discovery

Research, Scholarship and Creative Achievement at UTSA

First edition



Faculty and students at UTSA are involved in a wide variety of exploratory and scholarly research projects. These efforts are documented through the research articles they publish. To highlight the scope and depth of this work, we have listed a few of these below.



In a highly cited article in the journal of Chemical Reviews, Dr. Banglin Chen, professor of chemistry explores metalorganic frameworks. His recent works involve luminescent microporous metal- organic framework Tb(BTC)G which has been developed for the recognition and sensing of anions, exhibiting a high-sensitivity sensing function with respect to fluoride.

Dr. Douglas Frantz, professor of chemistry recently published an article in the journal Cell in which he discovered exposure of cell or tissue lysates to a biotinylated isoxazole chemical precipitated hundreds of RNA-binding proteins with significant overlap to the constituents of RNA granules. These observations offer a framework for understanding the function of low complexity sequences as well as an organizing principle for cellular structures that are not membrane bound.

UTSA’s Dean of the College for Science and Professor of Biology Dr. George Perry, published an article in the Journal of Neurochemistry titled “Impaired mitochondrial biogenesis contributes to mitochondrial dysfunction in Alzheimer’s disease.” This study demonstrated that impaired mitochondrial biogenesis likely contributes to mitochondrial dysfunction in Alzheimer’s disease.

Dr. Astrid Cardona receives recognition for her article titled “The Fractalkine Receptor but Not CCR2 Is Present on Microglia from Embryonic Development throughout Adulthood” which was published in the Journal of Immunology. It provides a novel model to monitor chemokine receptor expression changes in microglia and myeloid cells early in development and during inflammatory conditions.

Dr. Christopher Ellison explored religion through a quantitative approach in his study entitled “Religion and the Sense of Control among U.S. Adults.” This study develops a series of theoretical arguments linking multiple dimensions of religious involvement with the sense of control.

In an article published in the Review of Economics and Statistics, Department of Finance professor Dr. John Wald examines the relation between payperformance sensitivity, the convexity of managerial compensation, and future stock risk and returns for a large sample of firms between 1992 and 2004.

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering professor, Dr. Chunjiang Qian addresses the problem of using output feedback to globally control a class of nonlinear systems whose output functions are not precisely known in his work titled “Global control of nonlinear systems with uncertain output function using homogeneous domination approach” which was published in the International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control.

Associate Professor in the Department of Education and Human Development Dr. Anne-Marie Nunez examines the factors affecting Latino student’s enrollment in four-year institutions. Dr. Nunez discovers that academic preparation, navigation of financial aid, levels of school resources, and teacher quality are among the important areas to target.

Dr. Qi Tian, professor in the Department of Computer Science, explores visual codebooks in an article titled “Task- Dependent Visual-Codebook Compression”. Most existing codebooks are built based solely on the visual statistics of local descriptors, without considering the supervise labels coming from the subsequent recognition or classification tasks. Therefore, Tian’s work proposes a task-dependent codebook compression framework.

Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Dr. Shuo Wang, has pursued research exploring a new design for an ultra-fast, public electric vehicle charging station. Through the proper choice of a multi-level topology and staircase modulation, it is able to operate efficiently and provide galvanic isolation without the use of a large transformer.

Department of Physics and Astronomy professor Dr. Dhiraj Sardar’s article “Synthesis and spectroscopy of color tunable Y2O2S:Yb3+,Er3+ phosphors with intense emission” was published in the Journal of Alloys and Compounds. His results show that the Y2O2S:Yb3+,Er3+ phosphor offers power dependent color tuning properties where the emission color can be tuned from 490 to 550 nm by simply changing the 980 nm excitation power from 10 to 50 mW.

Dr. Miguel Jose-Yacaman, professor of Physics and Astronomy explores the synthesis of gold nanoparticles passivated by 1-dodecanethiol in a two phase system (toluene/water), based on a microwave induced method. It was found that under the conditions studied, nanoparticles selfassemble spontaneously into flower-like selfsupported superstructures, showing domains of ordered nanoparticles. This work was published in the esteemed journal, Nanoscale.

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