Imagine a household that consumes 1,000 kilowatt hours of energy per month. Then they install solar panels on their roof that generate 500 kilowatt hours of electricity per month on average. How much should their consumption of electricity drawn from the power grid decline after they install solar? Five hundred kilowatt hours is the expectation, but in reality, it’s less than that for most people. Now, they’re consuming more than 1,000 kilowatt hours per month.

This paradox is called the solar rebound effect: the ratio of the increase in energy consumption to the amount that is generated by the solar panels. In new research out of the Georgia Institute of Technology, Matthew Oliver, an associate professor in the School of Economics, presented this argument for how the economics of solar power really work, in “Tipping the Scale: Why Utility-Scale Solar Avoids a Solar Rebound and What It Means for U.S. Solar Policy,” published in The Electricity Journal.

“Getting people to adopt this technology does reduce their reliance on conventional energy sources, but not by as much as you think,” Oliver said. “This is because people end up increasing their electricity consumption after adopting solar panels, as an economic and behavioral response.”

People may believe they are saving money due to subsidies, or might perceive that their electricity consumption isn’t as environmentally damaging as it was before — so they leave the lights on longer and appliances running. 

Policymakers must account for solar rebound when determining solar subsidies, Oliver argues. Take the example of a typical household. If their solar rebound is 20%, they’re eliminating 20% of the carbon reduction benefits that they should have received from adding panels.

“You have to build the estimated rebound effect into your benefit-cost ratio with regard to how much electricity consumption you're actually displacing,” he said. “Because it's not happening on a one-for-one basis.”

If subsidizing residential solar proves to not be worthwhile, then shifting subsidies to utility-scale solar may be a good alternative. While household solar rebound effects happen because of individual consumer behavior, this is not an issue with utility providers. Utility-scale solar could enable solar to reach its full carbon reduction potential.

“Policymakers could consider reallocating subsidies in a more optimal way to support greater investment in utility-scale solar,” Oliver said. “That’s not to say policymakers wouldn’t continue to subsidize residential solar, but there has been an overwhelming policy focus on the adoption of residential solar.”

CITATION: Matthew E. Oliver, Tipping the scale: Why utility-scale solar avoids a solar rebound and what it means for U.S. solar policy, The Electricity Journal, Volume 36, Issue 4, 2023

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tej.2023.107266

A Georgia Tech researcher has successfully evaded security measures on Apple’s latest MacBook Pro with the M3 processor chip to capture his fictional target’s Facebook password and second-factor authentication text.

By the end of his demonstration video, Ph.D. student Jason Kim showed how the recently discovered iLeakage side-channel exploit is still a genuine threat to Apple devices, regardless of how updated their software might be.

First discovered by Kim and Daniel Genkin, an associate professor in the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy, the vulnerability affects all recent iPhones, iPads, laptops, and desktops produced by Apple since 2020.

iLeakage allows attackers to see what’s happening on their target’s Safari browser. This vulnerability allows potential access to Instagram login credentials, Gmail inboxes, and YouTube watch histories, as Kim demonstrated last month on a slightly older MacBook Pro.

“A remote attacker can deploy iLeakage by hosting a malicious webpage they control, and a target just needs to visit that webpage,” said Kim. “Because Safari does not properly isolate webpages from different origins, the attacker's webpage is able to coerce Safari to put the target webpage in the same address space. The attacker can use speculative execution to subsequently read arbitrary secrets from the target page.”

How is this possible? Well, as manufacturers developed faster and more efficient CPUs, their devices have become vulnerable to something called speculative execution attacks. This vulnerability is in the design of the chip itself. It has led to major software issues since the Spectre attack was reported in 2018.

There have been many attempts to stop these types of attacks, but Kim and Genkin show through their research that more work still needs to be done.

“iLeakage shows these attacks are still relevant and exploitable, even after nearly six years of Spectre mitigation efforts following its discovery,” said Genkin. “Spectre attacks coerce CPUs into speculatively executing the wrong flow of instructions. We have found that this can be used in several different environments, including Google Chrome and Safari.”

The team made Apple aware of its findings on Sept. 12, 2022. Since then, the tech company has issued mitigation for iLeakage in Safari. However, the researchers note that the update was not initially enabled by default. It was only compatible with macOS Ventura 13.0 and higher as of today.

So far, the team does not have evidence that real-world cyber-attackers have used iLeakage. They‘ve determined that iLeakage is a significantly difficult attack to orchestrate end-to-end, requiring advanced knowledge of browser-based side-channel attacks and Safari's implementation.

The vulnerability is confined to the Safari web browser on macOS because the exploit leverages peculiarities unique to Safari's JavaScript engine. However, iOS users face a different situation due to the sandboxing policies on Apple's App Store. The policies require other browser apps using iOS to use Safari's JavaScript engine, making nearly every browser application listed on the App Store vulnerable to iLeakage.

iLeakage: Browser-based Timerless Speculative Execution Attacks on Apple Devices will be published at the 2023 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security later this month.

Along with Kim and Genkin, Stephan van Schaik of the University of Michigan and Yuval Yarom of Ruhr University Bochum co-authored the paper.

Three out of four of the world’s most popular websites are failing to meet minimum requirement standards and allowing tens of millions of users to create weak passwords. The findings are part of a new Georgia Tech cybersecurity study that examines the current state of password policies across the internet.

Using a first-of-its-kind automated tool that can assess a website’s password creation policies, researchers also discovered that 12% of websites completely lacked password length requirements.

Assistant Professor Frank Li and Ph.D. student Suood Al Roomi in Georgia Tech’s School of Cybersecurity and Privacy created the automated assessment tool to explore all sites in the Google Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX), a database of one million websites and pages.  

Li and Al Roomi's method of inferring password policies succeeded on over 20,000 sites in the database and showed that many sites:

• Permit very short passwords
• Do not block common passwords
• Use outdated requirements like complex characters

The researchers also discovered that only a few sites fully follow standard guidelines, while most stick to outdated guidelines from 2004. The project was 135 times larger than previous works that relied on manual methods and smaller sample sizes.

More than half of the websites in the study accepted passwords with six characters or less, with 75% failing to require the recommended eight-character minimum. Around 12% of had no length requirements, and 30% did not support spaces or special characters.

Only 28% of the websites studied enforced a password block list, which means thousands of sites are vulnerable to cyber criminals who might try to use common passwords to break into a user’s account, also known as a password spraying attack.

“Both Professor Li and I were excited to take on the challenge,” said Al Roomi. “With his guidance and our continuous work on both algorithm design and the measurement technique, we were able to fully develop an automated measurement of password creation policy and apply it at scale.”

Al Roomi and Li designed an algorithm that automatically determines a website’s password policy. With the help of machine learning, the pair could see the consistency of length requirements and restrictions for numbers, upper- and lower-case letters, special symbols, combinations, and starting letters. They could also see if sites permitted dictionary words or known breached passwords.

“As a security community, we've identified and developed various solutions and best practices for improving internet and web security,” said Li. “It's crucial that we investigate whether those solutions or guidelines are actually adopted in practice to understand whether security is improving in reality.”

The project began during the height of the pandemic when Al Roomi found a gap in the research literature surrounding website password policies. Through his reading, he discovered that a consensus of his peers did not think a large-scale survey of password policies was possible due to the variety of web design.

“It was exciting to see an identified challenge in the literature and to develop and apply a vision we turned into the measurement tool,” said Al Roomi. “This research was my first in my Ph.D. program at Georgia Tech and SCP. It is one of the most challenging yet rewarding endeavors I've worked on.”

The full report will be presented at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) in Copenhagen, Denmark, later this month. A Large-Scale Measurement of Website Login Policies was also accepted to the 32nd USENIX Security Symposium earlier this year.

The Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology (IEN) and the Institute for Materials (IMat) have announced they will combine to form a new Interdisciplinary Research Institute (IRI) set to begin operations on July 1, 2024.

The new IRI, which has yet to be named, will explore the vast scientific, technological, societal, and economic impacts of innovative materials and devices, as well as foster their incorporation into systems that improve the human condition in areas such as information and communication technologies, the built environment, and human well-being and performance.

“The new IRI will not only combine the strengths of IEN and IMat, but will also allow us to further expand faculty representation from across the Institute,” said Julia Kubanek, vice president of Interdisciplinary Research at Georgia Tech. “As we look at the future of research in these areas, expanding inclusivity of researchers from the liberal arts, design, business, and basic sciences will allow us to better meet the education, workforce development, and innovation needs of Georgia, the U.S., and the world.”

The new IRI will strengthen Georgia Tech’s role in national focus areas such as the National Nanotechnology Initiative, the Materials Genome Initiative, and the CHIPS and Science Act, as well as identify and shape future priorities.

Core competencies of the new IRI will include:

• Fundamental science to comprehend and control matter from the nanoscale to the mesoscale.
• The synthesis, processing, and characterization of materials to achieve desired properties.
• The design and fabrication of novel devices and components with enhanced capabilities.
• The integration of materials, devices, and components into larger systems.
• Computing, modeling, simulation, and big data to advance progress at all length scales.
• Integration into all stages of research, from conceptualization to impact assessment, of economic, business, and social factors to ensure sustainable and equitable benefits.

“IEN and IMat have worked closely together for years, and there is overlap in the research areas we cover,” said Eric Vogel, IMat’s executive director. “This is an opportunity for us to build on IEN and IMat’s individual successes and our strong record of collaboration to create something even more exceptional.”

The new IRI will strengthen the state-of-the-art core cleanroom and characterization facilities, providing researchers with the tools and resources necessary for cutting-edge interdisciplinary research. These facilities will continue to serve both Georgia Tech and, through its leadership within the NSF National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure, the nation. Recognizing the importance of nurturing talent, it will champion education and outreach programs to inspire the next generation and equip the workforce with the skills necessary to collaborate and communicate across multiple disciplines.

“This is an exciting time to look to the future,” said Michael Filler, interim executive director of IEN. “We highly value the dedication and hard work of our staff and research faculty, who have been crucial to the success of IEN and IMat and will be the backbone of this new organization. We look forward to creating something exceptional in the coming months.”

Georgia Tech scientists will soon have another way to search for neutrinos, those hard-to-detect, high-energy particles speeding through the cosmos that hold clues to massive particle accelerators in the universe — if researchers can find them. 

“The detection of a neutrino source or even a single neutrino at the highest energies is like finding a holy grail,” says Professor Nepomuk Otte, the principal investigator for the Trinity Demonstrator telescope that was recently built by his group and collaborators, and was designed to detect neutrinos after they get stopped within the Earth.

The National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded effort will eventually create “the world’s most sensitive ultra-high energy neutrino telescope.” The Trinity Demonstrator is the first step toward an array of 18 telescopes located at three sites, each on top of a high mountain. 

Earlier in the year, Otte’s group flew a neutrino telescope tethered to a massive NASA-funded balloon — though a leak brought the telescope down earlier than planned. The effort was part of the EUSO-SPB2 collaboration, which wants to study cosmic-particle accelerators with detectors in space.

“This was the first time our group had built an instrument for a balloon mission,” Otte says. “And the big question was if it would work at the boundary to space at -40F and in a vacuum. Even though we only flew 37 hours (of a 50-hour mission), we could show that our instrument worked as expected. We even accomplished some key measurements, like making a measurement of the background light, which no one has done before.”

The search for neutrinos

Otte is the second Georgia Tech physicist to lead a search for neutrinos. Professor Ignacio Taboada is the spokesperson for IceCube, an NSF neutrino observatory located at the South Pole. IceCube uses thousands of sensors buried in the ice to detect neutrinos.

Meanwhile, Trinity telescopes will be especially sensitive to higher-energy neutrinos. “With Trinity, we can potentially open a new, entirely unexplored window in astronomy,” Otte says. “IceCube gives us a couple of good pointers on what to observe. That is also why we modified the building of the Trinity Demonstrator to point toward the only two high-energy neutrino sources” already identified by IceCube scientists.

‘Cherenkov lights’ illuminate ‘air showers’

The Trinity Demonstrator telescope is not your typical astronomy telescope. Instead of looking into the sky, it is looking at the horizon, waiting for a flash of light to happen that only lasts tens of billionths of a second. 

That flash is at the end of a chain of events that happens when a high-energy neutrino enters the Earth under a shallow angle. Upon penetrating Earth and traveling along a straight line for a hundred miles, the neutrino eventually interacts inside the Earth, producing a tau particle, which is like a short-lived massive electron. 

The tau continues to travel through the Earth, and when it bounces out of the ground, it decays into millions of electrons and positrons, which zip through the air. Because the electrons and positrons travel faster than the speed of light in the air, they emit Cherenkov light, the short flash of light the Trinity Demonstrator telescope detects. Using computer algorithms, the recorded Cherenkov flashes are analyzed to reconstruct the energy and arrival direction of the neutrino. 

Otte and his team of Georgia Tech postdoctoral and graduate scholars developed and built the Trinity Demonstrator. Undergraduate students have also had significant responsibilities in designing its optics. “It is good for the students because they are involved in all aspects of the experiment. In big collaborations, you are an expert on one aspect only,” Otte says.

The largest collaboration Otte is currently involved with is the Cherenkov Telescope Array, which involves more than 2,000 researchers. That planned international project will involve 60 next-generation gamma-ray telescopes in Chile and on the Canary Island of La Palma.

Next year, Otte says he and his researchers will apply for funding to build a much bigger telescope, which will be the foundation for the NSF 18-telescope array. For now, the team is busy observing with the Trinity Demonstrator atop Frisco Peak in Utah.

“With a bit of luck, we will detect the first neutrino source at these energies,” Otte said.

Funding: National Science Foundation (NSF)

Workforce diversity is imperative for innovative science and technology. Yet due to funding inequities, research infrastructure isn’t as robust at Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), making building a diverse workforce pipeline and inclusive research collaborations challenging. With its Research Collaboration Initiative (RCI), the Georgia Institute of Technology is building MSI partnerships and recently hosted its first research collaboration forum (RCF) specifically to develop these relationships with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).

Nearly 170 attendees from government, industry, national labs, and other universities gathered on the Georgia Tech campus Nov. 7 – 8. The research forum featured keynotes, panels, and breakout sessions divided by research area to develop the partnerships necessary for meaningful collaboration.

Dietra Trent — executive director of White House Initiatives on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity through HBCUs — gave the morning keynote.

“Research shaped by diverse experience and cultures will reduce the risk of bias and create significant opportunities for all our universities,” she said. “This collaboration represents one of the best ways to build a scholarly community. It’s the partnership our HBCUs need — not a handout but a hand up.”

Day one of the RCF featured keynotes talks from Senior Advisor Terrence Mosely of the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and Thyaga Nandagopal, director of the Division of Innovation and Technology Ecosystems in Tech, Innovation, and Partnerships.

The second day featured a keynote from Victoria Coleman, who currently serves as the chief scientist of the U.S. Air Force and was past director of the Defense Research Projects Agency. Coleman was instrumental in creating the first HBCU-led University Affiliated Research Center in Tactical Autonomy.

Keynotes from Kylie Patterson, director of opportunity and inclusion from CHIPS.gov, and Annette Owens-Scarsboro, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) institution program manager for HBCUs and MSIs, rounded out the second day.

Panels about funding priorities for the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Commerce, NIH, and the Department of Defense offered attendees compelling federal research opportunities. In breakout sessions, attendees gathered to ideate and team build within their respective research disciplines, which included everything from climate resiliency to artificial intelligence.

“We’re looking at these breakout sessions as an opportunity to develop long-term, sustainable collaborations and partnerships between our respective institutions,” said George White, senior director for strategic partnerships in the Office of the Vice President for Interdisciplinary Research and principal research engineer at Georgia Tech. “We believe this is an enduring model that can grow well beyond Georgia Tech. The ability to seed research projects and capacity building makes this a very unique opportunity.”

Throughout the forum, there were multiple opportunities to network and build more casual partnerships.

“The goal is to exchange ideas, meet one another, and identify areas of collaborative synergy,” said Taiesha Smith, senior program manager of HBCU/MSI Research Partnerships at Georgia Tech.

Inclusivity Imperative to Research Next

The RC is just one of the projects of Research Next. Executive Vice President for Research Chaouki T. Abdallah launched the research enterprise’s planning initiative in 2020, and creating inclusive research collaborations is its third phase.

“We believe that in order to develop lasting solutions for the problems facing humanity, we need as many perspectives as possible,” he said. “We need more original ideas, the kind of ideas born from having diverse communities to not just make the solutions but to ask the right questions.”

The event was one of Georgia Tech’s many efforts in this area. The team created a software tool, CollabNext, where researchers can find partners at HBCUs with similar disciplines and interests. They also developed a memorandum of understanding for a semiconductor research initiative with HBCU/MSIs. Even the Georgia Tech Research Institute is involved, developing the Defense-University Affiliated Research Traineeship to give HBCU students opportunities in the Department of Defense.

“This event will energize and identify opportunities from companies and the federal government to make sure HBCU and MCIS can compete for the funding,” Abdallah said, “because they have built the infrastructure to conduct this research.”

Researchers have documented for the first time the stresses that build up around solid-state battery electrolytes, helping set the stage for the development of improved and more efficient batteries. Scientists have long thought that stresses can build up around dendrites, thin metallic projects that can ultimately short out solid-electrolyte batteries, but they haven’t been precisely measured.

A team of scientists at Georgia Tech, Brown University, Nanyang Technological University, and MIT have measured the mechanical stresses that develop in dendrites – solving a long-standing hypothesis that high stresses can be developed around dendrites. Dendrites pierce through solid electrolytes, eventually crossing from one electrode to the other and shorting out the solid-state battery cell.

Georgia Tech Professor Christos Athanasiou and the multidisciplinary team used photoelasticity to measure the stress on batteries caused during the battery cycle. In their paper, Operando Measurements of Dendrite-Induced Stresses in Ceramic Electrolytes using Photoelasticity, they managed to overcome challenges associated with measurements of easy to break, very tiny solid electrolyte samples. The samples thickness was about 10 times smaller than the average diameter of human hair.

Read more by visiting the link below.

Open access to research data and information will be key to spur the next wave of solutions to the world’s most complex problems. With that in mind, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is creating the first-ever prototype open knowledge network.

Known as Proto-OKN, it will be a free, publicly available, searchable database containing troves of research data from major U.S. government agencies. The project aims to fuel the next data revolution in support of data-centric solutions to societal challenges. A team at the Georgia Institute of Technology is going to help build it.

With an award of $1.5 million, the Georgia Tech team will design a layer of the network known as a knowledge graph – a tool that facilitates data and knowledge sharing using nodes and edges and is similar to a social network. But unlike the other 17 teams working on the NSF effort, Georgia Tech’s contribution will focus on the entity most crucial for scientific breakthroughs: people. One of the team’s primary goals is to raise visibility for researchers often left out of the current research collaboration landscape.

Lew Lefton, emeritus faculty in the School of Mathematics and former associate vice president for Research Computing, will lead the project. The team includes Kexin Rong, assistant professor in the College of Computing, and Didier Contis, executive director of Academic Technology, Innovation, Research Computing in the Office of Information Technology. Their knowledge graph will be centered on people, research topics, and organizations with a focus on elevating researchers at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs).

“Research collaborations are driven by people making connections, but how do you connect to other researchers if you don’t know who they are?” Lefton said. “Current tools or search engines are biased to showing people with the most funding and prestige. Our tool will identify potential collaborators who have similar research interests but who may not be as well-known.”

Most tools and databases on research activity start with data from the top R1 institutions where the most federal funding is concentrated. Lefton’s team will instead build the network starting with data from researchers at HBCUs and MSIs. While often doing cutting-edge research like their counterparts at institutes like Georgia Tech and MIT, these researchers face challenges in finding collaborators and securing federal funding due to heavy teaching loads and a lack of internal research support infrastructure.

“In talking to our partners, we found that their biggest challenges are not in researching the state of the field or doing a literature review – the biggest challenge is finding collaborators,” Rong said.

Using a human-centered design approach, the Georgia Tech team will incorporate open data sources and infrastructures to create a tool to help researchers at these institutions find collaborators. The team will work with colleagues at HBCUs – Fisk University, Texas Southern University, Morehouse College, and the University at Buffalo – to both build the network and do iterative design based on that target audience's needs. In the design process, they will work together to identify gaps to make sure researchers are sufficiently represented. 

The team will advance and refine state-of-the-art algorithms and machine learning models that take in research journal articles, conference proceedings, preprints, patents, and theses, and extract who worked on them and what topics they cover.

The team will also use the award to expand and launch CollabNext, a proof-of-concept tool created at Georgia Tech that helps HBCU and Georgia Tech researchers connect. The CollabNext portal will serve as the front-end interface for the team’s knowledge graph.

“The current research collaboration landscape leans toward ‘winner takes all,’ and because extremely successful researchers are more visible, they become even more successful,” Rong said. “With this project, we want to give talented researchers more visibility, which will hopefully increase their chances of success.”

Georgia Tech is particularly invested in expanding research collaborations with HBCUs and has undertaken several initiatives towards that effort. The team hopes the tool will make it easier for both researchers at HBCUs and MSIs to find collaborators and researchers at other universities to find collaborators at HBCUs and MSIs.

It is statistically impossible to know who or where the next big scientific breakthrough will come from, Lefton said. It could be from a researcher who is not well known but who happened to have the right idea at the right time. But with money and influence concentrated in specific places, it is all too easy to not notice a great new idea.

“As a society we are facing difficult and complex challenges,” Lefton said. “In my opinion, the best approach to solving these problems is to consider many different perspectives and ideas, and that means we need everyone at the table.”

The advent of whole genome sequencing technology has prompted an explosion in research into how genetics are associated with disease risk. But the vast majority of genetics research has been done on people of European ancestry, and genetics researchers have realized that in order to address health disparities, more needs to be done.

In a new study, Georgia Tech researchers investigated whether 25 rare gene variants known to be associated with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) play a role in risk for African Americans. While the rare variant associations were recently discovered in individuals of European ancestry, contributing to about 15% of cases, it was unknown if and how those same rare gene variants might affect risk for African Americans.

Led by Greg Gibson, Regents’ Professor and Tom and Marie Patton Chair in the School of Biological Sciences, the study highlights the importance of considering genetic diversity and the mixing of ancestry in genetics research. The findings were published in the journal Genome Medicine.

“Because of major advancements in the last decade, we now know that most diseases are far more complex than we originally thought, in terms of genetics,” said Gibson, who is also director of the Center for Integrative Genomics at Georgia Tech. “Understanding whether genetic differences contribute to health disparities is a major point of focus for current genetics research, and we had an opportunity to test one idea with this study.”

Today, African Americans have a similar prevalence of various types of IBD as European Americans. But progression is often much worse: African Americans are more likely to progress to severe disease requiring colectomies and other major interventions.

Courtney Astore, a Ph.D. student in Gibson’s lab and first author on the paper, wanted to assess whether those same rare variants would have a similar effect on IBD risk in African Americans. In a collaboration with Subra Kugathasan from Emory University and the NIH’s IBD Genetics Consortium, Gibson’s lab had analyzed the complete genome sequences of over 3,000 genomes of African Americans, half with IBD. Astore used that database to conduct her analysis.  

She started by plotting the difference in frequency of the rare variants, and quickly realized that there was a significant reduction in prevalence of the variants in African Americans. Through further computations, she estimated that European ancestry variants actually only made a very small contribution to IBD in African Americans (around 44 additional cases per 100,000 people), fourfold less than Americans of European ancestry.

“Prior to our analysis, we suspected that admixture may play a role in the presence of IBD-associated rare variants in African Americans,” Astore said. “When I saw the differences, that was when I realized that there was something important there that we needed to discover.”

Astore then used a method known as chromosome painting, which is a tool for visualizing where each segment of the genome comes from. She showed that the rare variants found in African Americans were almost always located on segments of European ancestry genomes.

In simple terms, the location of the variants indicated that the genes resulted from admixture — a scientific term for mixing of genetic backgrounds throughout ancestry — which enabled Astore to show that the mutations had arisen outside of Africa, and only began to appear in people of African ancestry over the last dozen generations.

To conclude the study, Gibson and Astore assessed the presence of other rare variants associated with a dozen other diseases, which similarly confirmed that the presence of the variants contributes to African Americans generally through admixture.

The findings are important for several reasons. First, they highlight the value of considering genetic diversity and admixture in all genetics research, and especially when investigating rare variants and their associations with complex disease. While they showed that the European variants were rare in African Americans, there are almost certainly rare variants that contribute to IBD in African Americans that have yet to be discovered and may point to biological mechanisms.

“Doing more genetic studies on diverse populations, and especially those that have admixture, is going to be pivotal for therapeutic discovery,” Astore said.

Precision medicine will eventually be tailored to a person’s genome, which means that in some cases knowing the identity of rare variants will help guide therapy. If that is the case, knowing the context of ancestry will be beneficial. It also means that if more research on diverse ancestry groups isn’t done, then new treatments might not be effective for all people. The team also emphasizes that genetics is not the only factor contributing to risk for complex diseases like IBD, and their study simply highlights that it cannot be assumed that genetic discoveries are risk factors for all people.  

“Our study emphasizes that in order to move in the direction of greater health equity, it is absolutely crucial to do large-scale genetic sequencing for African Americans and all ancestry groups,” Gibson said. “We hope our work will encourage more research on both social determinants of health and the genetics of IBD across ancestries.”

Note: The IBD Genetics Consortium, of which Gibson is a part, organized the cohort of African Americans with IBD, and their samples were gathered at institutes across the country, including Emory University, Johns Hopkins University, Rutgers University, Cedars Sinai Los Angeles, and Mt. Sinai New York.

Funding: National Institutes of Health

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s13073-023-01244-w

There are around a billion cases of seasonal influenza worldwide every year, according to the World Health Organization. As many as 5 million cases are severe, causing up to 650,000 deaths.

Pandemics caused by novel influenza viruses — like the 1918 flu pandemic that killed more than 50 million people — represent an even more serious threat.

School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Professor Ravi Kane is leading a multi-university team that has received a five-year, $4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to change that and develop a more resilient flu vaccine — one that provides lasting protection from season to season.

The goal is to design a vaccine that provides broad protection against group 1 influenza A viruses — a group that includes the 1918, 1957-1958, and 2009 pandemic viruses —as well as some as some bird flu viruses that can cause disease in humans.

Kane has pioneered approaches for refocusing the immune response to protein antigens and controlling antigen orientation. His ChBE research group designs nanoscale scaffolds for antigen presentation as part of novel strategies for designing vaccines, including flu vaccines.

He explains why flu vaccines vary every year and how he’s working to create a universal influenza vaccine.