Research News

The university’s AI roadmap has reached some significant milestones, shared in a town hall opened by chief AI officer David Ebert. The biggest news is that campus community members now have access to U of A GenAI collection built on AWS Bedrock. This includes the generative AI platforms that can support teaching, learning, research and administrative work. All are private and FERPA compliant, though not HIPAA compliant. 

What is the IT job market going to look like in three years? With the advances in technology, especially Artificial Intelligence, it’s difficult to know, which is especially challenging for students working towards their degrees. Luckily, researchers at the University of Arizona are engaged in numerous important projects, from machine learning to quantum computing to health sciences and health sciences engineering.

What will happen to rainforests as global temperatures rise with climate change? Biosphere 2 has the hottest rainforest on the planet—there’s a huge temperature change from the shaded forest floor to the top of the tree canopy under the Arizona sun. That makes it the ideal place for postdoctoral researcher Justin Bestily to study resilience in plant life.

It’s easy to take today’s research technology for granted. But looking back reveals just how transformative the journey has been and how intentional investments have made discovery possible. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, scientific research became more collaborative, data-driven, and dependent on computing power that extended beyond a single lab or campus. At the University of Arizona, technology teams were responding in real time, building the infrastructure needed to support a new era of networked research.

The University of Arizona is helping unlock the mysteries of how our brains age, one powerful MRI scan at a time.

At the center of this work is the Precision Aging Network (PAN), a nationwide study led by Dr. Carol Barnes that’s examining more than 1,000 diverse participants across four U.S. cities: Atlanta, Baltimore, Miami, and Tucson.

How do you make sense of thousands of research papers at once? For researchers, the challenge of keeping up with an ever-expanding body of literature can feel overwhelming. That’s where Vis-Sieve, a new prototype tool, comes in.

There are an estimated 37 million Americans with chronic kidney disease. Over 27 thousand Americans received transplants in 2024, with many more on the donor waiting list. The average transplant cost is close to $80,000 for Medicare patients. With numbers like these, it’s critical to improve outcomes and reduce overall costs. More data analysis on resource allocation, the risks for candidates and the viability of donor organs can help.

University Libraries Dean Shan Sutton arranged a tour of the Main Library for new President Suresh Garimella on April 23. The CATalyst Studios near the front doors make an impressive visual impact, especially when the large Viz Wall in the Data Studio has a display up.

At the University of Arizona, research is at the heart of innovation. It drives solutions to complex challenges, strengthens communities, and propels the university to its status as a top-ranked institution. From space exploration to healthcare, environmental science to artificial intelligence, the university’s commitment to research fuels groundbreaking discoveries that shape the future.

Dr. Elise Lauterbur’s work as an evolutionary ecologist highlights the impact of High Performance Computing (HPC) in advancing scientific research. Starting with behavioral ecology, she used HPC to study virus resilience in bats and viral adaptations in mammals, developing tools like Bayesian models and a convolutional neural network (CNN) for genomic analysis. Now a faculty member at the University of Vermont, Elise credits HPC for enabling her to explore complex biological questions in ways that were previously impossible, driving innovations in genomics and evolutionary biology.