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Two engineering professors named Senior Members of National Academy of Inventors

2025-03-05T15:47:00-05:00

Tengfei Luo and Matthew J. Webber have been named Senior Members by the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), making them the first Notre Dame faculty members to receive this honor.

According to the NAI, Senior Members are “active faculty, scientists, and administrators with success in patents, licensing, and commercialization and have produced technologies that have brought or aspire to bring, real impact on the welfare of society.”

Tengfei Luo, the Dorini Energy Professor in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering and director of Notre Dame’s MÖNSTER Lab (MOlecular/Nano-Scale Transport & Energy Research Laboratory), has established himself as a leader in the field of thermal sciences and materials engineering.

Luo’s research has led to inventions, ranging from energy-saving coatings for windows, to technologies that detect cancer and nanoplastics, to a new desalination method that uses ionic liquids and low-temperature heat.

Matthew Webber, the Keating-Crawford Collegiate Professor of Engineering and associate professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering as well as the acting director of the Berthiaume Institute for Precision Health, has pioneered advancements in the application of supramolecular chemistry for use in biomaterials and drug delivery technologies.

His patented inventions, many of which were developed in the Webber Lab, offer better ways to deliver therapeutics, including new targeting strategies for cancer and related diseases as well as new glucose-responsive delivery mechanisms for treating diabetes.

Both awardees have made significant contributions to commercialization and have licensed their inventions to start-up companies, which have secured more than three million in funding.

The 2025 class of Senior Members will be celebrated during an induction ceremony at NAI’s 14th Annual Conference, taking place June 23-26 in Atlanta, Georgia.

A full list of NAI Senior members is available on the Academy’s website.

Engineer Ashley Thrall named fellow of the National Academy of Inventors

2024-12-11T15:00:00-05:00

The National Academy of Inventors has named Ashley Thrall, the Myron and Rosemary Noble Collegiate Professor of Structural Engineering in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences at the University of Notre Dame, to its 2024 class of fellows.

Election as an academy fellow is the highest professional distinction awarded solely to inventors.

Thrall designs modular structures — such as bridges, shelters and buildings — that can be rapidly erected, relocated and deployed. She has pioneered a comprehensive approach to kinetic (movable) structures, guiding design concepts from initial development through rigorous experimentation. Her work incorporates techniques such as origami, 3D printing and cold bending, applied to concrete, advanced composites and steel.

Thrall’s research, which integrates numerical and experimental methods, has resulted in six issued utility patents. These innovations include deployable, origami-inspired shelters for soldiers as well as modular steel bridge technologies that can be rapidly assembled for disaster relief or to meet immediate infrastructure needs.

Her research has resulted in 48 peer-reviewed journal publications. She has received both national and international recognition through prestigious awards such as the Hangai Prize from the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures, the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award and the American Institute of Steel Construction Early Career Faculty Award. She is also an inaugural AISC Innovation Scholar.

Thrall founded the Kinetic Structures Laboratory, which is dedicated to investigating the behavior, design and optimization of kinetic civil infrastructure. She also established and chaired the Modular, Rapidly Erectable, and Deployable Structures Committee of the American Society of Civil Engineers Structural Engineering Institute.

She received a doctorate in civil and environmental engineering from Princeton University and joined the Notre Dame faculty in 2011.

Other recent NAI fellows at Notre Dame include Ed Maginn (2023), Nosang Myung (2022), Gary Bernstein and Hsueh-Chia Chang (2020) and Bert Hochwald (2019).

Originally published by Karla Cruise at engineering.nd.edu.

Piezo proteins, sculptors in organ growth

2024-09-03T11:45:00-04:00

Butterfly wings, fish fins and human limbs develop precisely and symmetrically. While genetics and chemical environment significantly influence their development, recent research has revealed that mechanical forces play a pivotal role as well.

Piezo proteins have the unique ability to convert mechanical forces — such as the pressure and stretch of developing cells — into chemical signals. While these proteins have been previously shown to regulate blood pressure and sense pain, chemical and biomolecular engineers at the University of Notre Dame have demonstrated their crucial role in organ growth, regulating organ size and the arrangement of cells in organ tissue.

Their results were published in Cell Reports.

“Piezo acts like the thermostat in your house. It’s constantly measuring and adjusting the conditions of the cells,” said Jeremiah Zartman, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Notre Dame.

Fruit flies, with their fully sequenced genome, provided Zartman’s lab with a well-studied model for organ development that has many commonalities with organ growth in humans.

While it was known that Piezo proteins play a multifaceted role in cell growth and differentiation, the researchers were after a holistic picture of how this protein functioned on the larger scale of organ development.

On a cellular level, Piezo proteins join to create a gated channel into the cell membrane. Under mechanical tension, the channel’s gate opens, allowing calcium ions to flow in. The concentration of these ions cues the cell’s next step — proliferate, push other cells out or undergo programmed cell death.

The team reverse engineered this signaling process, altering the levels of Piezo with drugs or genetic manipulations to better understand how these channels function. The resulting wing asymmetries, aberrant cell death and changes in cellular proliferation highlighted the protein’s fundamental importance in organ development, even to nonadjacent tissues.

“It was a major surprise to us to find a protein, one that exists predominantly in the cell membrane, that could specifically control robustness or precision,” said Zartman. “Piezo regulates how cells interact with each other, reach a certain size, and stop growing. And it does this to ensure significant precision. There’s very little difference between one side of an organ and the other.”

Moving forward, Zartman said that his multi-institutional team will use mice and fish to explore how Piezo signals healthy cell development versus cancerous growth.

The team’s ongoing work is funded by the National Science Foundation’s Emergent Mechanisms in Biology of Robustness, Integration & Organization (EMBRIO) Institute and was supported by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of General Medical Science (NIGMS) with early support from the NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology Pilot program.

Contact: Brandi Wampler, associate director of media relations, 574-631-2632, brandiwampler@nd.edu

Machine learning discovers ‘hidden-gem’ materials for heat-free gas separation

2024-08-02T08:00:00-04:00

Chemical separation, including gas separation, is a common process that is required for manufacturing and research. It accounts for a whopping 15 percent of U.S. energy consumption and produces millions of tons of carbon emissions.

Separating gases by passing them through membranes could be an efficient, environmentally friendly alternative to current methods — if only the right materials could be found to make them.

Applying a graph-based machine learning approach, a team of chemical and mechanical engineers and computer scientists at the University of Notre Dame have discovered, synthesized and tested polymer membranes that can separate gases up to 6.7 times more effectively than previously synthesized membranes. Their results have been published in Cell Reports Physical Science.

“What determines the membrane’s performance is the material’s microscopic porosity,” said Agboola Suleiman, doctoral student in the lab of Ruilan Guo, the Frank M. Freimann Collegiate Professor of Engineering.

“The ideal membrane material strikes a balance between selectivity and permeability — permeable enough to let gases in, but selective enough to keep some out,” said Suleiman, who is co-author on the paper.

To identify this Goldilocks material, the team used graph neural networks (GNN), a type of machine learning particularly well-suited to representing a material’s molecular structure as well as its relationship with other molecules. After being trained on datasets, GNN identified two polymers that had the right properties to outperform previously synthesized membranes.

“Our machine learning algorithms led us to materials that had previously only been used for electronics applications,” said Tengfei Luo, the Dorini Family Professor for Energy 91��Ƶ, associate chair of the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering and co-author on the paper. “Then we synthesized and tested these materials in the lab, verifying their high performance in separating gases. It was like finding hidden gems.”

Synthesizing polymers can be costly and time-consuming, so the data available about their molecular structure and chemical properties are scarce and incomplete.

However, algorithmic innovations devised by co-authors and computer scientists Meng Jiang and his doctoral student Gang Liu solved this problem.

“By using machine learning techniques, we were able to augment and improve our data,” said Jiaxin Xu, doctoral student in Luo’s lab and co-author on the paper. “The graph-based model, enriched with information about each material’s molecular properties, allowed us not only to predict the best membrane materials but also to explain why they’re the best.”

The team’s top-performing polymers may be used to create membranes capable of separating several gas pairs, which are critical for industrial applications.

Implantable LED device uses light to treat deep-seated cancers

2024-07-09T08:45:00-04:00

Certain types of light have proven to be an effective, minimally invasive treatment for cancers located on or near the skin when combined with a light-activated drug. But deep-seated cancers, surrounded by tissue, blood and bone, have been beyond the reach of light’s therapeutic effects.

To bring light’s benefits to these harder-to-access cancers, engineers and scientists at the University of Notre Dame have devised a wireless LED device that can be implanted. This device, when combined with a light-sensitive dye, not only destroys cancer cells, but also mobilizes the immune system’s cancer-targeting response. The research was published in Photodiagnosis and Photodynamic Therapy.

“Certain colors of light penetrate tissue deeper than other ones,” said Thomas O’Sullivan, associate professor of electrical engineering and co-author on the paper. “It turns out that the kind of light — in this case green — that doesn’t penetrate as deeply has the capability of producing a more robust response against the cancer cells.”

Before the light can be effective in destroying cancer cells, a dye with light-absorbing molecules must be administered to the cells. The device turns on, the dye transfers the light into energy and that energy makes the cells’ own oxygen toxic — in effect, turning the cancer cells against themselves.

While other treatments also weaponize the cells’ own oxygen, this device causes a particularly serendipitous form of cell death.

“Working together, biochemistry graduate student Hailey Sanders and electrical engineering graduate student SungHoon Rho perceptively noted that the treated cells were swelling, which is the hallmark of a kind of cell death, pyroptosis, that’s particularly good at triggering the immune response,” said Bradley Smith, the Emil T. Hofman Professor of Science and co-author on the paper.

“Our goal is to induce just a little bit of pyroptotic cell death, which will then trigger the immune system to start attacking the cancer.”

In future studies, the device will be used in mice to see whether the cancer-killing response initiated in one tumor will prompt the immune system to identify and attack another cancerous tumor on its own.

O’Sullivan noted that the device, which is the size of a grain of rice, can be injected directly into a cancerous tumor and activated remotely by an external antenna. The goal is to use the device not only to deliver treatment but also to monitor the tumor’s response, adjusting signal strength and timing as needed.

This research was one of four projects funded by the first Seed Transformative Interdisciplinary Research (STIR) grants. Initiated in 2023 by the Notre Dame College of Science and College of Engineering, these grants are designed to jump-start science and engineering research projects in human health, the environment and information technologies.

New ink-based method offers best recipe yet for thermoelectric devices

2024-06-14T16:19:00-04:00

Power plants, factories, car engines — everything that consumes energy produces heat, much of which is wasted. Thermoelectric devices could capture this wasted heat and convert it into electricity, but their production has been prohibitively costly and complex.

Y anliang Zhang, the Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Collegiate Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, and colleagues from a multi-institutional team have devised an ink-based manufacturing method making feasible the large-scale and cost-effective manufacturing of highly efficient thermoelectric devices. Their finding were recently published in Energy & Environmental Science.

“Using our novel ink recipe and processing technique, we’ve been able to produce a material that’s more efficient in converting waste heat into power than any previous ink-produced device,” Zhang said. “With this method, we can make devices in a broad range of sizes — a film a few microns thick or a device big enough to collect waste heat from a power plant.”

To convert heat into electric power, thermoelectric devices require a hot side and a cold side. Electric current should flow easily through the material, but heat should not, since that would eliminate the temperature gradient needed for the device to function efficiently.

Materials with these unique properties were previously produced, Zhang said, by labor- and energy-intensive processes that lacked uniformity and scalability.

Schematic representation of (a) the thermoelectric ink formulation, (b) blade coating for fabricating thermoelectric films, (c) the addition of tellurium, and (d) comparison of efficiency at room-temperature between the team’s sample and other thermoelectric materials made using different ink-based processes.

The team’s ink “recipe” mixes thermoelectric particles with a solvent plus tellurium, an additive that reduces defects in the material and helps compact and solidify the resulting composite. The team’s ink-based production technique also gave them more control over the material’s microstructure and final 3D geometry compared with previous methods.

Thermoelectric devices can also be used for emission- and refrigerant-free cooling, if electric power is provided.

“We believe our findings hold great promise for waste heat recovery, energy efficiency improvements, CO₂ emission reduction, and environmentally friendly solid-state cooling and refrigeration,” Zhang said.

Zhang is principal investigator of the Advanced Materials and Manufacturing for Energy and Health Lab at Notre Dame. Tengfei Luo and Alexander Dowling at the University of Notre Dame, Mercouri Kanatzidis and G. Jeffrey Snyder at Northwestern University, and Minxiang Zeng at Texas Tech University contributed to this research, which was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Into high waves and turbulence: Engineers deploy smart devices to improve hurricane forecasts

2024-06-13T10:00:00-04:00

Forecasters’ ability to predict a hurricane’s intensity has lagged behind tracking its path because the forces driving the storm have been difficult and dangerous to measure — until now.

“When we’re talking 150-, 200-mph winds, with 30-foot waves, you don’t send a boat and crew out there to collect data,” said David Richter, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and earth sciences and faculty affiliate of the Environmental Change Initiative at the University of Notre Dame.

“We can now send drones and other ‘smart’ oceanographic instruments into hurricanes to take measurements in conditions previously considered too extreme to deploy anything.”

Richter is the lead investigator on a $9 million Office of Naval Research Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative grant that brings together experts in atmospheric science, oceanography and physics-informed modeling to improve hurricane intensity forecasts.

A schematic showing how the project will place data-collecting instruments within a hurricane

Data from a storm’s center will provide crucial insights into the transfer of energy within the hurricane, particularly at the volatile boundary between atmosphere and ocean.

Collaborators on the project include the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron of the United States Air Force Reserve and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory. Their planes, known as “hurricane hunters,” will carry and release some of the team’s autonomous, data-collecting instruments during routine storm missions.

A tube-like device with sensors, a dropsonde, will record a snapshot of wind speed, air pressure, temperature and humidity on its way from the aircraft to the ocean’s surface. Other air-dropped instruments (profiling floats) will measure water temperature, surface wind and wave height — a key factor in determining surface roughness.

Saildrones, piloted remotely by NOAA researchers, will navigate into the storm’s center to record such metrics as wind speed, air temperature and humidity, atmospheric pressure, currents and waves. Uncrewed aircraft will measure the storm’s low-altitude turbulence.

Air-Launched Autonomous Micro-Observer (ALAMO) profiling floats will be used in Richter’s project to collect and transmit data.

Saildrone (photo courtesy of Saildrone Inc.)

The collected data will help researchers verify the physical processes dominant in such extreme conditions and develop novel simulation strategies for improving forecasts.

“The goal is always to get better at predicting when and where hurricanes are going to strike and how destructive they’ll be when they land,” Richter said. “The more lead time you have to warn or evacuate people, the better.”

Richter’s research team for this project, titled SASCWATCH: Study on Air-Sea Coupling with Waves, Turbulence, and Clouds at High Winds, includes researchers from Colorado State, Colorado 91��Ƶ of Mines, University of Washington, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Texas A&M University, Mississippi State University and University of Miami.

Originally published by Karla Cruise at research.nd.edu on June 5.

Fruit fly model identifies key regulators behind organ development

2024-05-06T15:00:00-04:00

A new computational model simulating fruit fly wing development has enabled researchers to identify previously hidden mechanisms behind organ generation.

Because organs develop in remarkably similar ways in fruit flies and people, biological insights from this model can be used to inform the diagnosis and treatment of human diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer’s and congenital genetic birth defects.

Jeremiah Zartman, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Notre Dame, worked with a multidisciplinary research team that included collaborators from the University of California, Riverside to develop a fruit fly model to reverse engineer the mechanisms that generate organ tissue.

The team’s findings, which offer a deeper understanding of the chemical and mechanical levers regulating organ cell size and shape, have been published in Nature Communications.

“We’re trying to simulate an organ in the computer — effectively creating a digital twin of that organ,” Zartman said. “We’re taking the different cells and parts of cells to see if we can predict how they will interact with each other.”

Organs develop in response to what Zartman calls a “symphony” of signals. The researchers’ fruit fly model integrates the numerous signals that orchestrate cell movement, contraction, adhesion and proliferation. It also incorporates the mechanical, chemical and structural properties of cell components and accounts for how these properties change over time and in different locations.

Both the model and his lab’s experimental results showed that there were two distinct classes of chemical signaling pathways, or sequences of signals, that produce either curved or flat tissues — identifying the flexibility and tunability of generating an organ of a specified shape.

Cells receiving signals from insulin led to an increase in the curvature of the tissue, while cells receiving inputs from two other key growth regulators flattened tissue. The researchers discovered that these growth regulators also manipulated the cell’s internal framework, or cytoskeleton, to further sculpt cell size and shape.

The Zartman group’s big-picture goal is to identify the extent to which the biological rules gleaned from simulated fly organ studies are shared with systems as distinct as plants, fish and humans.

“Our goal for the future is to develop a digital prototype organ that tackles a fundamental question in biology — how do cells generate functional organs?” Zartman said.

The team’s ongoing work is funded by National Science Foundation’s Emergent Mechanisms in Biology of Robustness, Integration & Organization (EMBRIO) Institute as well as the Models for Uncovering Rules and Unexpected Phenomena in Biological Systems (MODULUS) program.

Contact: Jessica Sieff, associate director of media relations, 574-631-3933, jsieff@nd.edu

Sea-going expedition unearths clues to ancient climate

2024-04-25T11:29:00-04:00

The JOIDES Resolution.

Millions of years ago, cataclysmic tectonic events closed the passageway between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, triggering profound changes in ocean circulation, temperature and salinity.

The JOIDES Resolution, a 470-foot research vessel capable of drilling cores three miles below the seabed, recently sailed with an international team of 117 scientists, engineers and crew members to understand and quantify the oceanographic and climatic consequences of this large-scale geologic change.

Berke with core samples while aboard the JOIDES Resolution research vessel. (Photo courtesy of Erika Tanaka)

“Each core is basically a book of time, buried deep beneath the ocean,” said Melissa Berke, a geochemist and associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and earth sciences at the University of Notre Dame, who was selected to sail as a part of the expedition.

“If we ‘read’ them properly, they can tell us how the atmosphere, carbon storage and the circulation of ocean waters has changed over time.”

Berke’s research involves extracting ancient leaf wax, a natural coating protecting the leaf from drying out, from marine sediment cores. Wind and water transported these waxes to the ocean where they can be preserved for millions of years. Carbon isotopes of the wax show fluctuations in vegetation type, while hydrogen isotopes indicate rainfall variations.

“To get the big picture of what was going on during this time period, people on board jigsawed their interests and data,” Berke said.

“We have sampling ‘parties’ — actually a lot of work. We take thousands of samples from the cores to look for pollen, microfossils, trace metals and more — all with the goal of creating a cohesive story.”

Berke monitors gas content in sediments for safety purposes.

Everyone on board worked 12-hour shifts, every day for two months. The camaradarie, sunsets over the ocean and pilot whales whistling at night were a few of the many highlights, Berke said.

The ocean expedition is the first stage of a much larger project, which involves working with the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program to recover cores from land in Morocco and Spain. Shifts in vegetation patterns on land may be correlated with changes in ocean circulation or global climate dynamics. Forests prosper or retreat, for example, when ocean circulation patterns fluctuate.

“The more we understand our place in the global climate system, the more resilient we’ll be to the changes that are happening right now,” Berke said.

The JOIDES (an acronym for Joint Oceanographic Institutions for Deep Earth Sampling) vessel will be decommissioned for scientific operations this summer. Berke said the research community is hopeful a new vessel will be acquired in the coming years to replace this 46-year-old research ship.

Melissa Berke, far left, aboard the JOIDES research vessel with other scientists.

Contact: Jessica Sieff, associate director of media relations, 574-631-3933, jsieff@nd.edu

Sunrise to sunset, new window coating blocks heat — not view

2024-04-02T12:53:00-04:00

Windows welcome light into interior spaces, but they also bring in unwanted heat. A new window coating blocks heat-generating ultraviolet and infrared light and lets through visible light, regardless of the sun’s angle. The coating can be incorporated onto existing windows or automobiles and can reduce air-conditioning cooling costs by more than one-third in hot climates.

“The angle between the sunshine and your window is always changing,” said Tengfei Luo, the Dorini Family Professor for Energy 91��Ƶ at the University of Notre Dame and the lead of the study. “Our coating maintains functionality and efficiency whatever the sun’s position in the sky.”

Window coatings used in many recent studies are optimized for light that enters a room at a 90-degree angle. Yet at noon, often the hottest time of the day, the sun’s rays enter vertically installed windows at oblique angles.

Luo and his postdoctoral associate Seongmin Kim previously fabricated a transparent window coating by stacking ultra-thin layers of silica, alumina and titanium oxide on a glass base. A micrometer-thick silicon polymer was added to enhance the structure’s cooling power by reflecting thermal radiation through the atmospheric window and into outer space.

Additional optimization of the order of the layers was necessary to ensure the coating would accommodate multiple angles of solar light. However, a trial-and-error approach was not practical, given the immense number of possible combinations, Luo said.

To shuffle the layers into an optimal configuration — one that maximized the transmission of visible light while minimizing the passage of heat-producing wavelengths — the team used quantum computing, or more specifically, quantum annealing, and validated their results experimentally.

Their model produced a coating that both maintained transparency and reduced temperature by 5.4 to 7.2 degrees Celsius in a model room, even when light was transmitted in a broad range of angles. The lab’s results were recently published in Cell Reports Physical Science.

“Like polarized sunglasses, our coating lessens the intensity of incoming light, but, unlike sunglasses, our coating remains clear and effective even when you tilt it at different angles,” Luo said.

The active learning and quantum computing scheme developed to create this coating can be used to design of a broad range of materials with complex properties.

Contact: Jessica Sieff, associate director of media relations, 574-631-3933, jsieff@nd.edu

Engineers unmask nanoplastics in oceans for the first time, revealing their true shapes and chemistry

2024-02-01T08:54:00-05:00

Tengfei Luo, Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering (Photo by Matt Cashore/University of Notre Dame)

Millions of tons of plastic waste enter the oceans each year. The sun’s ultraviolet light and ocean turbulence break down these plastics into invisible nanoparticles that threaten marine ecosystems.

In a new study, engineers at the University of Notre Dame have presented clear images of nanoplastics in ocean water off the coasts of China, South Korea and the United States, and in the Gulf of Mexico. These tiny plastic particles, which originated from such consumer products as water bottles, food packaging and clothing, were found to have surprising diversity in shape and chemical composition.

The engineers’ research was published in Science Advances.

“Nanoplastics are potentially more toxic than larger plastic particles,” said Tengfei Luo, the Dorini Family Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. “Their small size makes them better able to penetrate the tissues of living organisms.”

Previously, nanoplastic particles synthesized in laboratories had been used in toxicity studies to investigate their effect on marine life. Luo’s team of researchers, in collaboration with the lab of Wei Xu at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, decided to search for actual nanoplastics in the world’s oceans, suspecting they might be significantly different from the lab-created versions, which are highly uniform in shape and composition. Any differences found may affect toxicity studies.

Nanoplastics are believed to exist at extremely low concentrations in the ocean. To find them in seawater, Luo’s team used a unique bubble deposition technique that they had previously developed to find traces of DNA molecules for early detection of cancers.

The team mixed seawater samples with silver nanoparticles and heated the solution with a laser until a bubble formed. Variations in surface tension cause the nanoplastic particles to accumulate on the bubble’s exterior. The bubble shrinks, then vanishes, depositing the particles in one concentrated spot. Electron microscopy and Raman spectroscopy are then used to reveal the nanoplastics’ shapes and chemistries.

Luo’s team found nanoplastics made of nylon, polystyrene and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) — plastic polymers used in food packaging, water bottles, clothing and fish nets — in these seawater samples. Some of the particles’ diverse shapes can be traced back to the different manufacturing techniques used to create them. Surprisingly, PET nanoparticles were found in water samples collected approximately 300 meters deep in the Gulf of Mexico, suggesting nanoplastic contamination is not restricted to the ocean surface.

Follow-up studies will focus on quantifying ocean nanoplastics, Luo said.

“The nanoplastics we found in the ocean were distinctively different from laboratory-synthesized ones,” Luo said. “Understanding the shape and chemistry of the actual nanoplastics is an essential first step in determining their toxicity and devising ways to mitigate it.”

In addition to Luo and Xu, other co-authors on this paper are Seunghyun Moon, Seongmin Kim, Qiushi Zhang and Renzheng Zhang at the University of Notre Dame, and Leisha Martin at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.

Contact: Jessica Sieff, associate director, media relations, 574-631-3933, jsieff@nd.edu

In memoriam: Iossif Lozovatsky, research professor of civil and environmental engineering and earth sciences

2024-01-19T14:56:00-05:00

Iossif D. Lozovatsky, research professor of civil and environmental engineering and earth sciences at the University of Notre Dame, passed away Dec. 23. He was 75.

Lozovatsky was an expert in physical oceanography, and his research lab was the world’s oceans. He worked with collaborators from around the world, making more than 20 oceanographic research cruises in the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian and Antarctic oceans as well as the Baltic, Black, Mediterranean and China seas.

Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, Lozovatsky received a master’s degree in oceanography from Lomonosov Moscow State University and a doctorate in physics and math from the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, where he later became a full professor and lead research scientist.

Lozovatsky joined Notre Dame’s Environmental Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (EFD) as a research professor in 2010, after serving for 16 years as a research associate and research professor at Arizona State University’s Center for Environmental Fluid Dynamics. He was a longtime and close collaborator of Joe Fernando, professor of civil and environmental engineering and earth sciences at Notre Dame and EFD’s director.

At Notre Dame, he carried out field measurements, data analysis and theoretical interpretations of ocean turbulence. He was a lead investigator of the Air-Sea Interactions in the Northern Indian Ocean and the Monsoon Intraseasonal Oscillations in the Bay of Bengal projects and was a key scientist of the CASPER air-sea interaction study, collecting data from the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

“I’ve worked with Iossif on several projects since 2010, including sharing a week in extremely cramped space on a converted fishing boat in the Magellan Straits,” said Scott Coppersmith, senior EFD research engineer. “He was a good guy, strong-willed and generous. He will be missed.”

Lozovatsky published more than 100 papers in international journals, covering small-scale physical oceanography and aspects of atmospheric science and fluid dynamics. He was a visiting scholar and lecturer at the University of Girona in Spain, the University of Western Australia in Perth, the Ocean University of China in Quindao, and the National Aquatic Resources Research and Development Agency in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

He also was known as a gifted teacher, deepening graduate students’ understanding of their field by providing meticulous training and insightful questioning.

He is survived by his daughter, Maria Lozovatskaya.

Edward Maginn named fellow of the National Academy of Inventors

2024-01-19T11:31:00-05:00

Edward Maginn, the Keough-Hesburgh Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and associate vice president for research at the University of Notre Dame, has been named a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) — the highest professional distinction awarded solely to academic inventors.

This year’s class of 162 NAI Fellows from around the world includes two Nobel laureates, three National Inventors Hall of Fame inductees and 22 members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Maginn is a globally recognized leader in research linking the physical properties of materials to their chemical composition. Much of his work has been directed toward greenhouse gas capture and reduction, electrolytes for energy storage, and materials for more efficient cooling and refrigeration.

His work in algorithmic and computational research led to the development of the open-source Monte Carlo package Cassandra, most commonly used to compute the thermodynamic properties of fluids.

Maginn has been granted 10 United States patents, primarily focusing on the use of ionic liquids for refrigeration and for electroplating. He has published more than 230 peer-reviewed papers with more than 27,000 citations. He has written 10 book chapters and authored 202 contributions to conference proceedings.

Maginn and the other 2023 fellows will be presented with medals at the group’s 13th annual meeting on June 18 in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Other recent NAI Fellows at Notre Dame include Nosang Myung (2022), Gary Bernstein and Hsueh-Chia Chang (2020) and Bert Hochwald (2019).

Nitesh Chawla elected 2024 AAAI Fellow for outstanding contributions to AI

2024-01-12T16:13:00-05:00

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) has elected Nitesh Chawla, Frank M. Freimann Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, as one of its 2024 fellows.

Chawla, who directs Notre Dame’s Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society, joins a cohort of 11 new fellows selected for their “outstanding contributions to the theory or practice of AI.”

Specifically, he was recognized for his foundational and significant advancements in learning from imbalanced data, learning on graphs, and interdisciplinary applications of AI.

An expert in data science and artificial intelligence, Chawla also holds concurrent faculty appointments in the Department of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics in the College of Science and the Department of Information, Technology, Analytics and Operations in the College of Business. He is a fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

AAAI is a nonprofit, scientific society dedicated to promoting the research and responsible use of AI technology. Fellows are individuals who have made significant, sustained contributions — usually over at least a ten-year period — to the field of artificial intelligence.

Chawla will be formally honored at the 38th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Vancouver, Canada, in February.

In memoriam: John J. Uhran Jr., professor emeritus and founding member of Department of Computer Science and Engineering

2023-10-09T15:38:00-04:00

John J. Uhran Jr., senior associate dean emeritus and professor emeritus of computer science and engineering and electrical engineering at the University of Notre Dame, died Oct. 2 (Monday). He was 87.

Born and raised in New York City, Uhran earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Manhattan College and a doctorate from Purdue University. He joined Notre Dame’s Department of Electrical Engineering in 1966.

Uhran’s teaching and research focused on communication theory and systems, signal processing, and simulation techniques, as well as artificial intelligence, robotics and engineering education.

In 1990, Uhran and longtime colleague and collaborator Gene Henry, now professor emeritus of computer science, helped establish the Department of Computer Science and Engineering within the College of Engineering.

“We worked together on analog, digital and hybrid computers,” said Henry, who collaborated with Uhran on numerous grants to equip student labs with the latest computer technology.

“John was wonderful to work with — a great researcher, teacher, administrator and friend.”

In the early days of the new department, Uhran developed autonomously moving robots that made use of neural network techniques. He also co-developed NDTran, a software package used to simulate large systems.

Uhran taught more than 20 different courses, and his teaching was recognized with multiple awards, including the Tau Beta Pi Most Valuable Instructor award and the ASEE Fluke Corporation Award for Outstanding Laboratory Instruction (1998). He became a fellow of the American Society of Engineering Education in 2014.

His passion for engineering education and commitment to students made him uniquely suited for the role of senior associate dean for academic affairs in the College of Engineering, a position he occupied from 1991 to 2008.

“A special characteristic of John’s service was that he was devoted to all students, especially those who were struggling academically or personally, and he would do whatever he could to assist them,” said Frank Incropera, dean emeritus of the College of Engineering.

Uhran was a compassionate mentor to graduate students. “He was more than my graduate adviser; he was a friend,” said Ramzi Bualuan, teaching professor of computer science and engineering and Uhran’s former graduate student. “His support and belief in me had a lasting impact on my life and career.”

Uhran is survived by his wife, Sue, as well as three children and eight grandchildren. A Mass of Christian Burial was celebrated at 9:30 a.m. Monday (Oct. 9) at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart.

Robotic sea turtle mimics uniquely adaptable gait

2023-08-07T13:30:00-04:00

Sea turtles can glide majestically through ocean waters and maneuver like armored vehicles over rocks and sand on land. Their locomotive adaptability makes them particularly interesting to robotics experts, who seek to learn the secrets of their gait and propulsion.

“The sea turtle’s unique body shape, the morphology of their flippers and their varied gait patterns makes them very adaptable,” said Yasemin Ozkan-Aydin, assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Notre Dame and a roboticist.

“Mimicking this adaptability is challenging because it requires an intricate understanding of how morphology, flexibility and gait interact with the environment. Studying how sea turtles adapt their gaits to traverse complex and varied terrains can help us design more versatile robots.”

Ozkan-Aydin, electrical engineering doctoral student Nnamdi Chikere and undergraduate John Simon McElroy, a Naughton Fellow from University College Dublin, have designed and built a robotic sea turtle, which they are testing in varied environments on Notre Dame’s campus. Their robot mimics a real sea turtle’s propulsion: its front flippers move it forward while its smaller hind flippers allow it to change direction.

The key components of their turtle-robot are an oval-shaped body, four independently radio-controlled flippers, an electronic onboard control unit, a multi-sensor device and a battery. The body frame and flipper connectors are 3D printed using a rigid polymer. The flippers are molded from silicone to provide both flexibility and stiffness.

The robot was designed using data from zoological studies on the morphology, gait patterns and flipper flexibility of multiple sea turtle species. “To maximize adaptability and versatility, we studied the locomotion patterns of different species and incorporated the most effective aspects from each,” Ozkan-Aydin said.

Ozkan-Aydin modeled the robot on the size and structure of sea turtle hatchlings. Sea turtle babies are particularly vulnerable — only one in a thousand survive to adulthood. Hatchlings must run a gauntlet of predator sea birds on their journey from nest to ocean, and that journey has become more perilous by a disorienting landscape of beach development and debris.

“Our hope is to use these baby sea turtle robots to safely guide sea turtle hatchlings to the ocean and minimize the risks they face during this critical period,” Ozkan-Aydin said.

In memoriam: Jeffrey Kantor, former vice president, associate provost and dean

2023-07-20T12:05:00-04:00

Jeffrey Kantor

Jeffrey Kantor, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, former associate provost, vice president for graduate studies and research, and dean of the Graduate 91��Ƶ at the University of Notre Dame, died unexpectedly on July 12 at his home in Rainy Lake, Minnesota. He was 69.

“Jeff was a wise counsel to me when I was chair,” said Edward Maginn, the Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Engineering. “When I had to make tough decisions, I often sought his advice. Jeff was a great person, scholar, teacher and friend.”

Kantor joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1981 after earning a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota and a doctorate from Princeton University. He was named a lifetime fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2004.

In his research, he was an early proponent of using real-time modeling, enabled by advances in computing power, to provide better control of chemical processes. The outstanding merit of his work was recognized with a prestigious NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award (1984) and the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (1985).

After building a successful research program, Kantor took on administrative duties. In 1995, he served as department chair and was appointed vice president and associate provost the following year. In this role, he established the University’s web administration office and became the University’s first chief information officer. In 2001, he was appointed dean of the Graduate 91��Ƶ and vice president of research, positions he held jointly for five years.

“Jeff would look at any situation, process or procedure and ask if there was a better idea or a path to a better way,” said Mark McCready, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and senior associate dean for research and faculty affairs.

After leaving his administrative roles, Kantor returned to his department where he devoted himself to teaching. He revitalized his department’s control course, developed a new class on plant operations and helped improve lab instruction.

A broad range of community and academic organizations benefited from Kantor’s considerable talents. He served as treasurer for the National GEM Consortium, board member for Innovation Park at Notre Dame and chair at the Madison Center. He was an avid amateur photographer and contributed his spectacular photography of northern landscapes and the night sky to the Voyageurs Conservancy.

“Jeff filled the room with energy, enthusiasm, kindness and compassion,” said Alexander Dowling, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering. “He was, above all, an exemplary role model for being a great person.”

Kantor is survived by his wife, Diane Bradley-Kantor, as well as two sons and one grandchild. A memorial service is planned at a date to be announced.

Novel 3D printing method a ‘game changer’ for discovery, manufacturing of new materials

2023-05-15T08:00:00-04:00

The time-honored Edisonian trial-and-error process of discovery is slow and labor-intensive. This hampers the development of urgently needed new technologies for clean energy and environmental sustainability, as well as for electronics and biomedical devices.

“It usually takes 10 to 20 years to discover a new material,” said Yanliang Zhang, associate professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at the University of Notre Dame.

“I thought if we could shorten that time to less than a year — or even a few months — it would be a game changer for the discovery and manufacturing of new materials.”

Now Zhang has done just that, creating a novel 3D printing method that produces materials in ways that conventional manufacturing can’t match. The new process mixes multiple aerosolized nanomaterial inks in a single printing nozzle, varying the ink mixing ratio on the fly during the printing process. This method — called high-throughput combinatorial printing (HTCP) — controls both the printed materials’ 3D architectures and local compositions and produces materials with gradient compositions and properties at microscale spatial resolution.

His research was just published in Nature.

The aerosol-based HTCP is extremely versatile and applicable to a broad range of metals, semiconductors and dielectrics, as well as polymers and biomaterials. It generates combinational materials that function as “libraries,” each containing thousands of unique compositions.

Combining combinational materials printing and high-throughput characterization can significantly accelerate materials discovery, Zhang said. His team has already used this approach to identify a semiconductor material with superior thermoelectric properties, a promising discovery for energy harvesting and cooling applications.

In addition to speeding up discovery, HTCP produces functionally graded materials that gradually transition from stiff to soft. This makes them particularly useful in biomedical applications that need to bridge between soft body tissues and stiff wearable and implantable devices.

In the next phase of research, Zhang and the students in his Advanced Manufacturing and Energy Lab plan to apply machine learning and artificial intelligence-guided strategies to the data-rich nature of HTCP in order to accelerate the discovery and development of a broad range of materials.

“In the future, I hope to develop an autonomous and self-driving process for materials discovery and device manufacturing, so students in the lab can be free to focus on high-level thinking,” Zhang said.

Making the skies safer with smarter drones

2023-04-06T08:00:00-04:00

Drones flying at low altitude are increasingly being used to support activities ranging from emergency response to package delivery to agricultural surveillance.

How can we ensure air traffic safety?

With support from NASA, University of Notre Dame computer scientists and engineers are leading the development of an automated decision-making capability system that will ensure small drones are safe to enter congested airspaces before they fly.

This system will replace the current manually intensive process, which has limited ability to handle increasing levels of drone traffic executing complex missions.

Jane Cleland-Huang, the Frank M. Freimann Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, leads the project.

“The NASA grant gives us a unique opportunity to contribute Notre Dame’s expertise in data analytics and flight coordination,” she said. “We’re prepared to develop innovative solutions for NASA’s uncrewed drone traffic management system, which will make skies safer.”

NASA’s current drone traffic management system allows uncrewed vehicles to integrate into low-altitude airspace without relying on air traffic controllers. Flight details are shared electronically so that drones are authorized for flights in controlled airspaces shared with other drone, airplane and helicopter traffic.

Notre Dame will enhance this system by developing decision-making software that permits or denies flight requests by evaluating a drone’s safety track record, equipment readiness, operator preparedness and maintenance procedures.

The $5.3 million grant to Notre Dame (over three years) is one of four NASA University Leadership Initiative grants awarded this year that give university faculty and students opportunities to solve key challenges facing the future of flight.

Cleland-Huang is the chair of computer science and engineering at Notre Dame and the faculty director of DroneResponse. Her research team for the NASA-funded project includes computer science and engineering faculty members Nitesh Chawla, Siddharth Joshi, Taeho Jung and Douglas Thain and research scientist Michael Murphy, as well as researchers and personnel from Iowa State University, Saint Louis University, University of Texas at El Paso, DePaul University and the DroneResponders Public Safety Alliance.

Graduate students and undergraduates will be involved in the research at every level.

New nanomaterial sets magnetic trap for disease biomarkers

2023-03-01T09:57:00-05:00

Researchers at the University of Notre Dame and Vanderbilt University Medical Center have devised a low-cost filter that can rapidly isolate and trap biomarkers for cancer with a 99 percent success rate.

Their novel filter uses magnetic fields to capture lipoproteins, which are biomarkers for stroke or heart disease, as well as extracellular vesicles (EVs), which carry valuable information about cancer tumor cells and other diseased cells.

“For a long time, people thought that EVs were just garbage secreted by the cell,” said Hsueh-Chia Chang, the Bayer Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, whose lab led the study.

“But then scientists found out that this ‘garbage’ might be able to tell you a tumor’s source, size and type — a gold mine of information.”

Before EVs can be used for diagnostic purposes, these submicron-sized particles must be extracted from biological fluid samples. One promising way to do this has been to use magnetic nanobeads that latch onto the particles, after which both are caught in a polymer filter.

Yet current filters lack the magnetic force needed to recover the nanobeads quickly and in sufficient numbers. Chang and his team solved this problem by altering the geometry of the filter’s surface, thereby reducing the recovery time for these tiny biomarkers from one day to a few minutes and increasing the capture rate to almost 100 percent.

“Magnetic fields are very intense at sharp corners or at wedges,” said Chang. “So, the key to this technology was the creation of wedges around the filter’s nanopores that could trap the magnetic beads.”

The research team anticipates that this new technology, described in their article in Communications Biology, will evolve from research tool to a diagnostic test for cancer, cardiovascular diseases and even neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

Co-authors on the paper were Chenguang Zhang, a doctoral student in chemical and biomolecular engineering, and Xiaoye Huo, a postdoctoral researcher in the same department.

The Notre Dame research team includes Satyajyoti Senapati, research associate professor in chemical and biomolecular engineering, and Xin Lu, the John M. and Mary Jo Boler Associate Professor of Biological Sciences. Collaboration with Robert J. Coffey, Jeffrey L. Franklin and Kasey C. Vickers of Vanderbilt 91��Ƶ of Medicine made the results possible.

Originally published by Karla Cruise at research.nd.edu on Feb. 20.