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Research Quick Takes

Breast Cancer Screening Team

Oct 16, 2025

Predicting Nonadherence to Breast Cancer Screening

PhD student Jiahui Luo and Professor Wesley Marrero—with quantitative biomedical sciences PhD student Guofang Ma and Miranda Scully '26—co-authored "Modeling the impact of social determinants on breast cancer screening: a data-driven approach" published in Frontiers in Medicine. "The study identified opportunities for healthcare organizations to transform sociodemographic data into targeted, facility-level intervention strategies while adapting to payer incentives and addressing screening gaps," said Marrero.

Mai Pham

Oct 09, 2025

Strategic Cyber Defense

PhD student Mai Pham and professors Vikrant Vaze and Peter Chin coauthored "Strategic Cyber Defense via Reinforcement Learning-Guided Combinatorial Auctions" which was chosen for presentation at the IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing Conference. "This work formulates the cyber defense problem, in which we act as a defense agent protecting a network from malware attackers, as a combinatorial auction," said Pham. "We combined reinforcement learning with differentiable mechanism design to find the best resource allocation for the hosts, which aims to upstream decision making and proactively protect the network."

Overview figure of fluorine-free electrolytes

Oct 09, 2025

Toward Greener Batteries

Research Associate Peiyu Wang Th'25, PhD students Huilin Qing and Ruiwen Zhang, and Professor Fiona Li coauthored "Fluorine-free electrolytes for sustainable lithium batteries: a review" published in npj Materials Sustainability. The paper highlights insights and advances in fluorine-free salts, solvents, additives, and interphases, along with challenges and opportunities, offering sustainable solutions potentially competitive with conventional fluorinated electrolytes. "Modern lithium battery electrolytes rely on fluorinated components to enhance performance and functionality, but such schemes raise safety, environmental, and cost concerns due to hydrogen fluoride generation and hazardous production," said Li.

Laasya Devi Annepureddy working in the Goods Lab

Oct 02, 2025

Biology of Human Milk

Goods Lab PhD student Laasya Devi Annepureddy is co-lead author of "Integrated ‘omics analysis reveals human milk oligosaccharide biosynthesis programs in human lactocytes" published in iScience. The study reveals pathways for how breastmilk cells produce sugars that are critical to infant health and development, and paves the way for being able to add them to formula or as a supplement to certain foods. "Being part of this project has been incredibly rewarding," said Annepureddy. "Our findings bring us one step closer to understanding the remarkable biology of human milk, and I’m grateful to the outstanding team whose collaboration made this work possible."

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