Peter Chien, a biochemist at UMass Amherst, recently received a five-year, $1.8 million NIH Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) award to fund research into how bacterial cells manage stress responses. Because antibiotics pose a major stress for these microbes, the work will in part address what he calls “the alarming rise in multi-drug resistant bacteria.”  

Many wearable biosensors, data transmitters and similar tech advances for personalized health monitoring have now been “creatively miniaturized,” says materials chemist Trisha Andrew at UMass Amherst, but they require a lot of energy, and power sources can be bulky and heavy. Now she and her Ph.D. student Linden Allison report that they have developed a fabric that can harvest body heat to power small wearable microelectronics such as activity trackers.