UAB Briefs: Building a better football helmet, student seeks Gates honor

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Welcome to another installment of UAB Briefs, in which we keep track of interesting people and events on campus.

Know people, places and programs on the UAB campus that deserve a mention? Email Iron City Ink at sydney@starnespublishing.com or jchambers@starnespublishing.com.

Watch your head

The long-term negative health effects of concussions on football players have become a big issue the last few years.

As a way to help address the issue, UAB researchers are now working with VICIS, a Seattle company, to bring safer, more effective football helmets to the market, according to an announcement by the partners at a press conference on campus on Jan. 24. Among the attendees was former NFL great Tony Dorsett.

VICIS was founded to develop new helmets that allow for a significant reduction in impact forces on the human brain. The company’s first model is the ZERO1.

And UAB researchers and physicians are already conducting extensive research to help address concussions and traumatic brain injury among athletes.

These include efforts by the Sports Medicine Concussion Clinic at Children's of Alabama, the Vestibular and Oculomotor Research Laboratory and the School of Engineering.

“VICIS’ mission and progress to this point were a perfect match for what UAB brings to the table,” said Kathy Nugent, executive director for UAB’s Bill L. Harbert Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

Some of the research at UAB has been led by Dean Sicking in the School of Engineering, who is known for his design of interstate guardrails and the Safer Barrier used in NASCAR.

He and his lab assistants have used special software to analyze thousands of helmet-to-helmet impacts in football.

“Football helmets have been designed to prevent skull fracture, and they do a very good job at that,” Sicking said in a UAB news release. “But helmets have not evolved to address concussions.

Engineers at the UAB Materials Processing and Applications Development Center have been developing new helmet materials using Sicking’s design.

The new partnership will allow UAB and VICIS to combine technologies.

The announcement has attracted a fair amount of media attention this week.

Dave Marver, CEO of VICIS, told Jon Solomon of cbssport.com that most of college football's top 25 teams will evaluate the Zero1 helmet during spring practice, and more than 10 NFL teams are trying the helmet in offseason training sessions.

UAB declined to provide financial terms of the partnership, but the parties will share expertise and intellectual property, according to Solomon.

“It's a damn good padded helmet,” Dorsett said, according to AL.com. “It looks like it's got all the protection you need."

UAB released photos of a Zero1 with a Blazers logo but said that this was strictly for marketing purposes and that it is not yet an official UAB helmet.

Student seeks big scholarship

Hriday Bhambhvani, a UAB mathematics and neuroscience major, is a finalist for the Gates Cambridge Scholarship, one of the most selective postgraduate scholarships in the world.

Bhambhvani, a UAB Honors College student from Birmingham, will interview for the scholarship in Washington, D.C., Jan. 27-28, according to a UAB news release.

If selected, Bhambhvani would receive funding to pursue a Master of Philosophy degree in biological science at the University of Cambridge.

Bhambhvani was previously selected for the NIH Summer Internship Program and the Amgen Scholars Program, and was named Honorable Mention for the Goldwater Scholarship.

Fighting cancer

UAB has received a five-year, $16.6 million renewal grant from the National Cancer Institute for the partnership between the Comprehensive Cancer Center, Morehouse School of Medicine and Tuskegee University to address cancer disparities among African-Americans, according to a UAB news release.

“Culture, environment, health care access, socioeconomics and population-specific genetic differences contribute to high cancer incidences and to cancer health disparities,” said Upender Manne, lead principal investigator and professor in the UAB Department of Pathology, in the news release. “Our efforts are focused on answers to these problems.”

Dr. Edward Partridge, director of the Comprehensive Cancer Center and co-principal investigator, said that, “Cancer rates are 10 percent higher among African-Americans than Caucasians, and death rates are double those of Caucasians.”

Partnership activities include bench- and community-level cancer research with a goal of understanding the causes for cancer disparities, as well as education and training programs.

The community outreach activities of the Partnership promote cancer awareness and healthy lifestyles among underserved populations and encourage minority participation in therapeutic clinical trials.