Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Tulane will purchase five transit buses with electric vehicle technology. Charging stations will be installed to support them. The shuttle buses will service the regular university shuttle route that links the uptown and downtown campuses and affiliate programs. The new buses will be part of the university’s fleet in 2022. Staff will collect and analyze data on the performance and costs of the shuttle buses, with the goal of sharing Tulane’s experience with fleet managers in the region and at other universities.

Tulane is investing $5.7 million to significantly expand the Tulane University Translational Science Institute (TUTSI) into a universitywide center focused on finding better ways to diagnose, treat and prevent disease and translate scientific discoveries into medical practices that improve patient care and public health.

“The reason that we’re not treating COVID like any other virus, like we treat smallpox and mumps, is that it became politicized.”

The Hogan Jazz Archive has been renamed the Hogan Archive of New Orleans Music and New Orleans Jazz. The archive will expand the scope of its collections, including acquisitions that document late-20th-century and 21st-century contemporary jazz, rhythm and blues, funk, hip-hop and rock musicians in New Orleans and the surrounding region, as well as the industry and culture that fosters and supports those artists.

Suzana Savkovic, associate professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the School of Medicine, and a team of researchers are investigating the relationship between obesity and enhanced risk for colon cancer. One of the emerging possibilities with regard to colon cancer is that excess lipids accumulate in both the fat-storing and non-fat-storing tissues of obese individuals. The lipids are stored and are seen at higher volumes in colonic tumors relative to normal tissues. Savkovic and her team were awarded a five-year, $1.6 million National Cancer Institute grant for this work.

The Tulane Mellon Graduate Program in Community-Engaged Scholarship in the Humanities — based at the School of Liberal Arts — will widen its scope to include undergraduates, new community relationships through more public events and groundbreaking work on a national level. The expansion is made possible by a $1.5 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The program will expand its local network by co-sponsoring additional community events that connect activists, artists and scholars.

Researchers at the School of Medicine have developed a highly sensitive blood test that can find traces of the bacteria that causes tuberculosis (TB) in infants a year before they develop the deadly disease. Using only a small blood sample, the test detects a protein secreted by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which causes TB infection. The test can screen for all forms of TB and rapidly evaluate a patient’s response to treatment, said lead study author Tony Hu, Weatherhead Presidential Chair in Biotechnology Innovation.

Patrick Button, associate professor of economics at the School of Liberal Arts, is studying discrimination in access to mental health care for LGBTQ+ people and marginalized communities and whether the problem has been exacerbated by the pandemic. The project, which was awarded a National Science Foundation grant, will also explore discrimination against underrepresented groups when applying for mortgages, develop new analytical tools for economics research using text data and establish a mentoring program for underrepresented graduate and undergraduate students in economics.