Throughout this year’s Big 12 football season, we’ve been bringing you information on some of the great research going on at our counterpart schools in the conference.  To help you get ready for this week’s game against the Cowboys of Oklahoma State University, we present a Q&A with Jeff Joiner, research communications specialist in OSU’s Office of the Vice President for Research.

What are a few of the most exciting research projects that OSU faculty are working on?

OSU researchers are working on an amazing variety of projects from using diamond nanoparticles as drug delivery agents to developing a material to protect astronauts from radiation in deep space to the design of smart garments to monitor cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. As the first university in the nation to launch a graduate degree program in the design and testing of unmanned aerial devices, commonly known as drones, OSU faculty and students are working on several novel uses for UAVs. Projects include using UAVs to collect data while flying around tornados and using drones in natural disasters to look for the injured and direct emergency responders into hard-hit areas.

What’s an area of research strength at Oklahoma State that people outside the OSU community might not know about?

OSU’s Center for Health Sciences in Tulsa is home to a nationally recognized group of paleontologists who, as well as teach anatomy at the CHS medical school, conduct vertebrate paleontology research field work throughout the U.S. and includes a scientist considered one of the nation’s top experts in the evolutionary development of mammals. Also, OSU has recently launched a multidisciplinary research center in respiratory and infectious diseases funded by a $11.3 million National Institutes of Health grant.

What are some interesting OSU research projects involving undergraduate students?

The university’s geology department just announced a major grant from the National Science Foundation that will fund sending a team of undergraduates and faculty to Malawi to study continental rift in the east African rift zone.

At your home football games, what’s the deal with the students in the front row banging those wooden paddles against the bleachers?

The OSU “paddle people” are students that are part of a military psychological warfare experiment – just kidding. Actually, the students are part of a long tradition at OSU football games of driving visiting teams crazy with all that noise. It also drives Big 12 officials crazy sometimes.

Thanks to Jeff Joiner and the Oklahoma State University Office of the Vice President for Research for participating in our “Get to know Big 12 Research” series.  Visit their website at http://www.vpr.okstate.edu/.