The Science & Technology desk gathers a weekly digest of impactful and interesting research publications and developments at Stanford. Read the latest in this week’s Research Roundup.

Stanford’s Robert E. Hall wins Nobel Memorial Prize for work on microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilization

Robert E. Hall, Stanford economics professor and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences on Oct. 12.

Hall was recognized for his contributions in revitalizing stabilisation policy using microeconomic-backed models to inform macroeconomic variables, such as inflation, production and consumption. The framework helps governments and central banks navigate economic volatility, according to the Stanford Report.

“Hall is one of the most distinguished economists of his generation, whose work has profoundly shaped our understanding of economic growth, employment, and the forces that drive the American economy,” Hoover Institution Director Condoleezza Rice told the Stanford Report.

Hall has advised a myriad of government agencies on national economic policy, including the Justice Department, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve Board. He served on President-elect Ronald Reagan’s Task Force on Inflation Policy and was a member of the National Presidential Advisory Committee on Productivity. Hall was nationally respected through his efforts in co-designing the “flat-tax” concept, which resonated with the Reagan administration’s goal of restructuring tax policy. 

Hall’s mentorship spans beyond Stanford: he began his teaching career as an assistant professor at University of California, Berkeley, before moving to Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970. He became an economics professor and Hoover Institution fellow at Stanford in 1978. “Stanford’s Economics Department and the Hoover Institution gave me a dream job: the freedom and time to do the research I wanted to do,” Hall told the Stanford Report. He now serves as a professor emeritus.

New insights of genetic networks demystify immune system puzzles

The scientist team, led by Gladstone’s Alex Marson, M.D., Ph.D., and Stanford Medicine’s Jonathan Pritchard, Ph.D. ’98, unveiled a massive dataset illuminating how gene regulatory networks, rather than individual genes, contribute to disease and bodily traits. The findings could help address a major obstacle in drug development: researchers often struggle to identify which components of these complex networks to target in developing new treatments.

The dataset, described in an article, is gene activity in T cells—crucial components of the immune system. They used a technique known as perturb-seq to decrease the activity of 12,748 genes in 22 million human T cells from four different donors. Perturb-seq combines the gene-editing tool CRISPR with single-cell RNA sequencing to dial each gene’s expression down individually, allowing researchers to effectively study gene function.

With the newfound perturb-seq dataset, scientists can use the tool to match the gene activity patterns in a given disease. Matches could inform discoveries toward targeted therapies.

“It’s the first time anybody’s done this type of experiment at genome scale and in a primary cell type,” Pritchard told Stanford Medicine. “It’s a milestone in terms of the technology development.”

The team is working on a dataset in which they increase the activity of the same genes of the perturb-seq cohort.

Stanford faculty named American Physical Society Fellows

Wendy Mao, Xiao-Liang Qi and Alberto Salleo were recognized for their contributions in compressed-matter physics, quantum many-body systems and organic and polymer electronic materials.

The American Physical Society Fellowship aims to honor scientists who have made extraordinary efforts to expand our understanding of advanced physics through original research or increase applications of physics to science and technology. 

Wendy Mao is a professor of Earth and planetary sciences in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and of photon science at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). Her work spans understanding Earth and planetary interiors and developing novel energy-related materials. She highlighted “pioneering experiments in compressed-matter research that have advanced our understanding of high-pressure mineral physics, planetary interiors and functional materials, while expanding the frontiers of Earth and planetary sciences and fundamental physics,” according to the Stanford Report.

Xiao-Liang Qi is a professor of physics in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and was nominated in the division of condensed matter physics for his “contributions to the theoretical understanding of topological states of matter and emergent phenomena in quantum many-body systems,” the American Physical Society Topical Group on Compression of Condensed Matter told the Stanford Report.

“My current research interest is the interplay of quantum entanglement, quantum gravity and quantum chaos,” Qi wrote in his biography. His goal is to utilize tools such as tensor networks to provide new microscopic understandings to the emergent space-time geometry from quantum states and dynamics.

Alberto Salleo is the Hong Seh and Vivian W. M. Lim Professor and professor of materials science and engineering in the School of Engineering and a professor of photon science at SLAC. Salleo’s area of expertise pertains to polymeric materials for electronics, bioelectronics and biosensors, including electrochemical devices for neuromorphic computing. He was nominated for the “physics of organic and polymer electronic materials through fundamental studies linking molecular structure, charge transport and device performance,” according to the Stanford Report.