Alumni Dylan Parilla-Koester (SLA ’18), Rosalind Kidwell (SLA ’19), and Tyler Hawk (SLA ’19), all former band members, have returned to campus as band instructional staff. They join fellow alumna Annie Stansbury (SLA ’15) who is in her third year as Shockwave Dance Team instructor.

Psychology professors Courtney Baker and Bonnie Nastasi received a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice to implement a program to make schools safer. The program will bring training to Louisiana’s five largest school districts to help school safety crisis teams recognize, respond quickly to and prevent school violence and other crises.

The Tulane Center for Brain Health and Merging Vets and Players (MVP) have formed a partnership to establish an MVP Chapter in New Orleans to support military veterans and former professional football players in addressing the challenges they face in transition to “normal life” once the uniform comes off.

Research by Kirsten Dorans, assistant professor of epidemiology at the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, suggests that a low-carb diet can help lower blood sugar levels in individuals with unmedicated diabetes and those who are at risk for prediabetes. The low-carb diet study group saw greater drops in blood sugar than the group who ate their usual diet.

James Donahue, chemistry professor at Tulane, and a team of chemists will use a $1.3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop a process for producing clean hydrogen from water and renewable energy. The project is part of a federal initiative to address climate change through clean energy technologies and low-carbon manufacturing.

Tulane immunologist Clovis Palmer analyzed the metabolic changes that occur in cells when viral invaders, such as HIV, hepatitis B, or SARS-CoV-2, pose a threat. Palmer concluded that the way in which cells use nutrients in the presence of a viral pathogen can determine disease outcome and severity.

“It isn’t going to be easy, but to have a chance of maintaining the Mississippi River basin — and the Colorado, and really, any major freshwater system — we must stop thinking about floods and droughts in extreme terms that leave the impression that these are infrequent outliers." John Sabo, director of the Tulane ByWater Institute, writes a piece in Forbes about the Mississippi River’s record low water levels and lessons that can be learned from the Colorado River’s water shortage.

The Tulane Innovation Institute was awarded $5 million from the state, part of the U.S. Treasury’s State Small Business Credit Initiative, to support entrepreneurs and small business owners. And Tulane matched the award with another $5 million, enabling the Innovation Institute to launch a new startup fund dedicated to creating opportunities for women- and minority-led ventures in Louisiana.

A blood test developed by Tulane researchers combines nanotechnology with artificial intelligence to diagnose tuberculosis (TB) in children. The nanotechnology allows scientists to see small components of the bacteria that causes TB. The test accurately detected TB in 89% of children who were known to have confirmed TB and identified 74% of children with unconfirmed TB that standard tests missed.

I’m Always So Serious, a debut poetry collection of Karisma Price, assistant professor of English at Tulane, was published in February by Sarabande Books. Price’s poems center on Blackness, family and loss and weave personal and public histories into a cultural reckoning of the past and present. Price has received several fellowships and was a finalist for the 2019 Manchester Poetry Prize. She was the recipient of the 2020 J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation.