I N N O V AT I O N
BREAkThRoughs In ThE MAkIng
Nixing Nicotine
tions who may be susceptible to breast and ovarian cancers. And, last year, Bernstein was one of six early-career investigators nationwide to be named an Outstanding New Environmental Scientist by the National Institutes of Health. She is using the funded award to study whether cancer incidence for at-risk individuals may be predicted by looking at differences in exposure to certain environmental carcinogens, like radiation or chemicals found in tobacco smoke. At Pitt, Bernstein’s young lab is forging ahead. “I think that most people’s lives have been touched by cancer in some way,” she says. So, pearl by pearl, she and her team are stringing together the clues to help solve one of the greatest human-disease mysteries of all time. ■
Cutting the amount of nicotine in cigarettes may help smokers reduce the smoking habit, says a multisite study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Principal author Eric Donny, professor of psychology in Pitt’s Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, along with collaborators, showed that daily smokers randomized to a sixweek trial of reduced-nicotine cigarettes smoked less per day than participants randomized to six weeks of normal-nicotine smokes. The findings are important for the Food and Drug Administration, which now has the authority to regulate nicotine content in cigarettes.
Solar Safety
Healthy Buy
Easy-to-understand nutritional information can lead to healthier food choices, according to a recent study coauthored by J. Jeffrey Inman, Albert Wesley Frey Professor of Marketing in the Katz Graduate School of Business. The research focused on grocery stores selling products with the simplified NuVal scale—a system that scores food’s nutritional value from 1 to 100, with the most nutritious foods scoring highest—visible on its packaging. After observing more than 535,000 shoppers, Inman and coauthor Hristina Nikolova found that simpler nutritional packaging influences people to purchase the healthier options, regardless of price. Nikolova (BUS ‘14G) is an assistant professor of marketing at Boston College.
As electric utilities shift toward renewable resources, harnessing solar energy requires ensuring that the abundance of incoming power does not overwhelm the system. An assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in Pitt’s Swanson School, Tom McDermott is part of a multipronged, federally funded, threeyear effort to explore tools that simulate, measure, and monitor the impact of environmental variables on solar power—and the resulting impact on the electrical grid. Creating faster and more accurate simulations can prevent grid damage, ultimately helping solar power become safer power.
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