Provosts & Presidents Picks
These are notable discoveries selected by presidents and provosts of leading universities in the United States.
Click on a school below to see a list of some of their notable discoveries.
| Arizona | Pima S-1Cotton was developed by Walker Bryan and standardized by Robert Peebles and has become the highest quality cotton. more... |
| Baylor Medical College | First successful gene therapy for diabetes in mice. Using a factor called NeuroD that was specific to cells that produce insulin and other hormones, Chan and his colleagues were successful in curing diabetes with gene therapy– at least in mice. more... |
| Berkeley | UC Berkeley physicist Luis W. Alvarez designed and engineered the first liquid hydrogen bubble chamber, a detector that allowed scientists to see and photograph the interaction of particles produced by cyclotrons and other particle accelerators. more... |
| Boston | In 1989, Professor Michael Mendillo and associates discovered the largest permanently visible object in the Solar System - the great sodium nebula at Jupiter (50 million miles in diameter). more... |
| Caltech | Theodore Von Karmen established the principles of flight and helped the aerospace industry develop in Southern California more... |
| Carnegie Mellon | first distributed computing environment with what we now call email more... |
| Columbia | fm radio & radar more... |
| Cornell | Development of the Heimlich maneuver, by Henry Heimlich (1960s) more... |
| Duke | developed a cure for Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome. This is a conduction abnormality with an aberrant conduction pathway. They figured out how to cut the pathway and cure the disease. more... |
| Emory | Raymond F. Schinazi, PhD, and Dennis C. Liotta, PhD, are co-inventors of some of the world’s most widely used anti-HIV pharmaceuticals, including lamivudine, based on the compound 3TC and marketed as Epivir®, and emtricitabine, based on the compound FTC and marketed as Emtriva®. more... |
| Georgia Tech | Micro-Flyers and Space Exploration more... |
| Harvard | Developed the first transgenic mouse, now in use worldwide for cancer research. Experiments with the mouse at Harvard led to a method of preventing a cancer of blood cells common in young children in Africa. more... |
| Johns Hopkins | Dan Nathans invents gene splicing using restriction enzymes more... |
| MIT | |
| Michigan | With John Kormendy, professor of astronomy at the University of Hawaii, Douglas O. Richstone discovered a supermassive black hole that appears to contain the mass of a billion suns in a galaxy 30 million light-years from Earth. more... |
| Northwestern | Computation of Molecular Properties, Gaussian program more... |
| Ohio State | Discovery and Impact of the Release of Genetically Engineered Organisms (GEOs) into the Environment more... |
| Penn State | Designed and first operated in 1902 by pioneer animal nutritionist Henry Armsby, the calorimeter monitored an animal’s metabolism to determine the net energy value of food, the portion of food energy that an animal uses to produce milk or meat. more... |
| Princeton | The Hubble Space Telescope, which has been traced back directly to an article written by Lyman Spitzer in 1946. Spitzer advocated and developed the idea over the next several decades. more... |
| Purdue | Professor Michael Rossmann heads a team of biologists who are unraveling the secrets of viruses. Rossmann was the first person to solve the structure of a common cold virus, and subsequently has made other breakthroughs. more... |
| Rice | Buckminsterfullerene, Rick Smalley, Bob Curl; Won the Nobel Prize for their discovery of fullerenes (along with Sir Harold W. Kroto, Univerisity of Sussex) more... |
| Rockefeller | In the 60s developed an automated process for synthesizing peptides, which revolutionized protein chemistry, and has been used to make vaccines, hormones, pharmaceuticals, etc. His machine is now standard equipment for research. more... |
| Stanford | Arthur Kornberg was the first to synthesize DNA-like material in a test tube. He won the Nobel Prize in 1959 for his work, which is seminal to understanding the relationship of DNA to diseases. more... |
| Texas A&M | Corrected sun path diagrams: Discovered that the Olgyay sun path diagrams used by architects throughout the United States in the design of energy efficient structures were incorrect. more... |
| UC Davis | Positron Emission Tomography (PET Scanning) - Michael Phelps more... |
| UCLA | In 1949 Dr. Benedict Cassen of the UCLA Department of Radiology developed the rectilinear scintillation scanner, an instrument that made possible the construction of a chart to accurately pinpoint the location and concentration of radioisotopes in the body. more... |
| UC San Diego | The field of bioengineering was pioneered at UCSD. more... |
| UC San Francisco | In 1974, UCSF scientists co-discovered recombinant DNA techniques, the fundamental first step in the creation of the biotechnology industry. more... |
| U Chicago | Carbon-14 dating, tool for understanding distant past more... |
| U Colorado | Discovery that the genetic messenger ribonucleic acid (RNA) can act like an enzyme and trigger catalytic reactions; with applications for novel therapeutics. more... |
| U Illinois-Urbana | John Bardeen et al. formulated a theoretical explanation of superconductivity, earning the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics. This was Bardeen’s second shared Nobel Prize; his first was for the 1947 discovery of the transistor effect. more... |
| U Maryland | Leadership in the development of the ideas of chaos theory and the use of the properties of chaos to predict and control the behavior of complex nonlinear systems by Ed Ott and Jim Yorke in 1990. more... |
| U North Carolina | Michael Knowles, John Gatzy, and Richard Boucher’s discovery that epethelial ion transport is a cause of cystic fibrosis (1981) more... |
| U Penn | The first multipurpose, digital computer, ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), was built at the Moore School of Engineering in 1945. more... |
| U Pittsburgh | Launching of first heavier-than-air flying craft to achieve free flight more... |
| U Southern California | Professor Theodore Berger is developer of the world’s first brain prosthesis, an implantable hippocampus that may help patients regain the ability to store new memories. more... |
| U Texas-Austin | In 1927, H. J. Muller found that X-rays could induce genetic mutations in fruit flies (and, of course, in other living things). more... |
| U Virginia | Dr. Robert Berne developed a drug to treat cardiac arrhythmia, using the naturally occurring chemical adenosine as his model. Today, his patented Adenocard is a staple in ambulances and paramedic kits more... |
| U Washington | devised the idea of using pulsed Doppler ultrasound in the early days of cardiovascular research. His creation turned ultrasound into the most vital, cost-effective diagnostic tool in the world today. more... |
| U Wisconsin | In late 1998, a UW-Madison group led by James Thomson was the first to isolate and culture human embryonic stem cells, master undifferentiated cells that arise at the earliest stages of development and are capable of becoming any of the 220 types of cells and tissues in the human body. more... |
| Vanderbilt | Fetal Surgery: developed a dramatic new technique to operate on a stricken child while still in its mother’s womb. more... |
| Yale | Josh Lederberg and Edward Tatum discovered bacterial recombination, which was then harnessed as a technique to explore biochemical genetics. more... |
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