Each issue of the Quarterly Review will include representative stories about our researchers, our partnerships, links to lists of our latest publications and grants, and graphs showing our progress in growing our funded research enterprise.
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Research & Strategic Partnerships: Quarterly Review, Volume 5, Issue 1
Portland State University. Research & Strategic Partnerships
This issue of the Research Review highlights some of the research PSU faculty and students are exploring:
- How microplastics and chemicals used in forest management regimes affect species living in the state’s estuarine and nearshore environments;
- Whether we can store thermal energy generated during the summer months in saline aquifers deep below the region for use during the winter;
- How community partnerships at Southeast Portland’s Earl Boyles Elementary School can improve school readiness and achievement;
- How much food Oregonians waste and why;
- Historical patterns of housing discrimination in the city, and
- How to launch a nanosatellite that will support STEM education in Oregon classrooms.
This issue also highlights the Oregon Center for Career Development in Childhood Care and Education, which works with roughly 24,000 childhood care and education practitioners, trainers, the state, and foundation partners to promote quality care and education for Oregon’s youngest residents and their families. Additionally, the magazine features profiles of PSU students who have received prestigious research fellowships from the NSF, as well as recent research news and stories from around campus.
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Research & Strategic Partnerships: Quarterly Review, Volume 4, Issue 2
Portland State University. Research & Strategic Partnerships
This issue highlights some of the innovative work PSU faculty members and graduate students are doing around campus, work aimed at producing:
- New nanotechnologies for medical researchers seeking novel therapies to treat diseases
- A solution to the problem of unregulated contaminants in water supplies
- A powerful new tool for forecasting droughts and drought recovery times
- Three-dimensional maps of molecules associated with memory formation, cognition, and learning, and
- Innovations in physics education that will impact students entering health-related fields
Additionally, this issue takes a close look at two recent grants received by PSU faculty members, one of which will improve our understanding of how repeated wildfires affect carbon cycling in Alaskan forests, and another that establishes a partnership between PSU and five regional museums to support the study and conservation of museum collections. As always, this issue contains highlights of faculty research from around campus and data on proposals submitted, awards received, and research expenditures from the fiscal year 2017.
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Research & Strategic Partnerships: Quarterly Review, Volume 4, Issue 1
Portland State University. Research & Strategic Partnerships
This issue focuses on international research and scholarship, and highlights faculty and students from a number of our colleges and schools. Included in this issue are stories of PSU faculty working to better understand how the relationships between society, culture, and the environment affected disaster preparedness, relief, and recovery in the wake of the devastating earthquakes that struck Nepal in 2015. Stories about how PSU researchers are working with collaborators in China, Israel, and New Zealand to improve water management practices and protect some of the world’s most stunning landscapes. And stories about PSU faculty, students, and alumni working in Africa, the Antarctic, South America, along the U.S.-Mexico border, and closer to home to solve some of the complex challenges we are facing today. RSP would like to thank Dr. Margaret Everett for writing an introduction to this issue, and extend thanks to everyone who contributed to its production.
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Research & Strategic Partnerships: Quarterly Review, Volume 3, Issue 3
Portland State University. Research & Strategic Partnerships
This issue of the Quarterly Review focuses on population health and strategies to improve it. Although these strategies may be revised and added to in the years ahead, the “Triple Aim” of addressing health costs, improving the experience of care, and maintaining healthy populations will undoubtedly remain unchanged, as will our drive to better understand the role of public health in developing resilient people and communities.
The research highlighted in this issue also bears witness to the importance of community and the ways in which Portland State University and the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health are empowering communities to live longer, healthier lives. The unique partnership between OHSU and PSU continues to produce research-based data for decision-making and educating a new generation of public health workers to tackle the challenges ahead.
In the pages that follow, readers will learn about partnerships that provide access to nutritious foods and measure the positive effects of such access on family, economic, and social stability. The notion of “moving upstream” is echoed in research that demonstrates the benefits of access to comprehensive, integrated primary care—as well as the need to address disparities in access to care that persist despite increases in insurance coverage.
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Research & Strategic Partnerships: Quarterly Review, Volume 3, Issue 2
Portland State University. Research & Strategic Partnerships
Portland State University plays a central role in our city’s transformation into the country’s leading laboratory for transportation innovation. Starting over a decade ago, our engineering and urban studies researchers began receiving federal funding to study the connections between the ways people get around in cities and their quality of life. This issue of the RSP Quarterly Review highlights this growing body of work, focusing on the contributions made by the Transportation Research and Education Center, or TREC.
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Research & Strategic Partnerships: Quarterly Review, Volume 3, Issue 1
Portland State University. Research & Strategic Partnerships
To commemorate the opening of Tilikum Crossing and the launch of this dynamic new district, this issue of the RSP Quarterly Review focuses on PSU collaborations with OHSU, OMSI, and the City of Portland.
We start by describing how OMSI, PSU, and OHSU collaborated to bring an exhibit about the human genome from the Smithsonian Institution to Portland. We then present a series of stories about projects building on the complementary health and life science talents of PSU and OHSU researchers. These include a study of ethnic inequities in health care access, a new malaria therapy, tools to improve MRI measurements, and a new way to assess the efficacy of alternative treatments for concussions.
We also include an article about one of PSU’s best-kept secrets—a high-tech metallurgy lab located in OMSI whose partners include many of the country’s largest metal manufacturers, including Boeing, Blount International, Precision Castparts, and the US Navy.
No collection of stories about PSU’s partnerships would be complete without reference to the close ties between the City of Portland and PSU’s Institute for Sustainable Solutions. Here we report on the selection of Robert Liberty as the Institute’s new Director. We also describe a faculty member’s analysis of the complex relationships between urban gardens and gentrification, in Portland and Vancouver BC. A sustainability link with OHSU is recounted in a story about the “Oregon’s Healthiest State” summit.
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Research & Strategic Partnerships: Quarterly Review, Volume 2, Issue 4
Portland State University. Research & Strategic Partnerships
The profiles in this issue highlight the many ways PSU researchers are helping to make Portland and other cities greener, more livable, and smarter. Several of the projects, including ones dealing with the urban heat island, green infrastructure, the food economy, air quality, and transportation, are funded in part by the Portland Climate Action Collaborative, a path-breaking program through which PSU faculty and students work on problems prioritized by Portland’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. The Seattle-based Bullitt Foundation and PSU’s Institute for Sustainable Solutions jointly fund the Collaborative.
A few of the stories also describe how PSU faculty and graduate students are participating in a major national effort, led by the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, called the MetroLab Network, which brings together teams of urban universities and city agencies to speed the development and deployment of smart city projects. The diverse Portland team includes several city departments, as well as TriMet, Intel, the Technology Association of Oregon, CH2M Hill, and DK Associates, among others.
These urban projects, along with others described in this issue concerning a major grant to support the study of e-cigarettes, and a video technique for speeding up professional training, have several things in common. They are highly interdisciplinary, co-developed with off-campus partners, and comprised of teams that include faculty, postdocs, and graduate students. They have the common goal of making lessons we learn in Portland relevant to cities around the world.
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Research & Strategic Partnerships: Quarterly Review, Volume 2, Issue 3
Portland State University. Research & Strategic Partnerships
This issue of the Research and Strategic Partnerships (RSP) Quarterly Review highlights emerging research leaders.
On the sustainability front, environmental engineer Stephen Talke applies a historian’s perspective to extract climate-related information from tide gauge records along the Columbia River dating back over 100 years.
Environmental biogeochemist Jennifer Morse is looking at the hidden carbon costs of “green” practices, like installation of urban bioswales and the establishment of an urban growth boundary, which may have higher ecological costs than previously thought.
In the health arena, you can read about Gerasimos Fergadiotis’s latest work to help diagnose and cure aphasia, the debilitating loss of language that accompanies stroke and other brain injuries.
Electrical engineer Eric Wan uses signal processing to develop tools that can help older people remain in their homes rather than go to assisted living facilities.
The one veteran in our line-up, Biology Professor Ken Stedman, is working with a local startup company to commercialize some of his discoveries that can make vaccines more effective in rural parts of developing countries.
In the educational research sphere, Jennifer Noll of the Mathematics and Statistics Department is developing innovative ways to get students excited about learning statistics.
Curriculum and Instruction faculty member Jean Aguilar- Valdez is exploring how closer dialogue with students from diverse backgrounds can increase their success in STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math) courses.
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Research & Strategic Partnerships: Quarterly Review, Volume 2, Issue 2
Portland State University. Research & Strategic Partnerships
The eleven stories in this Winter 2015 edition of the Research and Strategic Partnerships Quarterly Review explore an assortment of faculty and staff accomplishments, revealing common themes of technological innovation, public policy, strategic partnership, and improving human health.
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Research & Strategic Partnerships: Quarterly Review, Volume 2, Issue 1
Portland State University. Research & Strategic Partnerships
This Review describes connections among Portland State University, society's needs, and innovation: engineer Evan Thomas’s public health program in Rwanda, chemist Steve Reichow's protein research in the Collaborative Life Sciences Building, environmental historian Catherine McNeur's look back at urban agriculture in New York City, the "My Life" mentoring program for foster teens, and "Reclaiming Futures" interventions that help at-risk kids avoid incarceration.
It also focuses on EXITO. EXITO, Portland State University's largest-ever federal grant, awarded by the NIH to a team headed by Professors Carlos Crespo and Tom Keller. In the next decade, EXITO will help hundreds of underrepresented students enter the health science workforce, assuring that patients see caregivers whose backgrounds more closely reflect their own.
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Research & Strategic Partnerships: Quarterly Review, Volume 1, Issue 4
Portland State University. Research & Strategic Partnerships
This fourth issue of the Research and Strategic Partnerships (RSP) Quarterly Review highlights both the outward- and inward-facing aspects of PSU’s research enterprise. Ours is a university built on partnerships, and nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the just-opened Collaborative Life Sciences Building in South Waterfront, conceived, designed and executed in close coordination with OHSU and OSU. Some of the largest biomedical breakthroughs to come from the CLSB may be discovered at the smallest scales using electron microscopy techniques advanced by our Center for Electron Microscopy and Nanotechnology. PSU is a player in nanoscience in large part because Portland is home to companies like FEI and Intel that develop and use these futuristic devices. But PSU partners not only with high tech industry. Local nonprofits like the Portland Housing Center, which seeks to broaden access to homeownership, look to PSU faculty to help design creative solutions. And infusing enthusiastic energy into all of these partnerships are our students; a few of the dozens of research projects on display in this spring’s Student Research Symposium are summarized in this issue.
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Research & Strategic Partnerships: Quarterly Review, Volume 1, Issue 3
Portland State University. Research & Strategic Partnerships
This edition of RSP Quarterly Review focuses on programs that connect Portland State’s education researchers with their community partners. Improving STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math) education has emerged as a critical component of technology- dominated economic development across the U.S., including here in Oregon.
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Research & Strategic Partnerships: Quarterly Review, Volume 1, Issue 2
Portland State University. Research & Strategic Partnerships
In this second issue of RSP’s Quarterly Review, we turn our attention to the Innovation and Intellectual Property office (IIP), which connects university research to companies both large and small. IIP Director Joe Janda works closely with faculty, students and staff who seek to get their discoveries into the commercial marketplace through licensing and the creation of startup companies. For a relatively youthful research enterprise like Portland State University’s, IIP’s successes to date have been remarkable.
The Review also highlights Social Determinants of Health (SDH), an initiative that exemplifies Portland State University’s ability to link research to the interests of our community partners. SDH researchers show how health outcomes depend not only on genetics and exposure to biological dangers, but also on the quality of our social environment. This work is a key component of our partnership with the Oregon Health and Science University and forms a cornerstone of the planned joint OHSU-PSU School of Public Health.
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Research & Strategic Partnerships: Quarterly Review, Volume 1, Issue 1
Portland State University. Research & Strategic Partnerships
Bridges are the connective tissue of Portland, spanning our rivers, streams, and valleys. Similarly, Portland State University’s many partnerships link our institution with those organizations that provide the economic and cultural lifeblood of our region. The Office of Research and Strategic Partnerships (RSP) oversees the largest of these, with the Oregon Health and Science University, Intel, the City of Portland, Portland General Electric, Portland Public Schools, and the Technology Association of Oregon, among many others.
In this, RSP’s first quarterly newsletter, we provide a snapshot of how PSU’s faculty and students are working with these partners to make and apply new discoveries about the natural world and our urbanizing society.