It is a serious understatement to say Carlos Diaz Alvarenga had a big year: He graduated from UC Merced, successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis and landed a position as an assistant professor at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo.
Oh, and he got married.
"Yeah, those are all big life events and I did them all in one year," Diaz Alvarenga said, laughing. "It's been super difficult, but it's been worth it."
A grant from National Institutes of Health will fund research into using stem cell-derived cells to grow new blood vessels in areas that might have blockages.
The $416,741 grant will fund work by chemical and materials engineering Professor Kara McCloskey, working with co-principal investigator Ngan Huang, a professor in the department of cardiothoracic surgery at Stanford University and principal investigator at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System.
A major study publishing Friday in Science reveals that carbon dioxide emissions from forest fires have surged by 60% globally since 2001, and almost tripled in some of the most climate-sensitive northern boreal forests.
