Congratulations to Dr. Christos Grecos, professor of computer science and department chair, upon his selection as one of 83 new Fellows of SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. Fellows from education and industry are selected based on their significant science and technical contributions to the multidisciplinary fields of optics, photonics and imaging. Grecos’ research areas include image/video processing, analysis, compression, transmission and coding standards, computer vision and remote sensing.

Dr. Fabricio Medina-Bolivar, professor of plant metabolic engineering, has obtained a U.S. patent on “Stilbenoid Prenyltransferases from Plants.” This is the sixth patent Medina-Bolivar has secured for his research on health-related compounds from plants. The invention describes a procedure to produce prenylated stilbenoids using genetic engineering strategies. These compounds have applications as anticancer, antioxidant and anti-inflammatory agents. Co-inventors are former Ph.D. student Tianhong Yang and Dr. Keithanne Mockaitis of Indiana.

Dr. Carlitta Moore, assistant professor of athletic training, will be a co-presenter at the 74th National Athletic Trainers’ Association Clinical Symposia and Expo in Indianapolis. She also is clinical education coordinator and assistant dean for diversity, equity and inclusion, Nursing and Health Professions. The topic for her and her colleague from Wisconsin-Madison will be “Ensuring a Diverse and Inclusive Leadership Through Purposeful Data-Driven Practice.”

Research by Dr. Than J. Boves, associate professor of avian ecology, and Alex Worm, a Ph.D. student, has been published in Ornithology. While studying black-throated green warblers, they collected blood from populations of the bird in multiple states to sequence their DNA; they found the south Atlantic coastal population is genetically unique. The Center for Biological Diversity will petition for this subspecies to be listed under the Endangered Species Act.

Dr. Richard Segall, professor of information systems and business analytics, is lead author of the article “Survey of Recent Applications of Artificial Intelligence for Detection and Analysis of COVID-19 and Other Infectious Diseases” in the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. This work was funded by Arkansas Biosciences Institute (ABI) Summer Internship Program and involved undergraduate co-author Vidhya Sankarasubbu of India.