From The Department of Mechanical Engineering In The School of Engineering At The Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “From NASA to MIT to Formlabs” Audrey Chen ’24

From The Department of Mechanical Engineering

In

The School of Engineering

At

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

5.21.24
Sonny Oram | Edgerton Center

Audrey Chen ’24 landed an internship at NASA before she was old enough to drive. Here’s her secret to success.

Audrey Chen (left) and Jared Byars test the durability of their boat in the Charles River. Photo: Jessica Lam

Audrey Chen with the Arcturus autonomous boat team at the Edgerton Center 2023 Showcase. Photo: Jaypix Belmer

Audrey Chen ’24 lives by the philosophy that “a lot of opportunities only present themselves if you ask for them.” This approach has served her well, from becoming a NASA intern at 15 to running MIT’s autonomous boat team Arcturus to entering a leadership position at 3D printing technology company Formlabs right out of undergrad.

Growing up in Los Angeles, Chen showed a strong aptitude and passion for engineering at a young age and skipped several grades in math. In her first year of high school, she saw a posting about the Lab Space Academy at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. Though the program was for juniors and seniors, she inquired if they would make an exception for her and they agreed. By her junior year she was helping run the program as deputy.

But Chen didn’t stop there: She had dreams of interning at NASA. She asked her mentor and became a drone air traffic control researcher at NASA at 15. “I was not old enough to drive,” Chen says. “High school would end, the bell would ring, and I would put on my backpack and I would run down the street to JPL. Can you imagine you’re the security guard at the gate of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a kid shows up for work?”

Chen worked on the Orbiting Arid Subsurfaces and Ice Sheet Sounder (OASIS) project, whose goal is to find and examine freshwater aquifers and ice sheets. “It was very early in the mission, so I was doing system and objective definition,” Chen says.

Next stop: MIT

After graduating high school, Chen ventured across the country to explore her eclectic interests at MIT. When she wasn’t fulfilling the requirements for her mechanical engineering degree, she could be found leather crafting, glass blowing, or table welding in one of MIT’s makerspaces, documenting MIT student life with her camera (garnering the acclimation The Eyes of MIT by MIT Admissions), working as a researcher sampling deep-sea sediment, or notably, running the award-winning autonomous boat team Arcturus.

“Arcturus has been the highlight of my MIT career,” Chen says. She founded the team at MIT Sea Grant in 2022 along with a group of equally impassioned students who elected Chen as captain.

“I didn’t have any background in marine autonomy, so we pushed very hard to institute trainings and have lots of workshops so that they would feel comfortable coming in and contributing as soon as possible,” she recalls. Seeking additional funding and support, the team found a home at the MIT Edgerton Center.

Launching Arcturus

“Whenever I think about how Arcturus started and how it somehow still continues, I think it’s a miracle,” Chen says. “Our very first year, there were five of us at the Roboboat competition, and if any individual one of us had not decided to join the team, we either would not have a boat, we would not have electronics, we would not have code to run the boat, or we wouldn’t have funding to run the team.”

Chen’s first year as captain was a tremendous amount of work because the team was so small. In addition to managing the team and assuring they met their goals on time, Chen also acted as the team’s business lead, treasurer, media lead, and photographer. “I was juggling a lot of things. Since then, those roles have further split amongst more people within the team,” she says.

Recruiting isn’t easy for an autonomous boat team, as many students don’t get marine robotics experience in high school. To keep their recruitment pool wide, Chen didn’t expect students to have background in autonomy or in marine systems. “Creating an environment that’s welcoming and friendly and supportive of people’s learning is crucial, because otherwise you won’t have a team. We’ve really pushed hard to recruit from a large body of people. We make sure to emphasize that we’re open to all majors, all years. As an industry, marine robotics, like most engineering, is very male-dominated. We work hard to recruit people of all genders and ethnicities.”

With Chen’s skillful recruiting, Arcturus increased from five to 74 members in 2024. Arcturus flourished under Chen’s leadership, winning First Place Design Overall at the Roboboat competition in 2023.

The challenges with autonomous boats

Chen was drawn to autonomous boats because the field is so full of potential. “You leave a robot on land and you turn it off, it doesn’t move by itself, versus you put it in a body of water and you don’t do anything, then it still moves because of the currents. It needs to be constantly taking in that input and trying to localize where it is,” Chen says.

Chen sees a lot of potential in the marine biotics industry to gather crucial data about our environment. “Autonomy in the marine space is not as well researched as land autonomy is. There’s immense potential for marine autonomy to benefit the world. You think about mapping ocean topology or looking for endangered species or habitat protection or surveying bleached coral reefs. As a vehicle, you have more flexibility to move around versus a buoy. That gives you the ability to take water and sediment samples across a wider spread of area. And by making it autonomous, you eliminate high labor costs, so the price per sample for a researcher would go down. These are different ways in which autonomy has potential to benefit the research sphere, but also, more broadly, the world.”

Chen graduated early this past February and passed Arcturus on to captains and rising juniors Ami Shi and Karen Guo. “They’re rock stars. The team is in good hands,” Chen says.

Becoming a project manager at Formlabs

Chen graduated a semester early and accepted a project manager position at Formlabs. She brings many lessons from MIT to her work. “The biggest thing that I’ve learned is that I don’t need to know everything. Part of being successful is knowing what you don’t know. So I’m always aware that in every Arcturus meeting, and probably every technical meeting that I’ll be in at Formlabs, that I will not be the smartest person in the room. And that’s fine. I don’t need to be the smartest person ever because that’s not my job. My job is to bring these projects together and know enough about all the systems to integrate them.”

Chen is thrilled to stay near MIT after graduation, allowing her the opportunity to visit her friends and continue mentoring Arcturus. Upon announcing her new job, she remarked, “To my friends at MIT, I’ll be just down the street, so you won’t be able to get rid of me that easily!”

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct.

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The Department of Mechanical Engineering, commonly referred to as “Mech E,” was designated Course I of the six courses offered when classes began at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1865. The course focused on the study of existing machinery and the principles behind their construction and operation.

In 1872 the department became Course II and Civil Engineering became Course I. That same year Assistant Professor Channing Whitaker, MIT class of 1869, began to teach mechanical engineering and redirected the emphasis of the course towards empirical studies. Whitaker proposed the use of in-house teaching laboratories and increased excursions to industrial and civil sites. In 1874 mechanical engineering’s first laboratory was built for direct application of current methodology to engineering problems. The education and research program of the new lab was applied in its approach and focused primarily on the steam engine.

Mechanical engineering became a formal department in 1883. The following specializations were offered: marine engineering (offered until 1913); locomotive engineering (offered until 1918); mill engineering, which eventually became textile engineering; and naval architecture, which became a separate department in 1894. In 1899 the option of heat and ventilation (offered until 1913) was introduced and in 1908, steam turbine engineering (offered until 1918).

Edward Miller, who became head of the department in 1911, designed the facilities for the department when the Institute moved from Boston to the “New Technology” in Cambridge, Mass., in 1916. New options during this period included engine design (1913-1925), automotive engineering (1923-1949), ordnance (1923-1924), and refrigeration, which became refrigeration and air conditioning.

The appointment of Jerome C. Hunsaker as department head in 1933 marked a major change in the direction of the department as he incorporated the aeronautics curriculum into mechanical engineering, and altered the traditional course in hydraulics into a study of the mechanics of fluids in general. He also modernized the laboratories.

The work that was carried out in the department between 1930 and the early 1960s served to codify many basic principles in the field of mechanical engineering. Seminal publications in dynamics, heat transfer, mechanics of materials, and thermodynamics were produced, and by the mid 1960s the department was renowned for pioneering the development of system dynamics and control and man-machine systems as fields of study within the profession.

In 1965 Ascher Shapiro became head of the department and furthered the shift towards applied mechanical engineering as the focus of research moved away from military applications to quality of life applications such as the environment and biomedical engineering. By the mid 1970s, continuing to the present (as of 1995), research was concentrated within four major programs: biomedical engineering; energy and environment; human services, including transportation; and manufacturing, materials, and materials processing.

The Department of Ocean Engineering merged with the Department of Mechanical Engineering effective January 1, 2005, and the merged department is known as the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Within the Department of Mechanical Engineering an undergraduate specialization in ocean engineering and graduate programs in Naval Architecture and Construction (previously XIII-A) and the Joint MIT-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Program (previously XIII-W) will continue.

The MIT School of Engineering is one of the five schools of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The School of Engineering has eight academic departments and two interdisciplinary institutes. The School grants SB, MEng, SM, engineer’s degrees, and PhD or ScD degrees. The school is the largest at MIT as measured by undergraduate and graduate enrollments and faculty members.

Departments and initiatives:

Departments:

Aeronautics and Astronautics (Course 16)
Biological Engineering (Course 20)
Chemical Engineering (Course 10)
Civil and Environmental Engineering (Course 1)
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Course 6, joint department with MIT Schwarzman College of Computing)
Materials Science and Engineering (Course 3)
Mechanical Engineering (Course 2)
Nuclear Science and Engineering (Course 22)

Institutes:

Institute for Medical Engineering and Science
Health Sciences and Technology program (joint MIT-Harvard, “HST” in the course catalog)

(Departments and degree programs are commonly referred to by course catalog numbers on campus.)

Laboratories and research centers

Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab
Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems
Center for Computational Engineering
Center for Materials Science and Engineering
Center for Ocean Engineering
Center for Transportation and Logistics
Industrial Performance Center
Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies
Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research
Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems
Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity
Materials Processing Center
Microsystems Technology Laboratories
MIT Lincoln Laboratory Beaver Works Center
Novartis-MIT Center for Continuous Manufacturing
Ocean Engineering Design Laboratory
Research Laboratory of Electronics
SMART Center
Sociotechnical Systems Research Center
Tata Center for Technology and Design

USPS “Forever” postage stamps celebrating Innovation at MIT.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The institute has an urban campus that extends more than a mile (1.6 km) alongside the Charles River. The institute also encompasses a number of major off-campus facilities such as the MIT Lincoln Laboratory , the MIT Bates Research and Engineering Center , and the Haystack Observatory , as well as affiliated laboratories such as the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Whitehead Institute.

Founded in 1861 in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States, Massachusetts Institute of Technology adopted a European polytechnic university model and stressed laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering. It has since played a key role in the development of many aspects of modern science, engineering, mathematics, and technology, and is widely known for its innovation and academic strength. It is frequently regarded as one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

Nobel laureates, Turing Award winners, and Fields Medalists have been affiliated with MIT as alumni, faculty members, or researchers. In addition, National Medal of Science recipients, National Medals of Technology and Innovation recipients, MacArthur Fellows, Marshall Scholars, Mitchell Scholars, Schwarzman Scholars, astronauts, and Chief Scientists of the U.S. Air Force have been affiliated with The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The university also has a strong entrepreneurial culture and MIT alumni have founded or co-founded many notable companies. Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a member of the Association of American Universities.

Foundation and vision

In 1859, a proposal was submitted to the Massachusetts General Court to use newly filled lands in Back Bay, Boston for a “Conservatory of Art and Science”, but the proposal failed. A charter for the incorporation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed by William Barton Rogers, was signed by John Albion Andrew, the governor of Massachusetts, on April 10, 1861.

Rogers, a professor from the University of Virginia , wanted to establish an institution to address rapid scientific and technological advances. He did not wish to found a professional school, but a combination with elements of both professional and liberal education, proposing that:

“The true and only practicable object of a polytechnic school is, as I conceive, the teaching, not of the minute details and manipulations of the arts, which can be done only in the workshop, but the inculcation of those scientific principles which form the basis and explanation of them, and along with this, a full and methodical review of all their leading processes and operations in connection with physical laws.”

The Rogers Plan reflected the German research university model, emphasizing an independent faculty engaged in research, as well as instruction oriented around seminars and laboratories.

Early developments

Two days after The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was chartered, the first battle of the Civil War broke out. After a long delay through the war years, MIT’s first classes were held in the Mercantile Building in Boston in 1865. The new institute was founded as part of the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act to fund institutions “to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes” and was a land-grant school. In 1863 under the same act, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts founded the Massachusetts Agricultural College, which developed as the University of Massachusetts Amherst ). In 1866, the proceeds from land sales went toward new buildings in the Back Bay.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was informally called “Boston Tech”. The institute adopted the European polytechnic university model and emphasized laboratory instruction from an early date. Despite chronic financial problems, the institute saw growth in the last two decades of the 19th century under President Francis Amasa Walker. Programs in electrical, chemical, marine, and sanitary engineering were introduced, new buildings were built, and the size of the student body increased to more than one thousand.

The curriculum drifted to a vocational emphasis, with less focus on theoretical science. The fledgling school still suffered from chronic financial shortages which diverted the attention of the MIT leadership. During these “Boston Tech” years, Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty and alumni rebuffed Harvard University president (and former MIT faculty) Charles W. Eliot’s repeated attempts to merge MIT with Harvard College’s Lawrence Scientific School. There would be at least six attempts to absorb MIT into Harvard. In its cramped Back Bay location, MIT could not afford to expand its overcrowded facilities, driving a desperate search for a new campus and funding. Eventually, the MIT Corporation approved a formal agreement to merge with Harvard, over the vehement objections of MIT faculty, students, and alumni. However, a 1917 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court effectively put an end to the merger scheme.

In 1916, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology administration and the MIT charter crossed the Charles River on the ceremonial barge Bucentaur built for the occasion, to signify MIT’s move to a spacious new campus largely consisting of filled land on a one-mile-long (1.6 km) tract along the Cambridge side of the Charles River. The neoclassical “New Technology” campus was designed by William W. Bosworth and had been funded largely by anonymous donations from a mysterious “Mr. Smith”, starting in 1912. In January 1920, the donor was revealed to be the industrialist George Eastman of Rochester, New York, who had invented methods of film production and processing, and founded Eastman Kodak. Between 1912 and 1920, Eastman donated $20 million ($236.6 million in 2015 dollars) in cash and Kodak stock to MIT.

Curricular reforms

In the 1930s, President Karl Taylor Compton and Vice-President (effectively Provost) Vannevar Bush emphasized the importance of pure sciences like physics and chemistry and reduced the vocational practice required in shops and drafting studios. The Compton reforms “renewed confidence in the ability of the Institute to develop leadership in science as well as in engineering”. Unlike Ivy League schools, Massachusetts Institute of Technology catered more to middle-class families, and depended more on tuition than on endowments or grants for its funding. The school was elected to the Association of American Universities in 1934.

Still, as late as 1949, the Lewis Committee lamented in its report on the state of education at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology that “the Institute is widely conceived as basically a vocational school”, a “partly unjustified” perception the committee sought to change. The report comprehensively reviewed the undergraduate curriculum, recommended offering a broader education, and warned against letting engineering and government-sponsored research detract from the sciences and humanities. The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and the MIT Sloan School of Management were formed in 1950 to compete with the powerful Schools of Science and Engineering. Previously marginalized faculties in the areas of economics, management, political science, and linguistics emerged into cohesive and assertive departments by attracting respected professors and launching competitive graduate programs. The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences continued to develop under the successive terms of the more humanistically oriented presidents Howard W. Johnson and Jerome Wiesner between 1966 and 1980.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology‘s involvement in military science surged during World War II. In 1941, Vannevar Bush was appointed head of the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development and directed funding to only a select group of universities, including MIT. Engineers and scientists from across the country gathered at Massachusetts Institute of Technology ‘s Radiation Laboratory, established in 1940 to assist the British military in developing microwave radar. The work done there significantly affected both the war and subsequent research in the area. Other defense projects included gyroscope-based and other complex control systems for gunsight, bombsight, and inertial navigation under Charles Stark Draper’s Instrumentation Laboratory; the development of a digital computer for flight simulations under Project Whirlwind; and high-speed and high-altitude photography under Harold Edgerton. By the end of the war, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology became the nation’s largest wartime R&D contractor (attracting some criticism of Bush), employing nearly 4000 in the Radiation Laboratory alone and receiving in excess of $100 million ($1.2 billion in 2015 dollars) before 1946. Work on defense projects continued even after then. Post-war government-sponsored research at MIT included SAGE and guidance systems for ballistic missiles and Project Apollo.

These activities affected The Massachusetts Institute of Technology profoundly. A 1949 report noted the lack of “any great slackening in the pace of life at the Institute” to match the return to peacetime, remembering the “academic tranquility of the prewar years”, though acknowledging the significant contributions of military research to the increased emphasis on graduate education and rapid growth of personnel and facilities. The faculty doubled and the graduate student body quintupled during the terms of Karl Taylor Compton, president of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology between 1930 and 1948; James Rhyne Killian, president from 1948 to 1957; and Julius Adams Stratton, chancellor from 1952 to 1957, whose institution-building strategies shaped the expanding university. By the 1950s, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology no longer simply benefited the industries with which it had worked for three decades, and it had developed closer working relationships with new patrons, philanthropic foundations and the federal government.

In late 1960s and early 1970s, student and faculty activists protested against the Vietnam War and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology ‘s defense research. In this period Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s various departments were researching helicopters, smart bombs and counterinsurgency techniques for the war in Vietnam as well as guidance systems for nuclear missiles. The Union of Concerned Scientists was founded on March 4, 1969 during a meeting of faculty members and students seeking to shift the emphasis on military research toward environmental and social problems. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology ultimately divested itself from the Instrumentation Laboratory and moved all classified research off-campus to the MIT Lincoln Laboratory facility in 1973 in response to the protests. The student body, faculty, and administration remained comparatively unpolarized during what was a tumultuous time for many other universities. Johnson was seen to be highly successful in leading his institution to “greater strength and unity” after these times of turmoil. However, six Massachusetts Institute of Technology students were sentenced to prison terms at this time and some former student leaders, such as Michael Albert and George Katsiaficas, are still indignant about MIT’s role in military research and its suppression of these protests. (Richard Leacock’s film, November Actions, records some of these tumultuous events.)

In the 1980s, there was more controversy at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology over its involvement in SDI (space weaponry) and CBW (chemical and biological warfare) research. More recently, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s research for the military has included work on robots, drones and ‘battle suits’.

Recent history

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has kept pace with and helped to advance the digital age. In addition to developing the predecessors to modern computing and networking technologies, students, staff, and faculty members at Project MAC, the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and the Tech Model Railroad Club wrote some of the earliest interactive computer video games like Spacewar! and created much of modern hacker slang and culture. Several major computer-related organizations have originated at MIT since the 1980s: Richard Stallman’s GNU Project and the subsequent Free Software Foundation were founded in the mid-1980s at the AI Lab; the MIT Media Lab was founded in 1985 by Nicholas Negroponte and Jerome Wiesner to promote research into novel uses of computer technology; the World Wide Web Consortium standards organization was founded at the Laboratory for Computer Science in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee; the MIT OpenCourseWare project has made course materials for over 2,000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology classes available online free of charge since 2002; and the One Laptop per Child initiative to expand computer education and connectivity to children worldwide was launched in 2005.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was named a sea-grant college in 1976 to support its programs in oceanography and marine sciences and was named a space-grant college in 1989 to support its aeronautics and astronautics programs. Despite diminishing government financial support over the past quarter century, MIT launched several successful development campaigns to significantly expand the campus: new dormitories and athletics buildings on west campus; the Tang Center for Management Education; several buildings in the northeast corner of campus supporting research into biology, brain and cognitive sciences, genomics, biotechnology, and cancer research; and a number of new “backlot” buildings on Vassar Street including the Stata Center. Construction on campus in the 2000s included expansions of the Media Lab, the Sloan School’s eastern campus, and graduate residences in the northwest. In 2006, President Hockfield launched the MIT Energy Research Council to investigate the interdisciplinary challenges posed by increasing global energy consumption.

In 2001, inspired by the open source and open access movements, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched “OpenCourseWare” to make the lecture notes, problem sets, syllabi, exams, and lectures from the great majority of its courses available online for no charge, though without any formal accreditation for coursework completed. While the cost of supporting and hosting the project is high, OCW expanded in 2005 to include other universities as a part of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, which currently includes more than 250 academic institutions with content available in at least six languages. In 2011, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced it would offer formal certification (but not credits or degrees) to online participants completing coursework in its “MITx” program, for a modest fee. The “edX” online platform supporting MITx was initially developed in partnership with Harvard and its analogous “Harvardx” initiative. The courseware platform is open source, and other universities have already joined and added their own course content. In March 2009 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty adopted an open-access policy to make its scholarship publicly accessible online.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has its own police force. Three days after the Boston Marathon bombing of April 2013, MIT Police patrol officer Sean Collier was fatally shot by the suspects Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, setting off a violent manhunt that shut down the campus and much of the Boston metropolitan area for a day. One week later, Collier’s memorial service was attended by more than 10,000 people, in a ceremony hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology community with thousands of police officers from the New England region and Canada. On November 25, 2013, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced the creation of the Collier Medal, to be awarded annually to “an individual or group that embodies the character and qualities that Officer Collier exhibited as a member of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology community and in all aspects of his life”. The announcement further stated that “Future recipients of the award will include those whose contributions exceed the boundaries of their profession, those who have contributed to building bridges across the community, and those who consistently and selflessly perform acts of kindness”.

In September 2017, the school announced the creation of an artificial intelligence research lab called the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. IBM will spend $240 million over the next decade, and the lab will be staffed by MIT and IBM scientists. In October 2018 MIT announced that it would open a new Schwarzman College of Computing dedicated to the study of artificial intelligence, named after lead donor and The Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman. The focus of the new college is to study not just AI, but interdisciplinary AI education, and how AI can be used in fields as diverse as history and biology. The cost of buildings and new faculty for the new college is expected to be $1 billion upon completion.

The Caltech/MIT Advanced aLIGO was designed and constructed by a team of scientists from California Institute of Technology , Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and industrial contractors, and funded by the National Science Foundation .

Caltech /MIT Advanced aLigo

It was designed to open the field of gravitational-wave astronomy through the detection of gravitational waves predicted by general relativity. Gravitational waves were detected for the first time by the LIGO detector in 2015. For contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves, two Caltech physicists, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Rainer Weiss won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2017. Weiss, who is also a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, designed the laser interferometric technique, which served as the essential blueprint for the LIGO.

The mission of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the twenty-first century. We seek to develop in each member of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology community the ability and passion to work wisely, creatively, and effectively for the betterment of humankind.

From The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne [EPFL-École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne] (CH): “An AI leap into chemical synthesis”

From The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne [EPFL-École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne] (CH)

5.21.24
Nik Papageorgiou

© iStock

EPFL scientists introduce ChemCrow, a large language model-based AI system that revolutionizes chemistry by integrating 18 advanced tools for tasks like organic synthesis and drug discovery. ChemCrow streamlines complex processes in chemical research, making it more efficient for experts and novices alike.

Chemistry, with its intricate processes and vast potential for innovation, has always been a challenge for automation. Traditional computational tools, despite their advanced capabilities, often remain underutilized due to their complexity and the specialized knowledge required to operate them.

Now, researchers with the group of Philippe Schwaller at EPFL, have developed ChemCrow, an AI that integrates 18 expertly designed tools, enabling it to navigate and perform tasks within chemical research with unprecedented efficiency. “You might wonder why a crow?” asks Schwaller. “Because crows are known to use tools well.”

ChemCrow was developed by PhD students Andres Bran and Oliver Schilter (EPFL, NCCR Catalysis) in collaboration with Sam Cox and Professor Andrew White at (FutureHouse and University of Rochester).

ChemCrow is based on a large language model (LLMs), such as GPT-4, enhanced by LangChain for tool integration, to autonomously perform chemical synthesis tasks. The scientists augmented the language model with a suite of specialized software tools already used in chemistry, including WebSearch for internet-based information retrieval, LitSearch for scientific literature extraction, and various molecular and reaction tools for chemical analysis.

By integrating ChemCrow with these tools, the researchers enabled it to autonomously plan and execute chemical syntheses, such as creating an insect repellent and various organocatalysts, and even assist in discovering new chromophores, substances fundamental to dye and pigment industries.

What sets ChemCrow apart is its ability to adapt and apply a structured reasoning process to chemical tasks. “The system is analogous to a human expert with access to a calculator and databases that not only improve the expert’s efficiency, but also make them more factual – in the case of ChemCrow, reducing hallucinations,” explains Andres Camilo Marulanda Bran, the study’s first author.

ChemCrow receives a prompt from the user, plans ahead how to solve the task, selects the relevant tools, and iteratively refines its strategy based on the outcome(s) of each step. This methodical approach ensures that ChemCrow doesn’t only work off theory but is also grounded in practical application for real-world interaction with laboratory environments.

By democratizing access to complex chemical knowledge and processes, ChemCrow lowers the barrier to entry for non-experts while augmenting the toolkit available to veteran chemists. This can accelerate research and development in pharmaceuticals, materials science, and beyond, making the process more efficient and safer.

The group of Philippe Schwaller is part of the new EPFL AI Center, with more than forty other laboratories, leading the way towards trustworthy, accessible and inclusive AI.

Science paper:
Nature Machine Intelligence
See the science paper for instructive material with images.

Other contributors

University of Rochester
Future House

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct.

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

EPFL campus.

The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne [EPFL-École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne] (CH) is a research institute and university in Lausanne, Switzerland, that specializes in natural sciences and engineering. It is one of the two Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology, and it has three main missions: education, research and technology transfer.

The QS World University Rankings ranks EPFL(CH) very high, whereas Times Higher Education World University Rankings ranks EPFL(CH) as one of the world’s best schools for Engineering and Technology.

EPFL(CH) is located in the French-speaking part of Switzerland; the sister institution in the German-speaking part of Switzerland is The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zürich [Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich] (CH). Associated with several specialized research institutes, the two universities form The Domain of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology (ETH Domain) [ETH-Bereich; Domaine des Écoles Polytechniques Fédérales] (CH) which is directly dependent on the Federal Department of Economic Affairs, Education and Research. In connection with research and teaching activities, EPFL(CH) operates a nuclear reactor CROCUS; a Tokamak Fusion reactor; a Blue Gene/Q Supercomputer; and P3 bio-hazard facilities.

ETH Zürich, EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne) [École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne](CH), and four associated research institutes form The Domain of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology (ETH Domain) [ETH-Bereich; Domaine des Écoles polytechniques fédérales] (CH) with the aim of collaborating on scientific projects.

The roots of modern-day EPFL(CH) can be traced back to the foundation of a private school under the name École Spéciale de Lausanne in 1853 at the initiative of Lois Rivier, a graduate of the École Centrale Paris (FR) and John Gay the then professor and rector of the Académie de Lausanne. At its inception it had only 11 students and the offices were located at Rue du Valentin in Lausanne. In 1869, it became the technical department of the public Académie de Lausanne. When the Académie was reorganized and acquired the status of a university in 1890, the technical faculty changed its name to École d’Ingénieurs de l’Université de Lausanne. In 1946, it was renamed the École polytechnique de l’Université de Lausanne (EPUL). In 1969, the EPUL was separated from the rest of the University of Lausanne and became a federal institute under its current name. EPFL(CH), like ETH Zürich (CH), and it is thus directly controlled by the Swiss federal government. In contrast, all other universities in Switzerland are controlled by their respective cantonal governments. EPFL(CH) has started to develop into the field of life sciences. It absorbed the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC) in 2008.

In 1946, there were 360 students. In 1969, EPFL(CH) had 1,400 students and 55 professors. In the past two decades the university has grown rapidly and over 14,000 people study or work on campus, about 10,000 of these being Bachelor, Master or PhD students. The environment at modern day EPFL(CH) is highly international with the school attracting students and researchers from all over the world. More than 125 countries are represented on the campus and the university has two official languages, French and English.

Organization

EPFL is organized into eight schools, themselves formed of institutes that group research units (laboratories or chairs) around common themes:

School of Basic Sciences
Institute of Mathematics
Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering
Institute of Physics
European Centre of Atomic and Molecular Computations
Bernoulli Center
Biomedical Imaging Research Center
Interdisciplinary Center for Electron Microscopy
MPG-EPFL Centre for Molecular Nanosciences and Technology
Swiss Plasma Center
Laboratory of Astrophysics

School of Engineering

Institute of Electrical Engineering
Institute of Mechanical Engineering
Institute of Materials
Institute of Microengineering
Institute of Bioengineering

School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering

Institute of Architecture
Civil Engineering Institute
Institute of Urban and Regional Sciences
Environmental Engineering Institute

School of Computer and Communication Sciences

Algorithms & Theoretical Computer Science
Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
Computational Biology
Computer Architecture & Integrated Systems
Data Management & Information Retrieval
Graphics & Vision
Human-Computer Interaction
Information & Communication Theory
Networking
Programming Languages & Formal Methods
Security & Cryptography
Signal & Image Processing
Systems

School of Life Sciences

Bachelor-Master Teaching Section in Life Sciences and Technologies
Brain Mind Institute
Institute of Bioengineering
Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research
Global Health Institute
Ten Technology Platforms & Core Facilities (PTECH)
Center for Phenogenomics
NCCR Synaptic Bases of Mental Diseases

College of Management of Technology

Swiss Finance Institute at EPFL
Section of Management of Technology and Entrepreneurship
Institute of Technology and Public Policy
Institute of Management of Technology and Entrepreneurship
Section of Financial Engineering

College of Humanities

Human and social sciences teaching program

EPFL Middle East

Section of Energy Management and Sustainability

In addition to the eight schools there are seven closely related institutions

Swiss Cancer Centre
Center for Biomedical Imaging (CIBM)
Centre for Advanced Modelling Science (CADMOS)
École Cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL)
Campus Biotech
Wyss Center for Bio- and Neuro-engineering
Swiss National Supercomputing Centre

From The Jacobs School of Engineering At The University of California-San Diego: “$21 Million Gift to UC San Diego Honors Unique Efforts to Link Chemical and Nano Engineering More Strongly”

From The Jacobs School of Engineering

At

The University of California-San Diego

5.21.24
Daniel Kane
dbkane@ucsd.edu

Jade Griffin
cjgriffin@ucsd.edu

Liezel Labios
llabios@ucsd.edu

Business leader and philanthropist Aiiso Yufeng Li (Jeff) and his wife, DongDong Li (Doreen), made a $21 million gift to chemical and nano engineering at UC San Diego. In recognition of this gift, the department will be renamed the Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering. Photo by Erik Jepsen/ UC San Diego

Invigorated with a $21 million gift from the Li family, UC San Diego’s newly named Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering is unique for its efforts to combine nano-scale discovery, nano-scale engineering and manufacturability driven by advances in chemical engineering.

This transformative gift is one half of two independent milestones for the world-renowned nano engineers and chemical engineers at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

First, to reflect the department’s longstanding efforts to link its existing strengths in chemical and nano engineering more strategically, the engineering terminology in the department name has changed from “NanoEngineering” to “Chemical and Nano Engineering.”

Second, these longstanding efforts at UC San Diego to better link chemical engineering and nano engineering inspired Jeff, a nanoengineer, entrepreneur and philanthropist, and his wife Doreen and their family, to pledge $21 million in support of chemical and nano engineering in the Jacobs School of Engineering.

A team of students completes a chemical engineering experiment as part of the Chemical Engineering Process Laboratory course. Photo by Katherine Connor

The Li family’s gift will support education and research initiatives aimed at strengthening the ties between the two fundamentally complementary disciplines of chemical engineering and nano engineering within the department. The largest two research focus areas within the department are nanomaterials for human health, and nanomaterials for sustainable energy.

“UC San Diego is proud to be at the forefront of engineering innovation, and the Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering is a testament to our commitment to pushing boundaries and driving progress,” said Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla. “By combining these two fields, we are poised to unlock new discoveries that will improve lives and transform industries. We are deeply grateful to Jeff and Doreen for their visionary support, which will accelerate our pursuit of breakthroughs and cement UC San Diego’s position as a global leader in engineering education and research.”

Longstanding efforts to link Chemical and Nano Engineering

“Here at UC San Diego, we have a critical mass of faculty in the department whose research inherently includes strengthening the connections between chemical engineering and nano engineering. Our faculty have a desire to make real-world positive impacts by advancing medicine or improving renewable-energy technologies that drive our efforts as researchers to connect nano-scale engineering and chemical engineering in new ways,” said Liangfang Zhang, professor and department chair of the Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. “I am incredibly thankful for the generous gift from the Aiiso Yufeng Li Family. Their vote of confidence will allow us to accomplish our trailblazing vision to redefine chemical and nano engineering research and education more rapidly and more comprehensively.”

The Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego is unique in its effort to link chemical and nano engineering more strongly – in education and research. Photo by David Baillot

t is this transformative vision linking chemical and nano engineering that captured the attention of Jeff, who is the founder and chief strategy officer (CSO) of CorDx, a global biotech company and leader in the inventing and manufacturing of in vitro diagnostics.

“I am inspired by the department’s vision to unite the disciplines of chemical engineering and nano engineering more fully, with the ultimate goal of benefiting humanity,” said Jeff. “A large part of our success at CorDx can be traced back to our desire and ability to integrate nano-scale science and engineering with chemical engineering. I believe this convergence of nano-scale engineering and chemical engineering represents a bright future for manufacturing in the U.S. When I saw so many faculty in the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering connecting chemical and nano engineering while making research advances, training students and launching startups, I felt even more connected to the university. My family and I are proud to support UC San Diego on its journey to shape the next generation of scientists and engineers by building bridges between chemical and nano engineering. When I say ‘family,’ of course, I am referring to both my biological family and my CorDx family.”

Relevant, interdisciplinary research

In 2007, UC San Diego created the Department of NanoEngineering, which brought together new degree programs and emerging research efforts in nanoengineering with existing degree programs and research efforts in chemical engineering. This initiative was driven by the fact that nanotechnology had become an important academic subject both in terms of education and research. At the same time, a wide range of industries expressed growing nanotechnology workforce needs. Aiming to bridge the gap between nanoscale discovery and scalable production and manufacturing, the university integrated its chemical engineering degree programs and research into the nanoengineering department.

Over the next 17 years, this visionary plan has enhanced the translation of nanoscale research into a wide range of practical applications.

Since that time, the department has made significant strides through interdisciplinary research that links experts from diverse fields, including chemical engineering, nanoengineering, materials science, biomedical engineering, chemistry, physics, biology, medicine and more.

This interdisciplinary culture has catalyzed a diverse array of collaborative research projects that integrate fundamental science with applied research – often related to scaling up of advances in order to enable real-world use. Broadly speaking, the department’s research strengths are in nanoscale materials and technologies for healthcare and renewable energy.

“The research in our department is quite varied, but when I’m describing our work to prospective students, faculty candidates or external collaborators, I highlight the fact that we have extremely strong and broad research strengths in two general areas that are of great importance to society at large: in nanoscale science and engineering to improve health and medicine; and in the creation, characterization and improvement of nanoscale materials for solar panels, batteries and other technologies that help to generate, capture or store renewable energy,” said Zhang, who holds the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Chancellor’s Endowed Chair Professor at UC San Diego.

Discoveries and applications

“What sets our faculty apart is their inherent understanding that fundamental research and real-world application are not mutually exclusive, but synergistic. Our world-class chemical and nano engineering faculty approach their work with a mindset that their fundamental discoveries hold practical use and clinical potential. This is how we are driving forward innovation and impact in our field,” said Zhang.

It is through this aspect of the department’s research and education endeavors that Jeff – the nanoengineer, entrepreneur and philanthropist – was reminded of his own company’s journey from nanoscale discovery to large-scale production. His company, CorDx, stands as a noteworthy example of integrating nanoengineering and chemical engineering, from initial research on molecules and materials to the design and manufacturing of innovative diagnostic products, such as the CorDx TyFast Flu A/B & COVID-19 At Home Multiplex Rapid Test, capable of detecting Flu A, Flu B and COVID-19 simultaneously.

UC San Diego students at all levels – undergraduate, masters and doctorate – will benefit from these closer ties between chemical engineering and nano engineering. Photo by Erik Jepsen/ UC San Diego

Improving educational and career opportunities

Many UC San Diego students at all levels – undergraduate, masters and doctorate – will benefit from these closer ties between chemical engineering and nano engineering. The Li family’s gift will offer concrete support to all student organizations in the department, enhancing both their curricular and extracurricular experiences.

Nano engineering undergraduates, for example, are now encouraged to take chemical engineering classes as electives. This allows them to engage in discovery-oriented research while learning how to scale up those discoveries and turn them into products.

Meanwhile, chemical engineering students who are learning about large-scale production and manufacturing processes are highly encouraged to take classes on fundamental nanoscience, fabrication and characterization techniques, which opens new ways to make use of their chemical engineering expertise.

Masters students in both chemical engineering and nano engineering at UC San Diego have truly unique opportunities to build upon their undergraduate degrees and create compelling professional opportunities in a wide range of industries including biotechnology, drug development and renewable energy.

Doctoral students will be fully engaged in research environments that are unique in the world and will lead to a wide range of career opportunities.

“Our chemical and nano engineering department equips our students with a comprehensive understanding of both disciplines, and this sets us apart from other chemical engineering departments in the nation,” said Albert P. Pisano, Dean of the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and Special Adviser to the Chancellor. “By integrating chemical and nano engineering coursework, we are providing students with a unique skill set that will make them better prepared for their future careers. This is our longstanding vision, and I am thrilled and honored to add my thanks to Jeff, Doreen and the entire family. Our department will have new, game-changing resources to improve the experiences of our students as they move through our career-accelerating degree programs at all levels.”

A sampling of nanomedicine research in the department

A wide range of health-related research led by chemical engineers and nano engineers is powered by nano-scale research advances. Below are just a few examples.

Treatment based on nanoparticles derived from plant viruses shows promise in fighting metastatic cancers in mice

“Plug and play” nanoparticles could make it easier to tackle various biological targets

Biodegradable polymer system offers new hope for treating rheumatoid arthritis

Wireless, wearable ultrasound monitoring is advancing through innovative collaborations

A new technique creates greater fidelity in bioprinting functional human tissues

Targeted drug delivery using microscopic robots to treat deadly pneumonia and other hard-to-treat infections

Advancing predictive assembly and living materials, powered by a prestigious $18 million NSF Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC).

A sampling of renewable energy research in the department

A wide range of battery and solar panel research tied to the UC San Diego Sustainable Power and Energy Center (SPEC) is powered by nano-scale research advances:

A novel anode material to build lithium-ion batteries capable of ultra-fast charging and extended lifespan

An eco-friendly process to restore spent battery materials to mint condition

A predictive database that uses AI to discover new materials for safer and more energy-dense batteries

The discovery of nano-scale changes inside solid-state batteries could lead to improved solid-state battery performance

The use of advanced microscopy to probe inside perovskites at the nanoscale level and elucidate mechanisms of degradation of perovskite solar cells

Work to strengthen the battery ecosystem in San Diego through startups and workforce development.

Related gifts to the Jacobs School

The generosity of the Li family represents more than $26 million in philanthropic support to the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering since 2021.

Gifts have included a $2.1 million gift to support research, education and student activities in the Department of NanoEngineering and a $3 million donation to boost the Jacobs School’s Sustainable Power and Energy Center (SPEC).

In addition, Li donated $210,000 in seed funding to the UC San Diego Department of Bioengineering in 2021. The gift played a key role in building momentum for the department, which was later renamed the Shu Chien-Gene Lay Department of Bioengineering thanks to a generous gift from Gene Lay. The seed funding is also helping to unlock additional resources to upgrade hands-on bioengineering teaching laboratories.

“We are deeply grateful to Jeff, Doreen and their entire family and community for their generosity, vision and support,” said Pisano. “Their recent philanthropic support for our efforts to advance sustainable energy innovation through our Sustainable Power and Energy Center and to strengthen chemical and nano engineering efforts are deeply meaningful and will yield incredible results in their own right.”

See the full article here.

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct.

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

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About the Jacobs School of Engineering
Innovation Happens Here

The University of California-San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering is a premier research school set apart by our entrepreneurial culture and integrative engineering approach.

The Jacobs School’s Mission:

Educate Tomorrow’s Technology Leaders
Conduct Leading Edge Research and Drive Innovation
Transfer Discoveries for the Benefit of Society

The Jacobs School’s Values:

Engineering for the global good
Exponential impact through entrepreneurism
Collaboration to enrich relevance
Our education models focus on deep and broad engineering fundamentals, enhanced by real-world design and research, often in partnership with industry. Through our Team Internship Program and GlobalTeams in Engineering Service program, for example, we encourage students to develop their communications and leadership skills while working in the kind of multi-disciplinary team environment experienced by real-world engineers.

We are home to exciting research centers, such as the San Diego Supercomputer Center, a national resource for data-intensive computing; our Powell Structural Research Laboratories, the largest and most active in the world for full-scale structural testing; and the Qualcomm Institute, which is the UC San Diego division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), which is forging new ground in multi-disciplinary applications for information technology.

Located at the hub of San Diego’s thriving information technology, biotechnology, clean technology, and nanotechnology sectors, the Jacobs School proactively seeks corporate partners to collaborate with us in research, education and innovation.

The University of California-San Diego is a public land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Institution of Oceanography, The University of California-San Diego is the southernmost of the ten campuses of the University of California, and offers over 200 undergraduate and graduate degree programs. The University of California-San Diego occupies 2,178 acres (881 ha) near the coast of the Pacific Ocean, with the main campus resting on approximately 1,152 acres (466 ha). The University of California-San Diego is ranked among the best universities in the world by major college and university rankings.

The University of California-San Diego consists of twelve undergraduate, graduate and professional schools as well as seven undergraduate residential colleges. It regularly receives over 140,000 applications for undergraduate admissions. The University of California-San Diego San Diego Health, the region’s only academic health system, provides patient care, conducts medical research and educates future health care professionals at The University of California-San Diego Medical Center, Hillcrest, Jacobs Medical Center, Moores Cancer Center, Sulpizio Cardiovascular Center, Shiley Eye Institute, Institute for Genomic Medicine, Koman Family Outpatient Pavilion and various express care and urgent care clinics throughout San Diego.

The University of California-San Diego operates 19 organized research units as well as eight School of Medicine research units, six research centers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and two multi-campus initiatives. The University of California-San Diego is also closely affiliated with several regional research centers, such as The Salk Institute, the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine, and The Scripps Research Institute. It is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”.

The University of California-San Diego is considered one of the country’s “Public Ivies”. The University of California-San Diego faculty, researchers, and alumni have won Nobel Prizes as well as Fields Medals, National Medals of Science, MacArthur Fellowships, and Pulitzer Prizes. Additionally, of the current faculty, a number have been elected to The National Academy of Engineering, The National Academy of Sciences, The National Academy of Medicine and to The American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

History

When the Regents of the University of California originally authorized The University of California-San Diego campus in 1956, it was planned to be a graduate and research institution, providing instruction in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering. Local citizens supported the idea, voting the same year to transfer to the university 59 acres (24 ha) of mesa land on the coast near the preexisting Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The Regents requested an additional gift of 550 acres (220 ha) of undeveloped mesa land northeast of Scripps, as well as 500 acres (200 ha) on the former site of Camp Matthews from the federal government, but Roger Revelle, then director of Scripps Institution and main advocate for establishing the new campus, jeopardized the site selection by exposing the La Jolla community’s exclusive real estate business practices, which were antagonistic to minority racial and religious groups. This outraged local conservatives, as well as Regent Edwin W. Pauley.

University of California President Clark Kerr satisfied San Diego city donors by changing the proposed name from University of California, La Jolla, to University of California-San Diego. The city voted in agreement to its part in 1958, and the University of California approved construction of the new campus in 1960. Because of the clash with Pauley, Revelle was not made chancellor. Herbert York, first director of The DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, was designated instead. York planned the main campus according to the “Oxbridge” model, relying on many of Revelle’s ideas.

According to Kerr, “San Diego always asked for the best,” though this created much friction throughout the University of California system, including with Kerr himself, because The University of California-San Diego often seemed to be “asking for too much and too fast.” Kerr attributed The University of California-San Diego’s “special personality” to Scripps, which for over five decades had been the most isolated University of California unit in every sense: geographically, financially, and institutionally. It was a great shock to the Scripps community to learn that Scripps was now expected to become the nucleus of a new University of California campus and would now be the object of far more attention from both the university administration in Berkeley and the state government in Sacramento.

The University of California-San Diego was the first general campus of the University of California to be designed “from the top down” in terms of research emphasis. Local leaders disagreed on whether the new school should be a technical research institute or a more broadly based school that included undergraduates as well. John Jay Hopkins of General Dynamics Corporation pledged one million dollars for the former while the City Council offered free land for the latter. The original authorization for The University of California-San Diego campus given by the University of California Regents in 1956 approved a “graduate program in science and technology” that included undergraduate programs, a compromise that won both the support of General Dynamics and the city voters’ approval.

Nobel laureate Harold Urey, a physicist from the University of Chicago, and Hans Suess, who had published the first paper on the greenhouse effect with Revelle in the previous year, were early recruits to the faculty in 1958. Maria Goeppert-Mayer, later the second female Nobel laureate in physics, was appointed professor of physics in 1960. The graduate division of the school opened in 1960 with 20 faculty in residence, with instruction offered in the fields of physics, biology, chemistry, and earth science. Before the main campus completed construction, classes were held in the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

By 1963, new facilities on the mesa had been finished for the School of Science and Engineering, and new buildings were under construction for Social Sciences and Humanities. Ten additional faculty in those disciplines were hired, and the whole site was designated the First College, later renamed after Roger Revelle, of the new campus. York resigned as chancellor that year and was replaced by John Semple Galbraith. The undergraduate program accepted its first class of 181 freshman at Revelle College in 1964. Second College was founded in 1964, on the land deeded by the federal government, and named after environmentalist John Muir two years later. The University of California-San Diego School of Medicine also accepted its first students in 1966.

Political theorist Herbert Marcuse joined the faculty in 1965. A champion of the New Left, he reportedly was the first protester to occupy the administration building in a demonstration organized by his student, political activist Angela Davis. The American Legion offered to buy out the remainder of Marcuse’s contract for $20,000; the Regents censured Chancellor William J. McGill for defending Marcuse on the basis of academic freedom, but further action was averted after local leaders expressed support for Marcuse. Further student unrest was felt at the university, as the United States increased its involvement in the Vietnam War during the mid-1960s, when a student raised a Viet Minh flag over the campus. Protests escalated as the war continued and were only exacerbated after the National Guard fired on student protesters at Kent State University in 1970. Over 200 students occupied Urey Hall, with one student setting himself on fire in protest of the war.

Early research activity and faculty quality, notably in the sciences, was integral to shaping the focus and culture of the university. Even before The University of California-San Diego had its own campus, faculty recruits had already made significant research breakthroughs, such as the Keeling Curve, a graph that plots rapidly increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and was the first significant evidence for global climate change; the Kohn–Sham equations, used to investigate particular atoms and molecules in quantum chemistry; and the Miller–Urey experiment, which gave birth to the field of prebiotic chemistry.

Engineering, particularly computer science, became an important part of the university’s academics as it matured. University researchers helped develop The University of California-San Diego Pascal, an early machine-independent programming language that later heavily influenced Java; the National Science Foundation Network, a precursor to the Internet; and the Network News Transfer Protocol during the late 1970s to 1980s. In economics, the methods for analyzing economic time series with time-varying volatility (ARCH), and with common trends (co-integration) were developed. The University of California-San Diego maintained its research intense character after its founding, racking up many Nobel Laureates affiliated within 50 years of history.

Under Richard C. Atkinson’s leadership as chancellor from 1980 to 1995, The University of California-San Diego strengthened its ties with the city of San Diego by encouraging technology transfer with developing companies, transforming San Diego into a world leader in technology-based industries. He oversaw a rapid expansion of the School of Engineering, later renamed after Qualcomm founder Irwin M. Jacobs, with the construction of the San Diego Supercomputer Center and establishment of the computer science, electrical engineering, and bioengineering departments. Private donations increased from $15 million to nearly $50 million annually, faculty expanded by nearly 50%, and enrollment grew during his administration. By the end of his chancellorship, the quality of The University of California-San Diego graduate programs was ranked highly in the nation by The National Research Council.

The University of California-San Diego continued to undergo further expansion during the first decade of the new millennium with the establishment and construction of two new professional schools — the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Rady School of Management—and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, a research institute run jointly with University of California-Irvine. The University of California-San Diego also reached two financial milestones during this time, becoming the first university in the western region to raise over $1 billion in its eight-year fundraising campaign in 2007 and also obtaining an additional $1 billion through research contracts and grants in a single fiscal year for the first time. Despite this, due to the California budget crisis, the university loaned $40 million against its own assets in 2009 to offset a significant reduction in state educational appropriations. The salary of Pradeep Khosla, who became chancellor in 2012, has been the subject of controversy amidst continued budget cuts and tuition increases.

On November 27, 2017, The University of California-San Diego announced it would leave its longtime athletic home of the California Collegiate Athletic Association, an NCAA Division II league, to begin a transition to Division I in 2020. At that time, it would join the Big West Conference, already home to four other UC campuses (Davis, Irvine, Riverside, and Santa Barbara). The transition period would run through the 2023–24 school year. The university prepared to transition to NCAA Division I competition on July 1, 2020.

Research

Applied Physics and Mathematics

The Nature Index lists The University of California-San Diego highly in the United States for research output by article count. The university operates several organized research units, including the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences (CASS), the Center for Drug Discovery Innovation, and the Institute for Neural Computation. The University of California-San Diego also maintains close ties to the nearby Scripps Research Institute and Salk Institute for Biological Studies. In 1977, The University of California-San Diego developed and released the University of California-San Diego Pascal programming language. The university was designated as one of the original national Alzheimer’s disease research centers in 1984 by the National Institute on Aging. In 2018, The University of California-San Diego received $10.5 million from The DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration to establish the Center for Matters under Extreme Pressure (CMEC).

The University of California-San Diego founded The San Diego Supercomputer Center in 1985, which provides high performance computing for research in various scientific disciplines. In 2000, The University of California-San Diego partnered with The University of California-Irvine to create the Qualcomm Institute, which integrates research in photonics, nanotechnology, and wireless telecommunication to develop solutions to problems in energy, health, and the environment.

The University of California-San Diego also operates the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, one of the largest centers of research in earth science in the world, which predates the university itself. Together, SDSC and SIO, along with funding partner universities California Institute of Technology, San Diego State University, and The University of California-Santa Barbara, manage the High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network.

From The School of Science At The Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “An expansive approach to making new compounds”

From The School of Science

At

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

5.21.24
Anne Trafton

To create molecules with unique properties, Associate Professor Robert Gilliard and his team deploy strategies from both organic and inorganic chemistry.

MIT chemistry professor Robert Gilliard embraces an expansive style of research, mixing different approaches and drawing from a variety of areas of expertise, including organic and inorganic chemistry. Photo: Molly Angevine

While most chemistry labs focus on either organic (carbon-containing) or inorganic (metal-containing) molecules, Robert Gilliard’s lab takes a more expansive approach.

On any given day in his lab, researchers may be synthesizing new materials that can light up or change color in response to temperature changes, designing new molecules that activate chemical bonds, or finding new ways to make useful compounds out of carbon dioxide. Mixing different approaches and drawing from a variety of areas of expertise is the defining feature of his lab’s style of chemistry.

“At the core of our program, we are a chemical synthesis lab. We make molecules,” Gilliard says. “I have students that are in the organic division and students that are in the inorganic division, and we combine concepts from both worlds. We really can’t do our chemistry without both.”

Some of the molecules his lab creates require such specialized laboratory skills that very few other labs even try to make them. These compounds have a variety of unique optical and electrical properties that have drawn interest from companies that make LEDs and other optoelectronic devices.

Previously a professor at the University of Virginia, Gilliard joined the MIT faculty in 2023 as the Novartis Associate Professor of Chemistry, in part because of the opportunities to work with engineers to investigate device applications for those molecules, and to connect with companies interested in their lighting-generating properties.

“By bringing in components from different subareas of chemistry, we have generated some interesting optical and electronic properties in these compounds,” he says.

A winding path

After joining the faculty at UVA in 2017, Gilliard had no inkling that he would soon end up at MIT. His path to the Institute began soon after beginning his appointment, when he invited Christopher “Kit” Cummins, the Dreyfus Professor of Chemistry at MIT, to give a seminar at UVA. Cummins was very interested in the compounds Gilliard was working on and suggested that Gilliard come to MIT for six months as part of the MLK Visiting Professors and Scholars Program.

At the time, Gilliard was still getting settled as a new faculty member and didn’t want to leave his lab, but a few years later, when things were up and running, he joined the MLK program for the 2021-2022 school year. He worked closely with Cummins and others in MIT’s Department of Chemistry, and at the end of the year, department head Troy Van Voorhis broached the idea of bringing him to MIT as a permanent faculty member.

Gilliard, taken by surprise, had no intention of leaving his position at UVA, but he was intrigued by the opportunities for collaboration at MIT and in the Boston area in general.

“The MLK program was a great experience, a well-organized program that really exposed me to the whole MIT institution. I can say this, and I mean it: There’s no way I would’ve come here as a faculty member had I not done that MLK fellowship,” Gilliard says. “I was really enjoying my appointment at the University of Virginia and students that I had, and colleagues there. It would have been nearly impossible to get me to move if I hadn’t already spent that time at MIT and enjoyed the atmosphere and the people.”

Gilliard first became interested in chemistry as a high school student in Hartsville, South Carolina, thanks to an inspiring teacher, Charlotte Godwin, who taught his chemistry, physics, and physical science honors classes. He went to Clemson University planning to study premed, but he wasn’t enthusiastic about that choice.

“Before I arrived, I think I already knew I wasn’t going to do that because I don’t really like hospitals that much,” he recalls. “And so I changed my major before I even arrived, and I changed it to engineering.”

Clemson has a well-known engineering program, but after a couple of classes, Gilliard realized that wasn’t the best choice for him, either. He was, however, enjoying his chemistry classes, so he switched his major to chemistry and signed up to do undergraduate research.

He ended up working with a professor named Rhett Smith, who had just joined the Clemson faculty after doing a postdoc at MIT with Professor Stephen Lippard. In Smith’s lab, Gilliard worked on synthesizing catalysts as well as molecules that could be used as sensors, including sensors for cyanide and TNT, an explosive.

“That was just an amazing experience,” he says. “That’s when I knew that research was something that I enjoyed and that I would likely go on to graduate school.”

When he wasn’t working in Smith’s lab, Gilliard was still immersed in chemistry, working in the organic chemistry teaching labs. “I was doing so much chemistry, but I was having fun with it, so it didn’t really feel like work. It felt like something exciting to explore,” he says.

Novel compounds

As a graduate student at the University of Georgia, Gilliard focused on inorganic main-group chemistry but also took organic chemistry courses and was a teaching assistant for two organic chemistry classes. “I knew that I wanted to learn as much organic chemistry as possible because it would be beneficial for my career,” he says.

For his PhD research, he studied chemical bonds that can form between main-group elements — elements found at the edges of the periodic table, in columns 1-2 and 13-18. These types of bonds can be very difficult to achieve, but once made, they expand the possible bonding scenarios for non-transition metal elements, which makes them useful in a range of chemical reactions.

While doing a postdoctoral fellowship, which he divided between the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich) and Case Western Reserve University, Gilliard worked on combining small phosphorus-containing reagents into phosphorus heterocycles, which consist of multiple varied rings fused together.

At the University of Virginia, and now in his lab at MIT, Gilliard continued to study heterocycles, now focusing mainly on boron heterocycles. These molecules hold potential in numerous optical and electronic applications, in part because of their ability to efficiently donate or accept electrons from other molecules. Recently, in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Gilliard’s lab published the first examples of boraphenalenyl radicals and diborepin biradicals that exhibit this important redox behavior. Such materials can also be used to make stimuli-responsive materials and chemical sensors, or to advance various light-emitting or absorbing technologies.

His lab also works on compounds containing bismuth and antimony that can be used to activate carbon-hydrogen bonds. Another area of focus is capturing carbon dioxide and converting it into useful chemicals.

The success of all of these projects, Gilliard says, depends on the “great team” working in his lab, including several students, postdocs, and research scientists who came with him from the University of Virginia.

“A lot of the compounds that we make are very, very difficult. They require specialized techniques and skills, so I’m grateful to have talented folks working in my lab,” he says.

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct.

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

MIT School of Science

The MIT School of Science is one of the five schools of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The School is composed of 6 academic departments who grant SB, SM, and PhD or ScD degrees; as well as a number of affiliated laboratories and centers.
Biology
Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Chemistry
Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences
Mathematics
Physics

With approximately 275 faculty members, 1100 graduate students, 700 undergraduate majors, 500 postdocs, and 400 research staff, the School is the second largest at MIT. Faculty members and alumni of the School have won Nobel Prizes.

USPS “Forever” postage stamps celebrating Innovation at MIT.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The institute has an urban campus that extends more than a mile (1.6 km) alongside the Charles River. The institute also encompasses a number of major off-campus facilities such as the MIT Lincoln Laboratory , the MIT Bates Research and Engineering Center , and the Haystack Observatory , as well as affiliated laboratories such as the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Whitehead Institute.

Founded in 1861 in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States, Massachusetts Institute of Technology adopted a European polytechnic university model and stressed laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering. It has since played a key role in the development of many aspects of modern science, engineering, mathematics, and technology, and is widely known for its innovation and academic strength. It is frequently regarded as one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

Nobel laureates, Turing Award winners, and Fields Medalists have been affiliated with MIT as alumni, faculty members, or researchers. In addition, National Medal of Science recipients, National Medals of Technology and Innovation recipients, MacArthur Fellows, Marshall Scholars, Mitchell Scholars, Schwarzman Scholars, astronauts, and Chief Scientists of the U.S. Air Force have been affiliated with The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The university also has a strong entrepreneurial culture and MIT alumni have founded or co-founded many notable companies. Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a member of the Association of American Universities.

Foundation and vision

In 1859, a proposal was submitted to the Massachusetts General Court to use newly filled lands in Back Bay, Boston for a “Conservatory of Art and Science”, but the proposal failed. A charter for the incorporation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed by William Barton Rogers, was signed by John Albion Andrew, the governor of Massachusetts, on April 10, 1861.

Rogers, a professor from the University of Virginia , wanted to establish an institution to address rapid scientific and technological advances. He did not wish to found a professional school, but a combination with elements of both professional and liberal education, proposing that:

“The true and only practicable object of a polytechnic school is, as I conceive, the teaching, not of the minute details and manipulations of the arts, which can be done only in the workshop, but the inculcation of those scientific principles which form the basis and explanation of them, and along with this, a full and methodical review of all their leading processes and operations in connection with physical laws.”

The Rogers Plan reflected the German research university model, emphasizing an independent faculty engaged in research, as well as instruction oriented around seminars and laboratories.

Early developments

Two days after The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was chartered, the first battle of the Civil War broke out. After a long delay through the war years, MIT’s first classes were held in the Mercantile Building in Boston in 1865. The new institute was founded as part of the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act to fund institutions “to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes” and was a land-grant school. In 1863 under the same act, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts founded the Massachusetts Agricultural College, which developed as the University of Massachusetts Amherst ). In 1866, the proceeds from land sales went toward new buildings in the Back Bay.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was informally called “Boston Tech”. The institute adopted the European polytechnic university model and emphasized laboratory instruction from an early date. Despite chronic financial problems, the institute saw growth in the last two decades of the 19th century under President Francis Amasa Walker. Programs in electrical, chemical, marine, and sanitary engineering were introduced, new buildings were built, and the size of the student body increased to more than one thousand.

The curriculum drifted to a vocational emphasis, with less focus on theoretical science. The fledgling school still suffered from chronic financial shortages which diverted the attention of the MIT leadership. During these “Boston Tech” years, Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty and alumni rebuffed Harvard University president (and former MIT faculty) Charles W. Eliot’s repeated attempts to merge MIT with Harvard College’s Lawrence Scientific School. There would be at least six attempts to absorb MIT into Harvard. In its cramped Back Bay location, MIT could not afford to expand its overcrowded facilities, driving a desperate search for a new campus and funding. Eventually, the MIT Corporation approved a formal agreement to merge with Harvard, over the vehement objections of MIT faculty, students, and alumni. However, a 1917 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court effectively put an end to the merger scheme.

In 1916, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology administration and the MIT charter crossed the Charles River on the ceremonial barge Bucentaur built for the occasion, to signify MIT’s move to a spacious new campus largely consisting of filled land on a one-mile-long (1.6 km) tract along the Cambridge side of the Charles River. The neoclassical “New Technology” campus was designed by William W. Bosworth and had been funded largely by anonymous donations from a mysterious “Mr. Smith”, starting in 1912. In January 1920, the donor was revealed to be the industrialist George Eastman of Rochester, New York, who had invented methods of film production and processing, and founded Eastman Kodak. Between 1912 and 1920, Eastman donated $20 million ($236.6 million in 2015 dollars) in cash and Kodak stock to MIT.

Curricular reforms

In the 1930s, President Karl Taylor Compton and Vice-President (effectively Provost) Vannevar Bush emphasized the importance of pure sciences like physics and chemistry and reduced the vocational practice required in shops and drafting studios. The Compton reforms “renewed confidence in the ability of the Institute to develop leadership in science as well as in engineering”. Unlike Ivy League schools, Massachusetts Institute of Technology catered more to middle-class families, and depended more on tuition than on endowments or grants for its funding. The school was elected to the Association of American Universities in 1934.

Still, as late as 1949, the Lewis Committee lamented in its report on the state of education at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology that “the Institute is widely conceived as basically a vocational school”, a “partly unjustified” perception the committee sought to change. The report comprehensively reviewed the undergraduate curriculum, recommended offering a broader education, and warned against letting engineering and government-sponsored research detract from the sciences and humanities. The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and the MIT Sloan School of Management were formed in 1950 to compete with the powerful Schools of Science and Engineering. Previously marginalized faculties in the areas of economics, management, political science, and linguistics emerged into cohesive and assertive departments by attracting respected professors and launching competitive graduate programs. The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences continued to develop under the successive terms of the more humanistically oriented presidents Howard W. Johnson and Jerome Wiesner between 1966 and 1980.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology‘s involvement in military science surged during World War II. In 1941, Vannevar Bush was appointed head of the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development and directed funding to only a select group of universities, including MIT. Engineers and scientists from across the country gathered at Massachusetts Institute of Technology ‘s Radiation Laboratory, established in 1940 to assist the British military in developing microwave radar. The work done there significantly affected both the war and subsequent research in the area. Other defense projects included gyroscope-based and other complex control systems for gunsight, bombsight, and inertial navigation under Charles Stark Draper’s Instrumentation Laboratory; the development of a digital computer for flight simulations under Project Whirlwind; and high-speed and high-altitude photography under Harold Edgerton. By the end of the war, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology became the nation’s largest wartime R&D contractor (attracting some criticism of Bush), employing nearly 4000 in the Radiation Laboratory alone and receiving in excess of $100 million ($1.2 billion in 2015 dollars) before 1946. Work on defense projects continued even after then. Post-war government-sponsored research at MIT included SAGE and guidance systems for ballistic missiles and Project Apollo.

These activities affected The Massachusetts Institute of Technology profoundly. A 1949 report noted the lack of “any great slackening in the pace of life at the Institute” to match the return to peacetime, remembering the “academic tranquility of the prewar years”, though acknowledging the significant contributions of military research to the increased emphasis on graduate education and rapid growth of personnel and facilities. The faculty doubled and the graduate student body quintupled during the terms of Karl Taylor Compton, president of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology between 1930 and 1948; James Rhyne Killian, president from 1948 to 1957; and Julius Adams Stratton, chancellor from 1952 to 1957, whose institution-building strategies shaped the expanding university. By the 1950s, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology no longer simply benefited the industries with which it had worked for three decades, and it had developed closer working relationships with new patrons, philanthropic foundations and the federal government.

In late 1960s and early 1970s, student and faculty activists protested against the Vietnam War and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology ‘s defense research. In this period Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s various departments were researching helicopters, smart bombs and counterinsurgency techniques for the war in Vietnam as well as guidance systems for nuclear missiles. The Union of Concerned Scientists was founded on March 4, 1969 during a meeting of faculty members and students seeking to shift the emphasis on military research toward environmental and social problems. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology ultimately divested itself from the Instrumentation Laboratory and moved all classified research off-campus to the MIT Lincoln Laboratory facility in 1973 in response to the protests. The student body, faculty, and administration remained comparatively unpolarized during what was a tumultuous time for many other universities. Johnson was seen to be highly successful in leading his institution to “greater strength and unity” after these times of turmoil. However, six Massachusetts Institute of Technology students were sentenced to prison terms at this time and some former student leaders, such as Michael Albert and George Katsiaficas, are still indignant about MIT’s role in military research and its suppression of these protests. (Richard Leacock’s film, November Actions, records some of these tumultuous events.)

In the 1980s, there was more controversy at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology over its involvement in SDI (space weaponry) and CBW (chemical and biological warfare) research. More recently, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s research for the military has included work on robots, drones and ‘battle suits’.

Recent history

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has kept pace with and helped to advance the digital age. In addition to developing the predecessors to modern computing and networking technologies, students, staff, and faculty members at Project MAC, the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and the Tech Model Railroad Club wrote some of the earliest interactive computer video games like Spacewar! and created much of modern hacker slang and culture. Several major computer-related organizations have originated at MIT since the 1980s: Richard Stallman’s GNU Project and the subsequent Free Software Foundation were founded in the mid-1980s at the AI Lab; the MIT Media Lab was founded in 1985 by Nicholas Negroponte and Jerome Wiesner to promote research into novel uses of computer technology; the World Wide Web Consortium standards organization was founded at the Laboratory for Computer Science in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee; the MIT OpenCourseWare project has made course materials for over 2,000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology classes available online free of charge since 2002; and the One Laptop per Child initiative to expand computer education and connectivity to children worldwide was launched in 2005.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was named a sea-grant college in 1976 to support its programs in oceanography and marine sciences and was named a space-grant college in 1989 to support its aeronautics and astronautics programs. Despite diminishing government financial support over the past quarter century, MIT launched several successful development campaigns to significantly expand the campus: new dormitories and athletics buildings on west campus; the Tang Center for Management Education; several buildings in the northeast corner of campus supporting research into biology, brain and cognitive sciences, genomics, biotechnology, and cancer research; and a number of new “backlot” buildings on Vassar Street including the Stata Center. Construction on campus in the 2000s included expansions of the Media Lab, the Sloan School’s eastern campus, and graduate residences in the northwest. In 2006, President Hockfield launched the MIT Energy Research Council to investigate the interdisciplinary challenges posed by increasing global energy consumption.

In 2001, inspired by the open source and open access movements, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched “OpenCourseWare” to make the lecture notes, problem sets, syllabi, exams, and lectures from the great majority of its courses available online for no charge, though without any formal accreditation for coursework completed. While the cost of supporting and hosting the project is high, OCW expanded in 2005 to include other universities as a part of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, which currently includes more than 250 academic institutions with content available in at least six languages. In 2011, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced it would offer formal certification (but not credits or degrees) to online participants completing coursework in its “MITx” program, for a modest fee. The “edX” online platform supporting MITx was initially developed in partnership with Harvard and its analogous “Harvardx” initiative. The courseware platform is open source, and other universities have already joined and added their own course content. In March 2009 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty adopted an open-access policy to make its scholarship publicly accessible online.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has its own police force. Three days after the Boston Marathon bombing of April 2013, MIT Police patrol officer Sean Collier was fatally shot by the suspects Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, setting off a violent manhunt that shut down the campus and much of the Boston metropolitan area for a day. One week later, Collier’s memorial service was attended by more than 10,000 people, in a ceremony hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology community with thousands of police officers from the New England region and Canada. On November 25, 2013, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced the creation of the Collier Medal, to be awarded annually to “an individual or group that embodies the character and qualities that Officer Collier exhibited as a member of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology community and in all aspects of his life”. The announcement further stated that “Future recipients of the award will include those whose contributions exceed the boundaries of their profession, those who have contributed to building bridges across the community, and those who consistently and selflessly perform acts of kindness”.

In September 2017, the school announced the creation of an artificial intelligence research lab called the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. IBM will spend $240 million over the next decade, and the lab will be staffed by MIT and IBM scientists. In October 2018 MIT announced that it would open a new Schwarzman College of Computing dedicated to the study of artificial intelligence, named after lead donor and The Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman. The focus of the new college is to study not just AI, but interdisciplinary AI education, and how AI can be used in fields as diverse as history and biology. The cost of buildings and new faculty for the new college is expected to be $1 billion upon completion.

The Caltech/MIT Advanced aLIGO was designed and constructed by a team of scientists from California Institute of Technology , Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and industrial contractors, and funded by the National Science Foundation .

Caltech /MIT Advanced aLigo

It was designed to open the field of gravitational-wave astronomy through the detection of gravitational waves predicted by general relativity. Gravitational waves were detected for the first time by the LIGO detector in 2015. For contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves, two Caltech physicists, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Rainer Weiss won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2017. Weiss, who is also a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, designed the laser interferometric technique, which served as the essential blueprint for the LIGO.

The mission of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the twenty-first century. We seek to develop in each member of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology community the ability and passion to work wisely, creatively, and effectively for the betterment of humankind.

From The Faculty of Arts and Sciences At Yale University: “Sun, sustainability, and silicon: A double dose of Yale solar fuel research”

From The Faculty of Arts and Sciences

At

Yale University

5.17.24
Jim Shelton

Two Yale-led studies indicate the promise of finding hybrid approaches to developing alternative solar fuels.

Illustration by Michael S. Helfenbein

The CHASE is on to develop a new generation of liquid fuels that are activated by sunlight, and Yale researchers are helping to lead the way.

Over the past decade, basic research aimed at creating sustainable, solar-powered liquid fuel has reached a crossroads. New semiconductor materials can effectively capture sunlight and catalyze the conversion of carbon dioxide into valuable products, such as liquid fuels. However, it is often challenging to form a single product. Molecular catalysts can form a single product from carbon dioxide (CO2) but are not stable. Consequently, many scientists say neither of those approaches is adequate for large scale production.

But a third methodology is now emerging. Yale chemists involved in the Center for Hybrid Approaches to Solar Energy (CHASE) are combining new semiconductor materials with new molecular catalysts into more powerful, streamlined processes that may be scalable for wider use.

This promising new approach, which is described in two recent studies, represents a “best of both worlds” approach, researchers say, which could lead to game-changing, alternative fuel products that have the added benefit of removing CO2 from the air.

“Both of these papers give me a lot of hope that a hybrid approach can work,” said Eleanor Stewart-Jones, a graduate student in Yale’s Department of Chemistry and co-first author of one of the studies. “We’re definitely finding new ways to improve or enhance reactivity.”

Roughly a dozen Yale faculty members and graduate students are part of CHASE, a federally funded solar energy research hub comprised of six U.S. research institutions and based at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. CHASE’s mission is to accelerate research that may lead to the production of liquid fuels from sunlight, water, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide.

Yale’s contingent includes Nilay Hazari, the John Randolph Huffman Professor of Chemistry; James Mayer, the Charlotte Fitch Roberts Professor of Chemistry; and Hailiang Wang, professor of chemistry, all from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

“It has been inspiring to see the dedication that our students, postdoctoral researchers, and our colleagues at partner institutions are bringing to this work,” Wang said. “Each new discovery brings us closer to developing the technology necessary for practical solar fuels.”

Yale’s research ingenuity is front and center in the two new CHASE studies, both published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. They focus on silicon-based photoelectrodes — the components in solar batteries that draw in sunlight and convert it into electrical energy.

In the first study [Journal of the American Chemical Society], led by Wang’s lab at Yale and the lab of Tianquan Lian at Emory University, researchers constructed an electrode consisting of an array of silicon micropillars, coated with a layer of superhydrophobic fluorinated carbon.

This strategy boosted the overall electrode surface area and led to a dramatic rise in catalytic activity. “We saw a remarkable increase, up to 17 times more catalytic activity than the previous record for silicon photoelectrodes,” said Bo Shang, a Yale graduate student in chemistry and co-first author of the study.

The approach yielded the most efficient CO2 photoelectrocatalytic conversion of sunlight to methanol, based on silicon, ever reported. Methanol is a colorless, alternative liquid fuel.

For the second study [Journal of the American Chemical Society], the Yale labs of Mayer and Hazari collaborated on a process involving thin wafers of porous silicon, a form of silicon that is etched with channels called nanopores. The researchers attached a molecular rhenium catalyst to these electrode wafers.

“To our knowledge, this is the first time anyone has attached a molecular catalyst to porous silicon,” said Stewart-Jones, a graduate student in Mayer’s lab and co-first author of the study.

The resulting chemical reaction, sparked by sunlight, transforms CO2 into carbon monoxide in a more consistent and reproducible manner than when molecular catalysts are paired with flat, non-porous silicon.

“We have successfully immobilized an effective molecular CO2 reduction catalyst onto a sunlight-absorbing silicon material,” said Xiaofan Jia, a postdoctoral researcher in the Hazari lab and the study’s other co-first author. “This enables the device to directly utilize energy from sunlight to produce fuels.”

Taken together, both studies highlight the diversity and creativity of the CHASE project, Wang said.

“These two works both develop CO2 reduction photoelectrodes with silicon and a molecular catalyst, but take very different approaches,” Wang said.

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Stone Carvings

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences is home to 1000+ faculty and 40 departments and programs that span the divisions of Humanities, Social Science, and Science. Our work transforms the lives of our students and leads to fundamental discoveries that change understandings of the past and shape experiences of the future. Below, you will find news and stories of the impact of the FAS along with resources for FAS faculty and staff.

The mission of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences is to preserve, advance, and transmit knowledge through inspiring research, teaching, and art.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) comprises the 40+ departments and programs that, along with the departments of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, provide instruction to the students of Yale College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, including the ladder, instructional, and research faculty members who hold primary or fully joint appointments in them. The FAS spans three broad intellectual areas, represented by the divisions of Humanities, Social Science, and Science. All members of the FAS faculty hold appointments in at least one of these divisions. Through joint appointments and other affiliations, many members of the FAS also carry out their work in Yale’s professional schools or in the West Campus institutes.

The FAS Dean, assisted by the academic deans, divisional deans, and administrative staff, oversees the activities and decisions that shape the quality of the faculty and the stature of the FAS departments, including faculty searches, recruitment, hiring, mentoring, promotions, retentions, and compensation. Additionally, the office oversees departmental staffing, budgeting, strategic planning, and policies and practices throughout the FAS.

The FAS Dean’s Office seeks to facilitate the outstanding accomplishments of the FAS faculty in their teaching, research, and contributions to the university community.

Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine Colonial Colleges chartered before the American Revolution. The Collegiate School was renamed Yale College in 1718 to honor the school’s largest private benefactor for the first century of its existence, Elihu Yale. Yale University is consistently ranked as one of the top universities and is considered one of the most prestigious in the nation.

Chartered by Connecticut Colony, the Collegiate School was established in 1701 by clergy to educate Congregational ministers before moving to New Haven in 1716. Originally restricted to theology and sacred languages, the curriculum began to incorporate humanities and sciences by the time of the American Revolution. In the 19th century, the college expanded into graduate and professional instruction, awarding the first PhD in the United States in 1861 and organizing as a university in 1887. Yale’s faculty and student populations grew after 1890 with rapid expansion of the physical campus and scientific research.

Yale is organized into fourteen constituent schools: the original undergraduate college, the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and twelve professional schools. While the university is governed by the Yale Corporation, each school’s faculty oversees its curriculum and degree programs. In addition to a central campus in downtown New Haven, the university owns athletic facilities in western New Haven, a campus in West Haven, Connecticut, and forests and nature preserves throughout New England. As of June 2020, the university’s endowment was valued at $31.1 billion, the second largest of any educational institution. The Yale University Library, serving all constituent schools, holds more than 15 million volumes and is the third-largest academic library in the United States. Students compete in intercollegiate sports as the Yale Bulldogs in the NCAA Division I – Ivy League.

Nobel laureates, Fields Medalists, Abel Prize laureates, and Turing award winners have been affiliated with Yale University. In addition, Yale has graduated many notable alumni, including U.S. Presidents, U.S. Supreme Court Justices, living billionaires, and heads of state. Hundreds of members of Congress and many U.S. diplomats, MacArthur Fellows, Rhodes Scholars, Marshall Scholars, and Mitchell Scholars have been affiliated with the university.

Research

Yale is a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU) and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. According to the National Science Foundation , Yale spends $990 million on research and development.

Yale’s faculty include members of the National Academy of Sciences , members of the National Academy of Engineering and members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . The college is, after normalization for institution size, the tenth-largest baccalaureate source of doctoral degree recipients in the United States, and the largest such source within the Ivy League.

Yale’s English and Comparative Literature departments were part of the New Criticism movement. Of the New Critics, Robert Penn Warren, W.K. Wimsatt, and Cleanth Brooks were all Yale faculty. Later, the Yale Comparative literature department became a center of American deconstruction. Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, taught at the Department of Comparative Literature from the late seventies to mid-1980s. Several other Yale faculty members were also associated with deconstruction, forming the so-called “Yale School”. These included Paul de Man who taught in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman (both taught in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature), and Harold Bloom (English), whose theoretical position was always somewhat specific, and who ultimately took a very different path from the rest of this group. Yale’s history department has also originated important intellectual trends. Historians C. Vann Woodward and David Brion Davis are credited with beginning in the 1960s and 1970s an important stream of southern historians; likewise, David Montgomery, a labor historian, advised many of the current generation of labor historians in the country. Yale’s Music School and Department fostered the growth of Music Theory in the latter half of the 20th century. The Journal of Music Theory was founded there in 1957; Allen Forte and David Lewin were influential teachers and scholars.

In addition to eminent faculty members, Yale research relies heavily on the presence of roughly 1200 Postdocs from various national and international origin working in the multiple laboratories in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and professional schools of the university. The university progressively recognized this working force with the recent creation of the Office for Postdoctoral Affairs and the Yale Postdoctoral Association.

Notable alumni

Over its history, Yale has produced many distinguished alumni in a variety of fields, ranging from the public to private sector. around 71% of undergraduates join the workforce, while the next largest majority of 16.6% go on to attend graduate or professional schools. Yale graduates have been recipients of Rhodes Scholarships, Marshall Scholarships, Truman Scholarships, Churchill Scholarships, and Mitchell Scholarships. The university is also the second largest producer of Fulbright Scholars, and has produced many MacArthur Fellows. The U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs ranked Yale very high among research institutions producing the most Fulbright Scholars. Additionally, many living billionaires are Yale alumni.

At Yale, one of the most popular undergraduate majors among Juniors and Seniors is political science, with many students going on to serve careers in government and politics. Former presidents who attended Yale for undergrad include William Howard Taft, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush while former presidents Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton attended Yale Law School. Former vice-president and influential antebellum era politician John C. Calhoun also graduated from Yale. Former world leaders include Italian prime minister Mario Monti, Turkish prime minister Tansu Çiller, Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, German president Karl Carstens, Philippine president José Paciano Laurel, Latvian president Valdis Zatlers, Taiwanese premier Jiang Yi-huah, and Malawian president Peter Mutharika, among others. Prominent royals who graduated are Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden, and Olympia Bonaparte, Princess Napoléon.

Yale alumni have had considerable presence in U.S. government in all three branches. On the U.S. Supreme Court, justices have been Yale alumni, including current Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh. Numerous Yale alumni have been U.S. Senators, including current Senators Michael Bennet, Richard Blumenthal, Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Chris Coons, Amy Klobuchar, Ben Sasse, and Sheldon Whitehouse. Current and former cabinet members include Secretaries of State John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Cyrus Vance, and Dean Acheson; U.S. Secretaries of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, Robert Rubin, Nicholas F. Brady, Steven Mnuchin, and Janet Yellen; U.S. Attorneys General Nicholas Katzenbach, John Ashcroft, and Edward H. Levi; and many others. Peace Corps founder and American diplomat Sargent Shriver and public official and urban planner Robert Moses are Yale alumni.

Yale has produced numerous award-winning authors and influential writers, like Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Sinclair Lewis and Pulitzer Prize winners Stephen Vincent Benét, Thornton Wilder, Doug Wright, and David McCullough. Academy Award winning actors, actresses, and directors include Jodie Foster, Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, Elia Kazan, George Roy Hill, Lupita Nyong’o, Oliver Stone, and Frances McDormand. Alumni from Yale have also made notable contributions to both music and the arts. Leading American composer from the 20th century Charles Ives, Broadway composer Cole Porter, Grammy award winner David Lang, and award-winning jazz pianist and composer Vijay Iyer all hail from Yale. Hugo Boss Prize winner Matthew Barney, famed American sculptor Richard Serra, President Barack Obama presidential portrait painter Kehinde Wiley, MacArthur Fellow and contemporary artist Sarah Sze, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Garry Trudeau, and National Medal of Arts photorealist painter Chuck Close all graduated from Yale. Additional alumni include architect and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Maya Lin, Pritzker Prize winner Norman Foster, and Gateway Arch designer Eero Saarinen. Journalists and pundits include Dick Cavett, Chris Cuomo, Anderson Cooper, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Fareed Zakaria.

In business, Yale has had numerous alumni and former students go on to become founders of influential business, like William Boeing (Boeing, United Airlines), Briton Hadden and Henry Luce (Time Magazine), Stephen A. Schwarzman (Blackstone Group), Frederick W. Smith (FedEx), Juan Trippe (Pan Am), Harold Stanley (Morgan Stanley), Bing Gordon (Electronic Arts), and Ben Silbermann (Pinterest). Other business people from Yale include former chairman and CEO of Sears Holdings Edward Lampert, former Time Warner president Jeffrey Bewkes, former PepsiCo chairperson and CEO Indra Nooyi, sports agent Donald Dell, and investor/philanthropist Sir John Templeton.

Yale alumni distinguished in academia include literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates, economists Irving Fischer, Mahbub ul Haq, and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman; Nobel Prize in Physics laureates Ernest Lawrence and Murray Gell-Mann; Fields Medalist John G. Thompson; Human Genome Project leader and National Institutes of Health director Francis S. Collins; brain surgery pioneer Harvey Cushing; pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper; influential mathematician and chemist Josiah Willard Gibbs; National Women’s Hall of Fame inductee and biochemist Florence B. Seibert; Turing Award recipient Ron Rivest; inventors Samuel F.B. Morse and Eli Whitney; Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate John B. Goodenough; lexicographer Noah Webster; and theologians Jonathan Edwards and Reinhold Niebuhr.

In the sporting arena, Yale alumni include baseball players Ron Darling and Craig Breslow and baseball executives Theo Epstein and George Weiss; football players Calvin Hill, Gary Fenick, Amos Alonzo Stagg, and “the Father of American Football” Walter Camp; ice hockey players Chris Higgins and Olympian Helen Resor; Olympic figure skaters Sarah Hughes and Nathan Chen; nine-time U.S. Squash men’s champion Julian Illingworth; Olympic swimmer Don Schollander; Olympic rowers Josh West and Rusty Wailes; Olympic sailor Stuart McNay; Olympic runner Frank Shorter; and others.

From The KTH Royal Institute of Technology [Kungliga Tekniska högskolan](SE): “Smaller than a grain of sand—silica glass sensors 3D-printed on optical fiber”

From The KTH Royal Institute of Technology [Kungliga Tekniska högskolan](SE)

5.15.24

Lee-Lun Lai demonstrates the setup to print silica glass microstructures on an optical fiber. (Photo: David Callahan)

In a first for communications, researchers in Sweden 3D printed silica glass micro-optics on the tips of optic fibers—surfaces as small as the cross section of a human hair. The advance could enable faster internet and improved connectivity, as well as innovations like smaller sensors and imaging systems.

Reporting in the journal ACS Nano, researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm say integrating silica glass optical devices with optical fibers enables multiple innovations, including more sensitive remote sensors for environment and healthcare.

Figure 1. Printing process and example 3D structures in glass on optical fiber tips. (a) The fabrication process. Step 1: Mounting single-mode optical fiber in a customized fiber holder. Step 2: Drop-casting HSQ solution on the optical fiber tip. Step 3: Evaporating solvent. Injecting a visible laser from the other end of the fiber to illuminate the fiber core for alignment. Step 4: Exposing the HSQ layer with the femtosecond pulsed laser. Uniform Mode and Nanograting Mode can be selected by choice of exposure parameters. (b) A woodpile structure printed using Uniform Mode. The inset shows a close-up of the printed structure: the lateral width of each beam is below 400 nm. (c) Characters “KTH” and three blocks printed using Nanograting Mode. The inset shows that the three segments of the letter “K” are made of Nanogratings with distinct selected orientations.
See the science paper for further instructive material with images.

The printing techniques they report also could prove valuable in production of pharmaceuticals and chemicals.

An optical fiber cable is set up on the 3D printer. (Photo: David Callahan)

KTH Professor Kristinn Gylfason says the method overcomes longstanding limitations in structuring optical fiber tips with silica glass, which he says often require high-temperature treatments that compromise the integrity of temperature-sensitive fiber coatings.

In contrast to other methods, the process begins with a base material that doesn’t contain carbon. That means high temperatures are not needed to drive out carbon in order to make the glass structure transparent.

The authors have filed a patent application for the technique.

More resilient sensors

The study’s lead author, Lee-Lun Lai, says the researchers printed a silica glass sensor that proved more resilient than a standard plastic-based sensor after multiple measurements.

“We demonstrated a glass refractive index sensor integrated onto the fiber tip that allowed us to measure the concentration of organic solvents. This measurement is challenging for polymer-based sensors due to the corrosiveness of the solvents,” Lai says.

“These structures are so small you could fit 1,000 of them on the surface of a grain of sand, which is about the size of sensors being used today,” says the study’s co-author, Po-Han Huang.

The researchers also demonstrated a technique for printing nanogratings, ultra-small patterns etched onto surfaces at the nanometer scale. These are used to manipulate light in precise ways and have potential applications in quantum communication.

Gylfason says the ability to 3D print arbitrary glass structures directly on fiber tip opens new frontiers in photonics. “By bridging the gap between 3D printing and photonics, the implications of this research are far-reaching, with potential applications in microfluidic devices, MEMS accelerometers and fiber-integrated quantum emitters,” he says.

See the full article here.

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct.

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The KTH Royal Institute of Technology[Kungliga Tekniska högskolan](SE) is a public research university in Stockholm, Sweden. KTH conducts research and education within engineering and technology, and is Sweden’s largest technical university. Currently, KTH consists of five schools with four campuses in and around Stockholm.

KTH was established in 1827 as Teknologiska Institutet (Institute of Technology), and had its roots in Mekaniska skolan (School of Mechanics) that was established in 1798 in Stockholm. But the origin of KTH dates back to the predecessor to Mekaniska skolan, the Laboratorium Mechanicum, which was established in 1697 by Swedish scientist and innovator Christopher Polhem. Laboratorium Mechanicum combined education technology, a laboratory and an exhibition space for innovations. In 1877 KTH received its current name, Kungliga Tekniska högskolan (KTH Royal Institute of Technology). It is ranked top 100 in the world among all universities in the 2020 QS World University Rankings.

From The Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) In The Schwarzman College of Computing At The Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “Robotic palm mimics human touch”

From The Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)

In

The Schwarzman College of Computing

At

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

CSAIL is part of the Schwarzman College of Computing but is also overseen by the MIT Vice President of Research.

5.20.24
Rachel Gordon | MIT CSAIL

MIT CSAIL student Sandra Q. Liu displays her innovative GelPalm robotic design in her lab workspace. Photo: Michael Grimmett/MIT CSAIL

“I’ll have you eating out of the palm of my hand” is an unlikely utterance you’ll hear from a robot. Why? Most of them don’t have palms.

If you have kept up with the protean field, gripping and grasping more like humans has been an ongoing Herculean effort. Now, a new robotic hand design developed in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has rethought the oft-overlooked palm. The new design uses advanced sensors for a highly sensitive touch, helping the “extremity” handle objects with more detailed and delicate precision.

GelPalm has a gel-based, flexible sensor embedded in the palm, drawing inspiration from the soft, deformable nature of human hands. The sensor uses a special color illumination tech that uses red, green, and blue LEDs to light an object, and a camera to capture reflections. This mixture generates detailed 3D surface models for precise robotic interactions.

GelPalm
Video: MIT CSAIL

And what would the palm be without its facilitative fingers? The team also developed some robotic phalanges, called ROMEO (“RObotic Modular Endoskeleton Optical”), with flexible materials and similar sensing technology as the palm. The fingers have something called “passive compliance,” which is when a robot can adjust to forces naturally, without needing motors or extra control. This in turn helps with the larger objective: increasing the surface area in contact with objects so they can be fully enveloped. Manufactured as single, monolithic structures via 3D printing, the finger designs are a cost-effective production.

Beyond improved dexterity, GelPalm offers safer interaction with objects, something that’s especially handy for potential applications like human-robot collaboration, prosthetics, or robotic hands with human-like sensing for biomedical uses.

Many previous robotic designs have typically focused on enhancing finger dexterity. Liu’s approach shifts the focus to create a more human-like, versatile end effector that interacts more naturally with objects and performs a broader range of tasks.

“We draw inspiration from human hands, which have rigid bones surrounded by soft, compliant tissue,” says recent MIT graduate Sandra Q. Liu SM ’20, PhD ’24, the lead designer of GelPalm, who developed the system as a CSAIL affiliate and PhD student in mechanical engineering. “By combining rigid structures with deformable, compliant materials, we can better achieve that same adaptive talent as our skillful hands. A major advantage is that we don’t need extra motors or mechanisms to actuate the palm’s deformation — the inherent compliance allows it to automatically conform around objects, just like our human palms do so dexterously.”

The researchers put the palm design to the test. Liu compared the tactile sensing performance of two different illumination systems — blue LEDs versus white LEDs — integrated into the ROMEO fingers. “Both yielded similar high-quality 3D tactile reconstructions when pressing objects into the gel surfaces,” says Liu.

But the critical experiment, she says, was to examine how well the different palm configurations could envelop and stably grasp objects. The team got hands-on, literally slathering plastic shapes in paint and pressing them against four palm types: rigid, structurally compliant, gel compliant, and their dual compliant design. “Visually, and by analyzing the painted surface area contacts, it was clear having both structural and material compliance in the palm provided significantly more grip than the others,” says Liu. “It’s an elegant way to maximize the palm’s role in achieving stable grasps.”

One notable limitation is the challenge of integrating sufficient sensory technology within the palm without making it bulky or overly complex. The use of camera-based tactile sensors introduces issues with size and flexibility, the team says, as the current tech doesn’t easily allow for extensive coverage without trade-offs in design and functionality. Addressing this could mean developing more flexible materials for mirrors, and enhancing sensor integration to maintain functionality, without compromising practical usability.

“The palm is almost completely overlooked in the development of most robotic hands,” says Columbia University Associate Professor Matei Ciocarlie, who wasn’t involved in the paper. “This work is remarkable because it introduces a purposefully designed, useful palm that combines two key features, articulation and sensing, whereas most robot palms lack either. The human palm is both subtly articulated and highly sensitive, and this work is a relevant innovation in this direction.”

“I hope we’re moving toward more advanced robotic hands that blend soft and rigid elements with tactile sensitivity, ideally within the next five to 10 years. It’s a complex field without a clear consensus on the best hand design, which makes this work especially thrilling,” says Liu. “In developing GelPalm and the ROMEO fingers, I focused on modularity and transferability to encourage a wide range of designs. Making this technology low-cost and easy to manufacture allows more people to innovate and explore. As just one lab and one person in this vast field, my dream is that sharing this knowledge could spark advancements and inspire others.”

Ted Adelson, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Vision Science in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and CSAIL member, is the senior author on a paper describing the work. The research was supported, in part, by the Toyota Research Institute, Amazon Science Hub, and the SINTEF BIFROST project. Liu presented the research at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) earlier this month.

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct.

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The Schwarzman College of Computing campus

The MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing is a college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Announced in 2018 to address the growing applications of computing technology, the college is an Institute-wide academic unit that works alongside MIT’s five Schools of Architecture and Planning, Engineering, Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, Science, and Management. The college emphasizes artificial intelligence research, interdisciplinary applications of computing, and social and ethical responsibilities of computing. It aims to be an interdisciplinary hub for work in artificial intelligence, computer science, data science, and related fields. Its creation was the first significant change to MIT’s academic structure since the early 1950s.

The MIT Schwarzman College of Computing is named after The Blackstone Group chairman Stephen A. Schwarzman, who donated $350 million of the college’s $1.1 billion funding commitment. The college’s funding sources were met with criticism, with students and staff contrasting MIT’s stated emphasis on ethics against Schwarzman’s controversial business practices and support for Donald Trump.
Academics and research

The Schwarzman College of Computing has one academic department and several research enterprises which also have degree programs:

Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS, more commonly known at MIT as Course 6), which is jointly administered with the School of Engineering. Upon creation of the college, the department formerly only in the School of Engineering was reorganized into three “overlapping subunits”:
Electrical Engineering (EE)
Computer Science (CS)
Artificial Intelligence and Decision-Making (AI+D)
Operations Research Center (ORC), jointly administered with the MIT Sloan School of Management
Institute for Data, Systems and Society (IDSS)
Technology and Policy Program (TPP, adegree program)
Sociotechnical Systems Research Center (SSRC)
Center for Computational Science and Engineering (CCSE, renamed from Center for Computational Engineering upon formation of the college)

The non-degree-granting research labs which are part of the college are:

MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)
MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS)
Quest for Intelligence
MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab
MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health

The establishment of the college added 50 new faculty positions to the university. Half of these positions focus on computer science, while the other half are jointly appointed in collaboration with other departments in the Architecture and Planning, Engineering, Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, Science, and Management. The New York Times described the college’s structure as an effort to “alter traditional academic thinking and practice” and allow the university to more effectively bring computing to other fields.

The creation of the College of Computing also started the development of three additional programs meant to integrate closely with other MIT computing activities, for which plans have not been finalized:

Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) aims to develop “responsible habits of mind and action” regarding computing technology. SERC facilitates the teaching of ethics throughout MIT courses, conducts research in social, ethical, and policy implications of technology, and coordinates public forums regarding technology and public policy.
Common Ground for Computing Education coordinates interdepartmental teaching in computing, supporting interdisciplinary courses, majors, and minors on computing and its applications.
Center for Advanced Studies of Computing hosts research fellows and assists project-oriented programs in computing-related topics.

The Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AI Lab). Housed within the Ray and Maria Stata Center, CSAIL is the largest on-campus laboratory as measured by research scope and membership. It is part of the Schwarzman College of Computing but is also overseen by the MIT Vice President of Research.

Research activities

CSAIL’s research activities are organized around a number of semi-autonomous research groups, each of which is headed by one or more professors or research scientists. These groups are divided up into seven general areas of research:

Artificial intelligence
Computational biology
Graphics and vision
Language and learning
Theory of computation
Robotics
Systems (includes computer architecture, databases, distributed systems, networks and networked systems, operating systems, programming methodology, and software engineering among others)

In addition, CSAIL hosts the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

USPS “Forever” postage stamps celebrating Innovation at MIT.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The institute has an urban campus that extends more than a mile (1.6 km) alongside the Charles River. The institute also encompasses a number of major off-campus facilities such as the MIT Lincoln Laboratory , the MIT Bates Research and Engineering Center , and the Haystack Observatory , as well as affiliated laboratories such as the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Whitehead Institute.

Founded in 1861 in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States, Massachusetts Institute of Technology adopted a European polytechnic university model and stressed laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering. It has since played a key role in the development of many aspects of modern science, engineering, mathematics, and technology, and is widely known for its innovation and academic strength. It is frequently regarded as one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

Nobel laureates, Turing Award winners, and Fields Medalists have been affiliated with MIT as alumni, faculty members, or researchers. In addition, National Medal of Science recipients, National Medals of Technology and Innovation recipients, MacArthur Fellows, Marshall Scholars, Mitchell Scholars, Schwarzman Scholars, astronauts, and Chief Scientists of the U.S. Air Force have been affiliated with The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The university also has a strong entrepreneurial culture and MIT alumni have founded or co-founded many notable companies. Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a member of the Association of American Universities.

Foundation and vision

In 1859, a proposal was submitted to the Massachusetts General Court to use newly filled lands in Back Bay, Boston for a “Conservatory of Art and Science”, but the proposal failed. A charter for the incorporation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed by William Barton Rogers, was signed by John Albion Andrew, the governor of Massachusetts, on April 10, 1861.

Rogers, a professor from the University of Virginia , wanted to establish an institution to address rapid scientific and technological advances. He did not wish to found a professional school, but a combination with elements of both professional and liberal education, proposing that:

“The true and only practicable object of a polytechnic school is, as I conceive, the teaching, not of the minute details and manipulations of the arts, which can be done only in the workshop, but the inculcation of those scientific principles which form the basis and explanation of them, and along with this, a full and methodical review of all their leading processes and operations in connection with physical laws.”

The Rogers Plan reflected the German research university model, emphasizing an independent faculty engaged in research, as well as instruction oriented around seminars and laboratories.

Early developments

Two days after The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was chartered, the first battle of the Civil War broke out. After a long delay through the war years, MIT’s first classes were held in the Mercantile Building in Boston in 1865. The new institute was founded as part of the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act to fund institutions “to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes” and was a land-grant school. In 1863 under the same act, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts founded the Massachusetts Agricultural College, which developed as the University of Massachusetts Amherst ). In 1866, the proceeds from land sales went toward new buildings in the Back Bay.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was informally called “Boston Tech”. The institute adopted the European polytechnic university model and emphasized laboratory instruction from an early date. Despite chronic financial problems, the institute saw growth in the last two decades of the 19th century under President Francis Amasa Walker. Programs in electrical, chemical, marine, and sanitary engineering were introduced, new buildings were built, and the size of the student body increased to more than one thousand.

The curriculum drifted to a vocational emphasis, with less focus on theoretical science. The fledgling school still suffered from chronic financial shortages which diverted the attention of the MIT leadership. During these “Boston Tech” years, Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty and alumni rebuffed Harvard University president (and former MIT faculty) Charles W. Eliot’s repeated attempts to merge MIT with Harvard College’s Lawrence Scientific School. There would be at least six attempts to absorb MIT into Harvard. In its cramped Back Bay location, MIT could not afford to expand its overcrowded facilities, driving a desperate search for a new campus and funding. Eventually, the MIT Corporation approved a formal agreement to merge with Harvard, over the vehement objections of MIT faculty, students, and alumni. However, a 1917 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court effectively put an end to the merger scheme.

In 1916, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology administration and the MIT charter crossed the Charles River on the ceremonial barge Bucentaur built for the occasion, to signify MIT’s move to a spacious new campus largely consisting of filled land on a one-mile-long (1.6 km) tract along the Cambridge side of the Charles River. The neoclassical “New Technology” campus was designed by William W. Bosworth and had been funded largely by anonymous donations from a mysterious “Mr. Smith”, starting in 1912. In January 1920, the donor was revealed to be the industrialist George Eastman of Rochester, New York, who had invented methods of film production and processing, and founded Eastman Kodak. Between 1912 and 1920, Eastman donated $20 million ($236.6 million in 2015 dollars) in cash and Kodak stock to MIT.

Curricular reforms

In the 1930s, President Karl Taylor Compton and Vice-President (effectively Provost) Vannevar Bush emphasized the importance of pure sciences like physics and chemistry and reduced the vocational practice required in shops and drafting studios. The Compton reforms “renewed confidence in the ability of the Institute to develop leadership in science as well as in engineering”. Unlike Ivy League schools, Massachusetts Institute of Technology catered more to middle-class families, and depended more on tuition than on endowments or grants for its funding. The school was elected to the Association of American Universities in 1934.

Still, as late as 1949, the Lewis Committee lamented in its report on the state of education at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology that “the Institute is widely conceived as basically a vocational school”, a “partly unjustified” perception the committee sought to change. The report comprehensively reviewed the undergraduate curriculum, recommended offering a broader education, and warned against letting engineering and government-sponsored research detract from the sciences and humanities. The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and the MIT Sloan School of Management were formed in 1950 to compete with the powerful Schools of Science and Engineering. Previously marginalized faculties in the areas of economics, management, political science, and linguistics emerged into cohesive and assertive departments by attracting respected professors and launching competitive graduate programs. The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences continued to develop under the successive terms of the more humanistically oriented presidents Howard W. Johnson and Jerome Wiesner between 1966 and 1980.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology‘s involvement in military science surged during World War II. In 1941, Vannevar Bush was appointed head of the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development and directed funding to only a select group of universities, including MIT. Engineers and scientists from across the country gathered at Massachusetts Institute of Technology ‘s Radiation Laboratory, established in 1940 to assist the British military in developing microwave radar. The work done there significantly affected both the war and subsequent research in the area. Other defense projects included gyroscope-based and other complex control systems for gunsight, bombsight, and inertial navigation under Charles Stark Draper’s Instrumentation Laboratory; the development of a digital computer for flight simulations under Project Whirlwind; and high-speed and high-altitude photography under Harold Edgerton. By the end of the war, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology became the nation’s largest wartime R&D contractor (attracting some criticism of Bush), employing nearly 4000 in the Radiation Laboratory alone and receiving in excess of $100 million ($1.2 billion in 2015 dollars) before 1946. Work on defense projects continued even after then. Post-war government-sponsored research at MIT included SAGE and guidance systems for ballistic missiles and Project Apollo.

These activities affected The Massachusetts Institute of Technology profoundly. A 1949 report noted the lack of “any great slackening in the pace of life at the Institute” to match the return to peacetime, remembering the “academic tranquility of the prewar years”, though acknowledging the significant contributions of military research to the increased emphasis on graduate education and rapid growth of personnel and facilities. The faculty doubled and the graduate student body quintupled during the terms of Karl Taylor Compton, president of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology between 1930 and 1948; James Rhyne Killian, president from 1948 to 1957; and Julius Adams Stratton, chancellor from 1952 to 1957, whose institution-building strategies shaped the expanding university. By the 1950s, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology no longer simply benefited the industries with which it had worked for three decades, and it had developed closer working relationships with new patrons, philanthropic foundations and the federal government.

In late 1960s and early 1970s, student and faculty activists protested against the Vietnam War and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology ‘s defense research. In this period Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s various departments were researching helicopters, smart bombs and counterinsurgency techniques for the war in Vietnam as well as guidance systems for nuclear missiles. The Union of Concerned Scientists was founded on March 4, 1969 during a meeting of faculty members and students seeking to shift the emphasis on military research toward environmental and social problems. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology ultimately divested itself from the Instrumentation Laboratory and moved all classified research off-campus to the MIT Lincoln Laboratory facility in 1973 in response to the protests. The student body, faculty, and administration remained comparatively unpolarized during what was a tumultuous time for many other universities. Johnson was seen to be highly successful in leading his institution to “greater strength and unity” after these times of turmoil. However, six Massachusetts Institute of Technology students were sentenced to prison terms at this time and some former student leaders, such as Michael Albert and George Katsiaficas, are still indignant about MIT’s role in military research and its suppression of these protests. (Richard Leacock’s film, November Actions, records some of these tumultuous events.)

In the 1980s, there was more controversy at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology over its involvement in SDI (space weaponry) and CBW (chemical and biological warfare) research. More recently, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s research for the military has included work on robots, drones and ‘battle suits’.

Recent history

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has kept pace with and helped to advance the digital age. In addition to developing the predecessors to modern computing and networking technologies, students, staff, and faculty members at Project MAC, the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and the Tech Model Railroad Club wrote some of the earliest interactive computer video games like Spacewar! and created much of modern hacker slang and culture. Several major computer-related organizations have originated at MIT since the 1980s: Richard Stallman’s GNU Project and the subsequent Free Software Foundation were founded in the mid-1980s at the AI Lab; the MIT Media Lab was founded in 1985 by Nicholas Negroponte and Jerome Wiesner to promote research into novel uses of computer technology; the World Wide Web Consortium standards organization was founded at the Laboratory for Computer Science in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee; the MIT OpenCourseWare project has made course materials for over 2,000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology classes available online free of charge since 2002; and the One Laptop per Child initiative to expand computer education and connectivity to children worldwide was launched in 2005.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was named a sea-grant college in 1976 to support its programs in oceanography and marine sciences and was named a space-grant college in 1989 to support its aeronautics and astronautics programs. Despite diminishing government financial support over the past quarter century, MIT launched several successful development campaigns to significantly expand the campus: new dormitories and athletics buildings on west campus; the Tang Center for Management Education; several buildings in the northeast corner of campus supporting research into biology, brain and cognitive sciences, genomics, biotechnology, and cancer research; and a number of new “backlot” buildings on Vassar Street including the Stata Center. Construction on campus in the 2000s included expansions of the Media Lab, the Sloan School’s eastern campus, and graduate residences in the northwest. In 2006, President Hockfield launched the MIT Energy Research Council to investigate the interdisciplinary challenges posed by increasing global energy consumption.

In 2001, inspired by the open source and open access movements, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched “OpenCourseWare” to make the lecture notes, problem sets, syllabi, exams, and lectures from the great majority of its courses available online for no charge, though without any formal accreditation for coursework completed. While the cost of supporting and hosting the project is high, OCW expanded in 2005 to include other universities as a part of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, which currently includes more than 250 academic institutions with content available in at least six languages. In 2011, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced it would offer formal certification (but not credits or degrees) to online participants completing coursework in its “MITx” program, for a modest fee. The “edX” online platform supporting MITx was initially developed in partnership with Harvard and its analogous “Harvardx” initiative. The courseware platform is open source, and other universities have already joined and added their own course content. In March 2009 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty adopted an open-access policy to make its scholarship publicly accessible online.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has its own police force. Three days after the Boston Marathon bombing of April 2013, MIT Police patrol officer Sean Collier was fatally shot by the suspects Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, setting off a violent manhunt that shut down the campus and much of the Boston metropolitan area for a day. One week later, Collier’s memorial service was attended by more than 10,000 people, in a ceremony hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology community with thousands of police officers from the New England region and Canada. On November 25, 2013, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced the creation of the Collier Medal, to be awarded annually to “an individual or group that embodies the character and qualities that Officer Collier exhibited as a member of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology community and in all aspects of his life”. The announcement further stated that “Future recipients of the award will include those whose contributions exceed the boundaries of their profession, those who have contributed to building bridges across the community, and those who consistently and selflessly perform acts of kindness”.

In September 2017, the school announced the creation of an artificial intelligence research lab called the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. IBM will spend $240 million over the next decade, and the lab will be staffed by MIT and IBM scientists. In October 2018 MIT announced that it would open a new Schwarzman College of Computing dedicated to the study of artificial intelligence, named after lead donor and The Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman. The focus of the new college is to study not just AI, but interdisciplinary AI education, and how AI can be used in fields as diverse as history and biology. The cost of buildings and new faculty for the new college is expected to be $1 billion upon completion.

The Caltech/MIT Advanced aLIGO was designed and constructed by a team of scientists from California Institute of Technology , Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and industrial contractors, and funded by the National Science Foundation .

Caltech /MIT Advanced aLigo

It was designed to open the field of gravitational-wave astronomy through the detection of gravitational waves predicted by general relativity. Gravitational waves were detected for the first time by the LIGO detector in 2015. For contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves, two Caltech physicists, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Rainer Weiss won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2017. Weiss, who is also a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, designed the laser interferometric technique, which served as the essential blueprint for the LIGO.

The mission of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the twenty-first century. We seek to develop in each member of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology community the ability and passion to work wisely, creatively, and effectively for the betterment of humankind.

From The Eberly College of Science At The Pennsylvania State University: “Shining a light on molecules: L-shaped metamaterials can control light direction”

From The Eberly College of Science

At

The Pennsylvania State University

5.20.24
Mariah Lucas

Researchers fabricated an optical element that uses a forest of tiny, antenna-like nanorods, seen here, that together create a metamaterial able to control the spin of light. The metamaterial nanorods appear to be shaped like the letter “L” when seen at the nanoscale. Credit: Provided by Christos Argyopoulos. All Rights Reserved.

Polarized light waves spin clockwise or counterclockwise as they travel, with one direction behaving differently than the other as it interacts with molecules. This directionality, called chirality or handedness, could provide a way to identify and sort specific molecules for use in biomedicine applications, but researchers have had limited control over the direction of the waves — until now.

Using metamaterials, a team of electrical engineering researchers from Penn State and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) created an ultrathin optical element that can control the direction of polarized electromagnetic light waves. This new control allows researchers to not only direct the light’s chirality, but also to identify the chirality of molecules by determining how polarized light interacts with them.

Identifying the chirality of molecules can reveal critical information about how they will interact with other systems, such as whether specific drugs will help heal diseased or damaged tissue without harming healthy cells. The researchers published their findings in Nature Communications.

Fig. 1: L-shaped chiral dielectric metamaterial fabrication process.

a Electron beam assisted GLAD fabrication process. The evaporated particle flux impinges on the sample surface under oblique angles. b Schematic diagrams of the two-step bottom-up process to fabricate the presented chiral L-shaped metamaterials. c Circular polarized transmission and reflection coefficients and schematic of the proposed metamaterials. The zoomed-in illustration demonstrates the geometrical parameters of one L-shaped nanopillar, where β is the rotation angle of the second tilted nanopillar, θs is the initial deposition slanting angle, and dTOT is the total metamaterial thickness.
See the science paper for further instructive material with images.

Chirality refers to mirror images, like left and right hands joining in a handshake, explained Christos Argyropoulos, associate professor of electrical engineering at Penn State and co-corresponding author on the paper. In physics, among other responsibilities, chirality influences the direction that light waves spin.

Argyropoulos and his colleagues fabricated an optical element, akin to a glass slide, that uses a forest of tiny, antenna-like nanorods that together create a metamaterial — or material engineered to have specific properties not typically found in nature — able to control the spin of light. The metamaterial nanorods appear to be shaped like the letter “L” when seen at the nanoscale.

“When the light-matter interaction is mediated by the metamaterials, you can image a molecule and identify its chirality by inspecting how chiral light interacts with it,” Argyropoulos said.

Researchers at UNL used an emerging fabrication approach called glancing angle deposition to fabricate the optical element out of silicon.

“Silicon does not substantially dissipate the incident light that was problematic with metal, which we used in previous attempts to create the element,” said Ufuk Kilic, a research professor at UNL and co-corresponding author on the paper. “And silicon allowed us to adjust the shape and length of the nanopillars on the platform, which in turn allows us to change how we control the light.”

Identifying the chirality of molecules can have wide-ranging impacts in biomedicine, particularly in pharmaceutical drugs, which sometimes have right- or left-handed chirality, Argyropoulos explained. While a right-handed molecular structure can be effective at treating disease, the same molecule with a left-handed structure can be toxic to healthy cells.

Argyropoulos mentioned the classic example of thalidomide, a drug with a chiral structure that was prescribed to women to treat morning sickness between 1957 and 1962. The right-handed molecule could appease nausea but was highly toxic to developing fetuses and caused birth defects for thousands of babies around the world. The optical element, Argyropoulos said, can quickly image the molecular structure of pharmaceuticals, allowing scientists to better understand the nuances of drug behavior.

Additionally, the optical element can be used to create right- or left-handed electromagnetic waves, Argyropoulos said, which are necessary for the development and maintenance of classical and quantum communications systems, like encrypted Wi-Fi and cell phone service.

“Previously, for optical communication systems, you needed big, bulky devices that only operated at one frequency,” Argyropoulos said. “This new optical element is lightweight and easily tunable to multiple frequencies.”

In addition to Argyropoulos and Kilic, the co-authors include Matthew Hilfiker, Shawn Wimer, Alexander Ruder, Eva Schubert and Mathias Schubert, all from UNL.

The U.S. National Science Foundation, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the University of Nebraska Foundation and the J.A. Woollam Foundation supported this work.
Last Updated May 20, 2024

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct.

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

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The Eberly College of Science is the science college of The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1859 by Jacob S. Whitman, professor of natural science. The College offers baccalaureate, master’s, and doctoral degree programs in the basic sciences. It was named after Robert E. Eberly.

Academics The Eberly College of Science offers sixteen majors in four disciplines: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, Mathematical Sciences and Interdisciplinary Studies.
• The Life Sciences: Biology, Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, Biotechnology, Microbiology
• The Physical Sciences: Astronomy & Astrophysics, Chemistry, Physics, Planetary Science and Astronomy
• The Mathematical Sciences: Mathematics, Statistics, Data Sciences
• Interdisciplinary Programs: General Science, Forensic Science, Premedicine, Integrated Premedical-Medical, Science BS/MBA

The Pennsylvania State University is a public state-related land-grant research university with campuses and facilities throughout Pennsylvania. Founded in 1855 as the Farmers’ High School of Pennsylvania, Penn State became the state’s only land-grant university in 1863. Today, Penn State is a major research university which conducts teaching, research, and public service. Its instructional mission includes undergraduate, graduate, professional and continuing education offered through resident instruction and online delivery. In addition to its land-grant designation, it also participates in the sea-grant, space-grant, and sun-grant research consortia; it is one of only four such universities (along with Cornell University, Oregon State University, and University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa). Its University Park campus, which is the largest and serves as the administrative hub, lies within the Borough of State College and College Township. It has two law schools: Penn State Law, on the school’s University Park campus, and Dickinson Law, in Carlisle. The College of Medicine is in Hershey. Penn State is one university that is geographically distributed throughout Pennsylvania. There are 19 commonwealth campuses and 5 special mission campuses located across the state. The University Park campus has been labeled one of the “Public Ivies,” a publicly funded university considered as providing a quality of education comparable to those of the Ivy League.
The Pennsylvania State University is a member of The Association of American Universities an organization of American and Canadian research universities devoted to maintaining a strong system of academic research and education.

Annual enrollment at the University Park campus totals more than 47,000 graduate and undergraduate students, making it one of the largest universities in the United States. It has the world’s largest dues-paying alumni association. The university offers more than 160 majors among all its campuses.

Annually, the university hosts the Penn State IFC/Panhellenic Dance Marathon (THON), which is the world’s largest student-run philanthropy. This event is held at the Bryce Jordan Center on the University Park campus. The university’s athletics teams compete in Division I of the NCAA and are collectively known as the Penn State Nittany Lions, competing in the Big Ten Conference for most sports. Penn State students, alumni, faculty and coaches have received a total of 54 Olympic medals.

Early years

The school was sponsored by the Pennsylvania State Agricultural Society and founded as a degree-granting institution on February 22, 1855, by Pennsylvania’s state legislature as the Farmers’ High School of Pennsylvania. The use of “college” or “university” was avoided because of local prejudice against such institutions as being impractical in their courses of study. Centre County, Pennsylvania, became the home of the new school when James Irvin of Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, donated 200 acres (0.8 km^2) of land – the first of 10,101 acres (41 km^2) the school would eventually acquire. In 1862, the school’s name was changed to the Agricultural College of Pennsylvania, and with the passage of the Morrill Land-Grant Acts, Pennsylvania selected the school in 1863 to be the state’s sole land-grant college. The school’s name changed to the Pennsylvania State College in 1874; enrollment fell to 64 undergraduates the following year as the school tried to balance purely agricultural studies with a more classic education.

George W. Atherton became president of the school in 1882, and broadened the curriculum. Shortly after he introduced engineering studies, Penn State became one of the ten largest engineering schools in the nation. Atherton also expanded the liberal arts and agriculture programs, for which the school began receiving regular appropriations from the state in 1887. A major road in State College has been named in Atherton’s honor. Additionally, Penn State’s Atherton Hall, a well-furnished and centrally located residence hall, is named not after George Atherton himself, but after his wife, Frances Washburn Atherton. His grave is in front of Schwab Auditorium near Old Main, marked by an engraved marble block in front of his statue.

Early 20th century

In the years that followed, Penn State grew significantly, becoming the state’s largest grantor of baccalaureate degrees and reaching an enrollment of 5,000 in 1936. Around that time, a system of commonwealth campuses was started by President Ralph Dorn Hetzel to provide an alternative for Depression-era students who were economically unable to leave home to attend college.

In 1953, President Milton S. Eisenhower, brother of then-U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, sought and won permission to elevate the school to university status as The Pennsylvania State University. Under his successor Eric A. Walker (1956–1970), the university acquired hundreds of acres of surrounding land, and enrollment nearly tripled. In addition, in 1967, the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, a college of medicine and hospital, was established in Hershey with a $50 million gift from the Hershey Trust Company.

Modern era

In the 1970s, the university became a state-related institution. As such, it now belongs to the Commonwealth System of Higher Education. In 1975, the lyrics in Penn State’s alma mater song were revised to be gender-neutral in honor of International Women’s Year; the revised lyrics were taken from the posthumously-published autobiography of the writer of the original lyrics, Fred Lewis Pattee, and Professor Patricia Farrell acted as a spokesperson for those who wanted the change.

In 1989, the Pennsylvania College of Technology in Williamsport joined ranks with the university, and in 2000, so did the Dickinson School of Law. The university is now the largest in Pennsylvania. To offset the lack of funding due to the limited growth in state appropriations to Penn State, the university has concentrated its efforts on philanthropy.

Research

Penn State is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. Over 10,000 students are enrolled in the university’s graduate school (including the law and medical schools), and over 70,000 degrees have been awarded since the school was founded in 1922.

Penn State’s research and development expenditure has been on the rise in recent years. According to institutional rankings of total research expenditures for science and engineering released by the National Science Foundation , Penn State stood second in the nation, behind only Johns Hopkins University and tied with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , in the number of fields in which it is ranked in the top ten. Overall, Penn State ranked very highly nationally in total research expenditures across the board. In 12 individual fields, however, the university achieved rankings in the top ten nationally. The fields and sub-fields in which Penn State ranked in the top ten are materials, psychology, mechanical engineering, sociology, electrical engineering, total engineering, aerospace engineering, computer science, agricultural sciences, civil engineering, atmospheric sciences, and earth sciences. Moreover, in eleven of these fields, the university has repeated top-ten status every year.

The Applied Research Lab (ARL), located near the University Park campus, has been a research partner with the Department of Defense since 1945 and conducts research primarily in support of the United States Navy. It is the largest component of Penn State’s research efforts statewide, with over 1,000 researchers and other staff members.

The Materials Research Institute was created to coordinate the highly diverse and growing materials activities across Penn State’s University Park campus. With more than 200 faculty in 15 departments, 4 colleges, and 2 Department of Defense research laboratories, MRI was designed to break down the academic walls that traditionally divide disciplines and enable faculty to collaborate across departmental and even college boundaries. MRI has become a model for this interdisciplinary approach to research, both within and outside the university. Dr. Richard E. Tressler was an international leader in the development of high-temperature materials. He pioneered high-temperature fiber testing and use, advanced instrumentation and test methodologies for thermostructural materials, and design and performance verification of ceramics and composites in high-temperature aerospace, industrial, and energy applications. He was founding director of the Center for Advanced Materials (CAM), which supported many faculty and students from the College of Earth and Mineral Science, the Eberly College of Science, the College of Engineering, the Materials Research Laboratory and the Applied Research Laboratories at Penn State on high-temperature materials. His vision for Interdisciplinary research played a key role in creating the Materials Research Institute, and the establishment of Penn State as an acknowledged leader among major universities in materials education and research.

The university was one of the founding members of the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN), a partnership that includes 17 research-led universities in the United States, Asia, and Europe. The network provides funding, facilitates collaboration between universities, and coordinates exchanges of faculty members and graduate students among institutions. Former Penn State president Graham Spanier is a former vice-chair of the WUN.

The university’s library system began with a 1,500-book library in Old Main.

The university’s College of Information Sciences and Technology is the home of CiteSeerX, an open-access repository and search engine for scholarly publications. The university is also the host to the Radiation Science & Engineering Center, which houses the oldest operating university research reactor. Additionally, University Park houses the Graduate Program in Acoustics, the only freestanding acoustics program in the United States. The university also houses the Center for Medieval Studies, a program that was founded to research and study the European Middle Ages, and the Center for the Study of Higher Education (CSHE), one of the first centers established to research postsecondary education.

From The Eberly College of Science At The Pennsylvania State University: “$4M NASA grants to support UV and X-ray astronomy”

From The Eberly College of Science

At

The Pennsylvania State University

5.20.24
Katie Yan

Two NASA grants totaling over $4M to support UV and X-ray astronomy. Jake McCoy, left, assistant research professor, and Fabien Grisé, right, associate research professor, are each leading projects to design, fabricate and test diffraction optics that could allow next-generation space telescopes to explore objects that are fainter and farther away in the Universe. Credit: Katie Yan / Penn State. Creative Commons

Objects and events in space emit electromagnetic radiation, ranging from low-energy radio waves through visible and ultraviolet (UV) light and up to higher energy X-rays and gamma rays. Astronomers use unfathomably precise optics and sensors to dissect the radiation into individual wavelengths, allowing them to decipher the information it carries about its cosmic sources. Developing and testing these optics for X-rays and ultraviolet light is one of the focuses of Penn State astronomers Fabien Grisé and Jake McCoy, who have each been recently been awarded new NASA grants totaling over $4 million.

Grisé is an associate research professor and McCoy is an assistant research professor working with Randy McEntaffer, department head and professor of astronomy and astrophysics. They will use the grants to develop and test improved UV and X-ray diffraction gratings. These optical devices are a key component of spectrometers that can be integrated into telescopes. They function similar to the way a prism can split visible light into its constituent colors but are much more precise and can be tuned to specific wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation like UV or X-rays. The spectrometer can then identify specific wavelengths of UV or X-rays that are signatures of the presence of certain elements or other characteristics of objects or events in space.

The improved gratings will allow astronomers to observe and learn about objects that are farther away or fainter in the universe. In addition, the researchers said, these gratings may help answer questions about the universe, including identifying habitable planets outside of our solar system, how galaxies evolve, and how much and what types of matter makes up objects in space and how that matter is recycled.

“In our research, we are trying to learn about the universe by designing and fabricating gratings that improve the resolution and specificity of the data we collect,” Grisé said. “You can imagine these gratings sort of like CDs or DVDs. When you hold a CD in the light, the light bounces around in the grooves on the CD and we can see the colors of the rainbow. For the gratings, we etch tiny groves, much smaller than those on a CD, into a material so we can separate UV and X-ray radiation into separate wavelengths, which give us information about the object in space we are observing. We test the devices on small rockets that only spend a few minutes in space, but they could eventually be incorporated in the next-generation of large X-ray or UV space telescopes.”

Typically, X-rays are produced by hotter events with temperatures that are over one million degrees, whereas UV wavelengths represent slightly lower temperatures.

“As NASA continues to push to increase our technological readiness for big future projects like the Habitable World Observatory, a concept mission designed to search for and characterize habitable planets beyond our solar system, we will use these funds to advance and define what cutting edge technology looks like,” McCoy said.

With the two grants, Grisé and McCoy aim to increase the technological readiness of the gratings for future NASA missions. The first grant will support research to improve UV-wavelength diffraction gratings, while the second will focus on X-ray wavelength diffraction gratings.

“These grants, led by Grisé and McCoy, provide support for two independent, interdisciplinary, multi-institutional, collaborative research programs being led by two research professors in my group,” McEntaffer said. “Each of their programs just received a NASA grant to study nanofabrication of diffraction optics for space telescopes that are designed to expand the boundaries of what we can learn about our universe through UV and X-ray radiation.”

Both of the projects will make use of the Nanofabrication Laboratory, which is part of the Materials Research Institute at Penn State. The Nanofabrication Lab is a state-of-the-art facility with the tools and expert staff to facilitate the research and development of the gratings led by Grisé and McCoy.

“The equipment, staff and resources make the Nanofabrication Lab a fantastic space for our work,” McCoy said. “At most other institutions, our projects would have to be outsourced, but we are fortunate here at Penn State to do all our work in house.”

The McEntaffer Group has perennially been one of the largest users of the Nanofabrication Lab since moving to Penn State in 2016.

“Being able to go into the lab ourselves to run our experiments is a huge part of our project,” Grisé said. “The lab itself has almost every tool we could need to do our research and the staff is incredibly knowledgeable and helpful to our work.”

“Our faculty, students, researchers and Nanofabrication Lab staff have teamed up to take design concepts and drive them into large scale X-ray and UV gratings with complex designs that require extremely precise tolerances. This type of accomplishment can only be realized with dedicated partnerships and open innovation with a commitment to leading excellence,” said Clive Randall, director of the Materials Research Institute and distinguished professor of materials science and engineering.

The technology and expertise available in the Nanofabrication Lab will allow McEntaffer’s group to improve these gratings for future NASA missions and beyond, the researchers said.

“It is fascinating that by using all of these tools and chemical processes to fabricate nanoscopic patterns in the laboratory, we are able to probe further into the universe at the largest scales,” Grisé said. “As a scientist, being part of an ecosystem that tries to improve astronomical instruments and perform at a higher level will hopefully one day help us to understand the universe that we all live in better.”

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The Eberly College of Science is the science college of The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1859 by Jacob S. Whitman, professor of natural science. The College offers baccalaureate, master’s, and doctoral degree programs in the basic sciences. It was named after Robert E. Eberly.

Academics The Eberly College of Science offers sixteen majors in four disciplines: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, Mathematical Sciences and Interdisciplinary Studies.
• The Life Sciences: Biology, Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, Biotechnology, Microbiology
• The Physical Sciences: Astronomy & Astrophysics, Chemistry, Physics, Planetary Science and Astronomy
• The Mathematical Sciences: Mathematics, Statistics, Data Sciences
• Interdisciplinary Programs: General Science, Forensic Science, Premedicine, Integrated Premedical-Medical, Science BS/MBA

The Pennsylvania State University is a public state-related land-grant research university with campuses and facilities throughout Pennsylvania. Founded in 1855 as the Farmers’ High School of Pennsylvania, Penn State became the state’s only land-grant university in 1863. Today, Penn State is a major research university which conducts teaching, research, and public service. Its instructional mission includes undergraduate, graduate, professional and continuing education offered through resident instruction and online delivery. In addition to its land-grant designation, it also participates in the sea-grant, space-grant, and sun-grant research consortia; it is one of only four such universities (along with Cornell University, Oregon State University, and University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa). Its University Park campus, which is the largest and serves as the administrative hub, lies within the Borough of State College and College Township. It has two law schools: Penn State Law, on the school’s University Park campus, and Dickinson Law, in Carlisle. The College of Medicine is in Hershey. Penn State is one university that is geographically distributed throughout Pennsylvania. There are 19 commonwealth campuses and 5 special mission campuses located across the state. The University Park campus has been labeled one of the “Public Ivies,” a publicly funded university considered as providing a quality of education comparable to those of the Ivy League.
The Pennsylvania State University is a member of The Association of American Universities an organization of American and Canadian research universities devoted to maintaining a strong system of academic research and education.

Annual enrollment at the University Park campus totals more than 47,000 graduate and undergraduate students, making it one of the largest universities in the United States. It has the world’s largest dues-paying alumni association. The university offers more than 160 majors among all its campuses.

Annually, the university hosts the Penn State IFC/Panhellenic Dance Marathon (THON), which is the world’s largest student-run philanthropy. This event is held at the Bryce Jordan Center on the University Park campus. The university’s athletics teams compete in Division I of the NCAA and are collectively known as the Penn State Nittany Lions, competing in the Big Ten Conference for most sports. Penn State students, alumni, faculty and coaches have received a total of 54 Olympic medals.

Early years

The school was sponsored by the Pennsylvania State Agricultural Society and founded as a degree-granting institution on February 22, 1855, by Pennsylvania’s state legislature as the Farmers’ High School of Pennsylvania. The use of “college” or “university” was avoided because of local prejudice against such institutions as being impractical in their courses of study. Centre County, Pennsylvania, became the home of the new school when James Irvin of Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, donated 200 acres (0.8 km^2) of land – the first of 10,101 acres (41 km^2) the school would eventually acquire. In 1862, the school’s name was changed to the Agricultural College of Pennsylvania, and with the passage of the Morrill Land-Grant Acts, Pennsylvania selected the school in 1863 to be the state’s sole land-grant college. The school’s name changed to the Pennsylvania State College in 1874; enrollment fell to 64 undergraduates the following year as the school tried to balance purely agricultural studies with a more classic education.

George W. Atherton became president of the school in 1882, and broadened the curriculum. Shortly after he introduced engineering studies, Penn State became one of the ten largest engineering schools in the nation. Atherton also expanded the liberal arts and agriculture programs, for which the school began receiving regular appropriations from the state in 1887. A major road in State College has been named in Atherton’s honor. Additionally, Penn State’s Atherton Hall, a well-furnished and centrally located residence hall, is named not after George Atherton himself, but after his wife, Frances Washburn Atherton. His grave is in front of Schwab Auditorium near Old Main, marked by an engraved marble block in front of his statue.

Early 20th century

In the years that followed, Penn State grew significantly, becoming the state’s largest grantor of baccalaureate degrees and reaching an enrollment of 5,000 in 1936. Around that time, a system of commonwealth campuses was started by President Ralph Dorn Hetzel to provide an alternative for Depression-era students who were economically unable to leave home to attend college.

In 1953, President Milton S. Eisenhower, brother of then-U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, sought and won permission to elevate the school to university status as The Pennsylvania State University. Under his successor Eric A. Walker (1956–1970), the university acquired hundreds of acres of surrounding land, and enrollment nearly tripled. In addition, in 1967, the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, a college of medicine and hospital, was established in Hershey with a $50 million gift from the Hershey Trust Company.

Modern era

In the 1970s, the university became a state-related institution. As such, it now belongs to the Commonwealth System of Higher Education. In 1975, the lyrics in Penn State’s alma mater song were revised to be gender-neutral in honor of International Women’s Year; the revised lyrics were taken from the posthumously-published autobiography of the writer of the original lyrics, Fred Lewis Pattee, and Professor Patricia Farrell acted as a spokesperson for those who wanted the change.

In 1989, the Pennsylvania College of Technology in Williamsport joined ranks with the university, and in 2000, so did the Dickinson School of Law. The university is now the largest in Pennsylvania. To offset the lack of funding due to the limited growth in state appropriations to Penn State, the university has concentrated its efforts on philanthropy.

Research

Penn State is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. Over 10,000 students are enrolled in the university’s graduate school (including the law and medical schools), and over 70,000 degrees have been awarded since the school was founded in 1922.

Penn State’s research and development expenditure has been on the rise in recent years. According to institutional rankings of total research expenditures for science and engineering released by the National Science Foundation , Penn State stood second in the nation, behind only Johns Hopkins University and tied with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , in the number of fields in which it is ranked in the top ten. Overall, Penn State ranked very highly nationally in total research expenditures across the board. In 12 individual fields, however, the university achieved rankings in the top ten nationally. The fields and sub-fields in which Penn State ranked in the top ten are materials, psychology, mechanical engineering, sociology, electrical engineering, total engineering, aerospace engineering, computer science, agricultural sciences, civil engineering, atmospheric sciences, and earth sciences. Moreover, in eleven of these fields, the university has repeated top-ten status every year.

The Applied Research Lab (ARL), located near the University Park campus, has been a research partner with the Department of Defense since 1945 and conducts research primarily in support of the United States Navy. It is the largest component of Penn State’s research efforts statewide, with over 1,000 researchers and other staff members.

The Materials Research Institute was created to coordinate the highly diverse and growing materials activities across Penn State’s University Park campus. With more than 200 faculty in 15 departments, 4 colleges, and 2 Department of Defense research laboratories, MRI was designed to break down the academic walls that traditionally divide disciplines and enable faculty to collaborate across departmental and even college boundaries. MRI has become a model for this interdisciplinary approach to research, both within and outside the university. Dr. Richard E. Tressler was an international leader in the development of high-temperature materials. He pioneered high-temperature fiber testing and use, advanced instrumentation and test methodologies for thermostructural materials, and design and performance verification of ceramics and composites in high-temperature aerospace, industrial, and energy applications. He was founding director of the Center for Advanced Materials (CAM), which supported many faculty and students from the College of Earth and Mineral Science, the Eberly College of Science, the College of Engineering, the Materials Research Laboratory and the Applied Research Laboratories at Penn State on high-temperature materials. His vision for Interdisciplinary research played a key role in creating the Materials Research Institute, and the establishment of Penn State as an acknowledged leader among major universities in materials education and research.

The university was one of the founding members of the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN), a partnership that includes 17 research-led universities in the United States, Asia, and Europe. The network provides funding, facilitates collaboration between universities, and coordinates exchanges of faculty members and graduate students among institutions. Former Penn State president Graham Spanier is a former vice-chair of the WUN.

The university’s library system began with a 1,500-book library in Old Main.

The university’s College of Information Sciences and Technology is the home of CiteSeerX, an open-access repository and search engine for scholarly publications. The university is also the host to the Radiation Science & Engineering Center, which houses the oldest operating university research reactor. Additionally, University Park houses the Graduate Program in Acoustics, the only freestanding acoustics program in the United States. The university also houses the Center for Medieval Studies, a program that was founded to research and study the European Middle Ages, and the Center for the Study of Higher Education (CSHE), one of the first centers established to research postsecondary education.

From The Southwest Research Institute : “SwRI investigating unusual substorm in Earth’s magnetotail using MMS data”Something strange is happening with Earth’s magnetic field tail”

From The Southwest Research Institute

5.14.24

Contact
Deb Schmid
+1 210 522 2254

Southwest Research Institute is investigating an unusual event in the Earth’s “magnetotail”, the elongated portion of the planet’s magnetosphere trailing away from the Sun.

“Magnetotail” Courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center-Conceptual Image Lab. The illustration shows magnetic field lines around the Earth reconnecting in the magnetotail, usually one of the first signs of a substorm. An internally funded Southwest Research Institute project is investigating the nature of substorms, specifically a 2017 event when reconnection appeared to occur without inciting a substorm.

Magnetosphere of Earth, original bitmap from NASA. SVG rendering by Aaron Kaase.

Using data from NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission, SwRI scientists are examining the nature of substorms, fleeting disturbances in the magnetotail that release energy and often cause aurorae.

Depiction of Magnetospheric Multiscale mission spacecraft in space. Credit: National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Since their launch in 2015, the MMS spacecraft have been surveying the magnetopause, the boundary between the magnetosphere and surrounding plasma, for signs of magnetic reconnection, which occurs when magnetic field lines converge, break apart and reconnect, explosively converting magnetic energy into heat and kinetic energy. In 2017, MMS observed signs of magnetic reconnection in the magnetotail but not the normal signs of a substorm that accompany reconnection, such as strong electrical currents and perturbations in the magnetic field.

“We want to see how the local physics observed by MMS affects the entire global magnetosphere,” said SwRI’s Dr. Andy Marshall, a postdoctoral researcher. “By comparing that event to more typical substorms, we are striving to improve our understanding of what causes a substorm and the relationship between substorms and reconnection.”

During the one-year project, SwRI will compare in situ MMS measurements of reconnection affecting local fields and particles to global magnetosphere reconstructions created by the Community Coordinated Modeling Center at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center using the University of Michigan’s Space Weather Modeling Framework.

“It’s possible that significant differences exist between the global magnetotail convection patterns for substorms and non-substorm tail reconnection,” Marshall said. “We have not looked at the movement of the magnetic field lines on a global scale, so it could be that this unusual substorm was a very localized occurrence that MMS happened to observe. If not, it could reshape our understanding of the relationship between tail-side reconnection and substorms.”

MMS is the fourth NASA Solar Terrestrial Probes Program mission. Goddard Space Flight Center built, integrated and tested the four MMS spacecraft and is responsible for overall mission management and mission operations. The principal investigator for the MMS instrument suite science team is based at SwRI in San Antonio. Science operations planning and instrument commanding are performed at the MMS Science Operations Center at the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder.

For more information, visit Planetary Science or contact Joanna Quintanilla, +1 210 522 2073, Communications Department, Southwest Research Institute, 6220 Culebra Road, San Antonio, TX 78238-5166.

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The Southwest Research Institute is an independent, nonprofit applied research and development organization. The staff of nearly 2,800 specializes in the creation and transfer of technology in engineering and the physical sciences. SwRI’s technical divisions offer a wide range of technical expertise and services in such areas as engine design and development, emissions certification testing, fuels and lubricants evaluation, chemistry, space science, nondestructive evaluation, automation, mechanical engineering, electronics, and more.

The Southwest Research Institute, headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, is one of the oldest and largest independent, nonprofit, applied research and development (R&D) organizations in the United States. Founded in 1947 by oil businessman Tom Slick, SwRI provides contract research and development services to government and industrial clients.

The institute consists of nine technical divisions that offer multidisciplinary, problem-solving services in a variety of areas in engineering and the physical sciences. The Center for Nuclear Waste Regulatory Analyses, a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, also operates on the SwRI grounds. More than 4,000 projects are active at the institute at any given time. These projects are funded almost equally between the government and commercial sectors. the staff numbers over 3,000 employees and research volume was almost $1 billion. The institute provided more than $9 million to fund innovative research through its internally sponsored R&D program.

A partial listing of research areas includes space science and engineering; automation; robotics and intelligent systems; avionics and support systems; bioengineering; chemistry and chemical engineering; corrosion and electrochemistry; earth and planetary sciences; emissions research; engineering mechanics; fire technology; fluid systems and machinery dynamics; and fuels and lubricants. Additional areas include geochemistry and mining engineering; hydrology and geohydrology; materials sciences and fracture mechanics; modeling and simulation; nondestructive evaluation; oil and gas exploration; pipeline technology; surface modification and coatings; and vehicle, engine, and powertrain design, research and development. Staff members publish a great many papers in the technical literature; make hundreds of presentations at technical conferences, seminars and symposia around the world; submitted many invention disclosures; filed many patent applications; and received many U.S. patent awards.

SwRI research scientists have led several National Aeronautics Space Agency missions, including the New Horizons mission to Pluto; the Juno mission to Jupiter; and the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission to study the Earth’s magnetosphere.

National Aeronautics Space Agency New Horizons spacecraft annotated.

National Aeronautics Space Agency Juno at Jupiter.

Depiction of Magnetospheric Multiscale mission spacecraft in space. Credit: National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

SwRI initiates contracts with clients based on consultations and prepares a formal proposal outlining the scope of work. Subject to client wishes, programs are kept confidential. As part of a long-held tradition, patent rights arising from sponsored research are often assigned to the client. SwRI generally retains the rights to institute-funded advancements.

The institute’s headquarters occupy more than 2.3 million square feet of office and laboratory space on more than 1,200 acres in San Antonio. SwRI has technical offices and laboratories in Boulder, Colorado; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Warner-Robins, Georgia; Ogden, Utah; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; Rockville, Maryland; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Beijing, China; and other locations.

Technology Today, SwRI’s technical magazine, is published three times each year to spotlight the research and development projects currently underway. A complementary Technology Today podcast offers a new way to listen and learn about the technology, science, engineering, and research impacting lives and changing our world.