Tulane School of Science and Engineering

🔬 Incoming freshmen, join us for the SSE Open House on Thursday, Aug 13, 10am at McAlister Auditorium for our Welcome Rally, featuring:

🎓 A Speech From SSE Dean Hridesh Rajan
📚 An Overview Of Our Academic Programs
🛠️ Student Resources & Success Tips
🎤 A Student Panel

Then you will head to Lindy Boggs Center at 11am for:

🗺️ The SSE Passport Challenge: Grab a passport at the entrance and explore everything SSE has to offer! Visit stations hosted by departments, programs, and student orgs to collect stamps, learn about research, advising, clubs, and unique academic tracks, and win SSE swag and prizes!

🧊 New Orleans Sno-Balls: Chill out with a classic NOLA treat while you mingle with fellow new students, faculty, staff, and student org reps.

See you there, Green Wave! 🌊💚

Tulane University First-Year Experience, Tulane University

🐟 8 million pickled fish. Two abandoned WWII bunkers. One incredible story.

Big shoutout to Brian Sidlauskas, director of Tulane's Biodiversity Research Institute (TUBRI), for sitting down with IFLScience's We Have Questions podcast to unpack one of the wildest afterlives of a WWII storage facility.

In this episode, Brian traces how a series of Louisiana bunkers built to hold weapons in the 1940s became home to millions of preserved fish specimens, including species that are extinct, others no scientist has ever seen alive, and the only known specimen of a deep-sea shark on Earth. It's a fascinating look at how TUBRI came to be one of the world's great biodiversity collections.

🎧 Give it a listen: https://iflsciencewehavequestions.podbean.com/e/why-do-8-million-pickled-fish-sit-in-louisianas-wwii-bunkers/

Tulane researchers seek to advance cardiovascular disease prevention through artificial intelligence and community-based care Tulane University researchers are developing an initiative that uses artificial intelligence to support cardiovascular disease prevention by combining digital tools with community-based care.

🦇 Tulane research is making headlines! Earth.com recently featured a study led by Dr. Hannah Frank, associate professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at Tulane SSE, uncovering an immune system unlike any other known mammal's.

Vesper bats — the largest bat family — carry two separate sets of antibody genes, instead of the single set found in every other mammal studied. One set builds sharp, highly specific antibodies; the other builds broad, flexible ones. Together, they may help explain how bats carry some of the world's deadliest viruses without getting sick themselves.

The findings, published in Science Advances with collaborators at Stanford and the CDC, don't fully solve the mystery — but they open an entirely new direction for studying immunity in the wild.

📰 Read the full story: https://www.earth.com/news/how-can-bats-carry-deadly-viruses-without-getting-sick-scientists-find-a-new-clue/

🎉 Congratulations to Dr. Michelle Lacey on being named Chair of Tulane's Department of Mathematics! Dr. Lacey makes history as the first woman and first statistician to lead the department — and she's bringing a bold vision with her: growing the tenure-track faculty, launching new outreach efforts, and championing a collaborative, "non-hierarchical" culture where every faculty voice matters.

A Tulane faculty member since 2003, Dr. Lacey's research has spanned cancer genomics to fieldwork with the UN World Food Program at a Syrian refugee camp — proof that math and statistics can change the world far beyond the classroom. 🧮✨

Welcome to the role, Dr. Lacey!

Read her full story: https://sse.tulane.edu/welcoming-dr-michelle-lacey-chair-department-mathematics

🔬 A blood vessel network you can hold in your hand? At Tulane SSE, that's the everyday reality in Dr. Jennifer Fang's lab.

Fang just landed a $1M+ NSF CAREER Award to advance organ-on-a-chip technology — engineering artificial blood vessel networks from human cells to study healthy vs. diseased vascular growth and help close the gap between animal models and human clinical trials.

But the impact doesn't stop at the bench. The award also funds hands-on workshops bringing bioengineered tissue chips into New Orleans high school classrooms, plus training programs for the next generation of scientists.

Science, meet classroom. 🧫📚

Read more: https://sse.tulane.edu/bridging-lab-and-classroom-tulane-researcher-secures-1m-nsf-career-award-organ-chip-innovation

🔬 Big things happen when high schoolers get a taste of real research! Today, students who spent their summer working in labs across Tulane's School of Science and Engineering presented their findings — sharing what they discovered, what they learned, and what it's like to do hands-on science at the college level. Way to go, future scientists and engineers! 👏

🚀 Helping stem cells find their way home.

Inside Tulane's Regenerative Engineering and Education Laboratory (REEL), biomedical engineering PhD student Eferoghene Okakuro is developing new approaches to improve stem cell therapies for sickle cell disease, research that could one day help more life-saving cells survive, integrate, and do what they were designed to do.

After nearly seven years at Tulane, Okakuro's journey has taken her from undergraduate student to PhD researcher, mentor, and future physician. Along the way, she's remained focused on one goal: making science improve people's lives.

"What good is science if people are not using it to max out their lives?" she asks.

Read how engineering, medicine, and compassion are coming together to advance the future of regenerative medicine.

🔗 Read the full story: https://sse.tulane.edu/helping-stem-cells-find-their-way-home

That's a wrap on Summer Scholars 2026! 🎉 From building robots and analyzing DNA to studying Louisiana's fishes and cracking forensic mysteries, our pre-college scholars spent their summer thinking, testing, and creating like true Tulane engineers and scientists. Huge thanks to our SSE faculty and staff for bringing it all to life. See you next year, future Green Wave! 💚💙

⚡ Powering the future of energy, one atom at a time.

A Tulane-led team, headed by physics professor Jianwei Sun, has been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy's Genesis Mission to use AI in the search for next-generation superconductors — materials that could transform the electrical grid, medical imaging, and quantum computing. Physicists, chemists, AI researchers, and experimental scientists are teaming up to crack a problem no single discipline could solve alone. 🧪🔬

Read more: https://news.tulane.edu/pr/department-energys-genesis-mission-selects-tulane-team-using-ai-discover-next-generation