A $100,000 commitment from Baptist Memorial Health Care Corporation will support the role of the School of Public Health at the University of Memphis in the Comprehensive Sickle Cell Project. The project is designed to make it easier for adolescent sickle cell patients to transition from pediatric to adult health care, and to meet the issues involved with such transition, including loss of their primary pediatric medical home, incomplete community transition, and problems with health insurance coverage.

A research team made up of five University of Memphis professors will receive $1.2 million as part of a five-year, $20 million, 11-university program for research, mentoring and outreach related to solar energy technology. The award is part of the Tennessee Solar Conversion and Storage Using Outreach, Research and Education (TN-SCORE) project, which is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The professors are Yongmei Wang, Xuan Zhao, and Tomoko Fujiwara from the Department of Chemistry and Mohamed Laradji and Sanjay Mishra from the Department of Physics.

TN-SCORE draws upon the state’s growing energy industry and brings together researchers from Tennessee’s public and private universities and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to enhance energy-related research and education across the state.

The program has three major research focus areas: advanced solar conversion and innovation, components and devices for energy storage and conversion, and nanostructures for enhancing energy efficiency.