PSYCHOLOGY - Wordle, the wildly popular five-word guessing game, has been called “genius” and “the pandemic game we didn’t know we needed,” but don’t count on it to improve your brain power a UO psychology professor says.

BIOLOGY, NEUROSCIENCE - Nerves in the intestines help regulate the gut’s acidity, new research shows, and that helps keep their bacterial communities in balance.

PHYSICS - Two assistant professors of physics at the University of Oregon have landed prized National Science Foundation research grants, funding their projects for the next four years. Ben Farr and Jayson Paulose have been awarded $400,000 and $593,407, respectively, in grants from the NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development Program.

BIOLOGY, CHEMISTRY & BIOCHEMISTRY - Here at the UO, many women on campus are doing innovative research while also working to make the sciences better for everyone.

MATHEMATICS - The UO Department of Mathematics garnered a $2.3 million grant from the National Science Foundation for projects that train and mentor the next generation of mathematicians in Oregon.

BIOLOGY - Proteins on the surface of cells act as sentries — and microbes hoping to invade will evolve tricks to evade these front-line defenses. But the host cell’s proteins don’t sit back helplessly. They, too, can evolve in ways that makes it harder for microbes to get through.

BIOLOGY - Prithiviraj Fernando, MS ’93, PhD ’98 (biology), and Herve Memiaghe, a landscape architecture PhD student, use research to save elephant populations in Sri Lanka and Gabon, Africa.

BIOLOGY - Two-time winner of the prestigious Udall Scholarship and 2018 Stamps Scholar Temerity Bauer didn’t always feel at home at the University of Oregon. One of few Native students pursuing a biology degree at UO and in the Clark Honors College, she said she felt lonely during her first few weeks of her freshman year — until she attended a potluck with the Native American Student Union.

HISTORY, COMPUTER SCIENCE, RELIGIOUS STUDIES - Open Oregon Educational Resources has awarded four grants, totaling more than $101,000, to University of Oregon faculty members who proposed innovative ideas for textbook and resource solutions.

ANTHROPOLOGY, BIOLOGY, CHEMISTRY AND BIOCHEMISTRY - Four UO faculty members have been named as 2021 fellows by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, joining 564 other newly elected members whose work has distinguished them in the science community and beyond.