training, acquisition and retention for research and creative work opportunities.

The Research & Innovation Office has announced that Joe Dragavon, PhD, has been named interim director of Core Facilities and Shared Instrumentation, effective February 1. Since the departure of the previous director, Claudius Mundoma, Dragavon has played an instrumental role in maintaining the momentum of the university’s core facilities community.

The $900K award—a highly prestigious early-career grant for junior faculty members—was awarded to Assistant Professor Orit Peleg (Computer Science) to support her research into how fireflies in a swarm synchronize their lighting displays. Fireflies' elegant, distributed communication systems could eventually help us with our own telecommunications through new ideas about compressing information and distributed networks.

Corrella Detweiler, professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology, and Wei Zhang, professor of chemistry and chair of the Chemistry Department, have been named senior members of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). Senior members of the NAI are active faculty, scientists and administrators who have been successful in patents, licensing and commercialization and have produced technologies that have been or aspire to be transformational.

A new NASA report shows that ����������ý�Ļ���Ʒ is the top university recipient of NASA astrophysics technology grants. The majority of this funding was granted to researchers at LASP and the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy (CASA), a center affiliated with the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences.