From The School of Engineering and Applied Science At Yale University: “Purifying water with just a few atoms”

Yale SEAS

From The School of Engineering and Applied Science

At

Yale University

Due to their considerable efficiency, catalysts made of just a few atoms show great promise in the field of water treatment. In a new study, researchers looked into how to optimize the performance of these catalysts and make them viable for practical use.

The results of the study, led by Prof. Jaehong Kim, are published in the PNAS [below].

In the last few decades, nanoscale catalysts have drawn much attention in the field of water treatment. Materials at the nanoscale have numerous unique and beneficial properties to offer. More recently, researchers have been exploring the possibilities of single-atom catalysts. Even smaller than nanomaterials, these catalysts can offer even greater efficiency.

“We didn’t have this capability before, but now we are basically loading single-atom metals, atom by atom, onto the substrate,” said Kim, the Henry P. Becton Sr. Professor of Chemical & Environmental Engineering. “And that’s great, because you can utilize all of the atom.”

Efficiency is critical because the materials that are commonly used for catalysts can be very expensive. For instance, palladium (currently going for about $2,000 per ounce) is a metal that’s often used for catalysts. A quick comparison shows why single-atom catalysts have generated so much interest. In nanoscale form, 50 nanometers of palladium cost about $37 to cover an area of about 250 square meters. Just over 2% of its atoms are exposed at the surface. In single-atom form, in contrast, palladium costs only 17 cents to cover an area greater than 50 football fields. And you can’t beat it for efficiency, with 100% atom exposure at the surface.

One limitation of the single-atom catalysts is that certain conditions can diminish their catalytic performance. As a solution to that, researchers have now begun creating catalysts comprising a small cluster of atoms, known as ensembles. Instead of the thousands of atoms that make up a nanomaterial, these clusters contain just three or four atoms. “But they exhibit properties more like a single atom because they’re such a small cluster, and the atoms are all exposed at the surface,” Kim said.

Because this material design is still relatively new, researchers are still figuring out the best ways to control the properties of these ensemble structures and optimize their performance. For instance, fully isolated single-atom catalysts can be enhanced by the addition of certain elements around the metals. Kim and his research team investigated whether atom ensembles could be similarly manipulated. Their paper is the first to explore the possibilities of doing so.

Kim created a system with a catalyst using an ensemble of palladium atoms, designed to reduce the carcinogen bromate in water. They introduced the non-metal elements sulfur, nitrogen, and boron to the surrounds of atom ensembles. The overall results suggested an improvement in the system’s catalytic performance. It’s a promising sign, Kim said, especially since water treatment needs to be as cost-effective as possible.

“Ultimately, we are hoping to have a highly efficient device that has this catalyst to destroy pollutants in water, because it is going to be so much cheaper and efficient than other material designs,” he said.

PNAS

See the full article here .

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

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

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science Daniel L Malone Engineering Center
The Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science is the engineering school of Yale University. When the first professor of civil engineering was hired in 1852, a Yale School of Engineering was established within the Yale Scientific School, and in 1932 the engineering faculty organized as a separate, constituent school of the university. The school currently offers undergraduate and graduate classes and degrees in electrical engineering, chemical engineering, computer science, applied physics, environmental engineering, biomedical engineering, and mechanical engineering and materials science.

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.

As of October 2020, 65 Nobel laureates, five Fields Medalists, four Abel Prize laureates, and three Turing award winners have been affiliated with Yale University. In addition, Yale has graduated many notable alumni, including five U.S. Presidents, 19 U.S. Supreme Court Justices, 31 living billionaires, and many heads of state. Hundreds of members of Congress and many U.S. diplomats, 78 MacArthur Fellows, 252 Rhodes Scholars, 123 Marshall Scholars, and nine 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 spent $990 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 15th in the nation.

Yale’s faculty include 61 members of the National Academy of Sciences , 7 members of the National Academy of Engineering and 49 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. According to 2020 data, 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 252 Rhodes Scholarships, 123 Marshall Scholarships, 67 Truman Scholarships, 21 Churchill Scholarships, and 9 Mitchell Scholarships. The university is also the second largest producer of Fulbright Scholars, with a total of 1,199 in its history and has produced 89 MacArthur Fellows. The U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs ranked Yale fifth among research institutions producing the most 2020–2021 Fulbright Scholars. Additionally, 31 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, 19 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 Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “Rescuing small plastics from the waste stream” PhD student Alexis Hocken

From The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

2.5.23
Aaron Krol | Environmental Solutions Initiative

Alexis Hocken is an MIT PhD candidate in chemical engineering, working in the lab of Brad Olsen.
Image: Melanie Gonick, MIT.

A coalition of manufacturers have sent MIT sample products to test new sorting technologies for small plastics.
Photo: Alexis Hocken.

As plastic pollution continues to mount, with growing risks to ecosystems and wildlife, manufacturers are beginning to make ambitious commitments to keep new plastics out of the environment. A growing number have signed onto the U.S. Plastics Pact, which pledges to make 100 percent of plastic packaging reusable, recyclable, or compostable, and to see 50 percent of it effectively recycled or composted, by 2025.

But for companies that make large numbers of small, disposable plastics, these pocket-sized objects are a major barrier to realizing their recycling goals.

“Think about items like your toothbrush, your travel-size toothpaste tubes, your travel-size shampoo bottles,” says Alexis Hocken, a second-year PhD student in the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering. “They end up actually slipping through the cracks of current recycling infrastructure. So you might put them in your recycling bin at home, they might make it all the way to the sorting facility, but when it comes down to actually sorting them, they never make it into a recycled plastic bale at the very end of the line.”

Now, a group of five consumer products companies is working with MIT to develop a sorting process that can keep their smallest plastic products inside the recycling chain. The companies — Colgate-Palmolive, Procter & Gamble, the Estée Lauder Companies, L’Oreal, and Haleon — all manufacture a large volume of “small format” plastics, or products less than two inches long in at least two dimensions. In a collaboration with Brad Olsen, the Alexander and I. Michael Kasser (1960) Professor of Chemical Engineering; Desiree Plata, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering; the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative; and the nonprofit The Sustainability Consortium, these companies are seeking a prototype sorting technology to bring to recycling facilities for large-scale testing and commercial development.

Working in Olsen’s lab, Hocken is coming to grips with the complexity of the recycling systems involved. Material recovery facilities, or MRFs, are expected to handle products in any number of shapes, sizes, and materials, and sort them into a pure stream of glass, metal, paper, or plastic. Hocken’s first step in taking on the recycling project was to tour one of these MRFs in Portland, Maine, with Olsen and Plata.

“We could literally see plastics just falling from the conveyor belts,” she says. “Leaving that tour, I thought, my gosh! There’s so much improvement that can be made. There’s so much impact that we can have on this industry.”

From designing plastics to managing them

Hocken always knew she wanted to work in engineering. Growing up in Scottsdale, Arizona, she was able to spend time in the workplace with her father, an electrical engineer who designs biomedical devices. “Seeing him working as an engineer, and how he’s solving these really important problems, definitely sparked my interest,” she says. “When it came time to begin my undergraduate degree, it was a really easy decision to choose engineering after seeing the day-to-day that my dad was doing in his career.”

At Arizona State University, she settled on chemical engineering as a major and began working with polymers, coming up with combinations of additives for 3D plastics printing that could help fine-tune how the final products behaved. But even working with plastics every day, she rarely thought about the implications of her work for the environment.

“And then in the spring of my final year at ASU, I took a class about polymers through the lens of sustainability, and that really opened my eyes,” Hocken remembers. The class was taught by Professor Timothy Long, director of the Biodesign Center for Sustainable Macromolecular Materials and Manufacturing and a well-known expert in the field of sustainable plastics. “That first session, where he laid out all of the really scary facts surrounding the plastics crisis, got me very motivated to look more into that field.”

At MIT the next year, Hocken sought out Olsen as her advisor and made plastics sustainability her focus from the start.

“Coming to MIT was my first time venturing outside of the state of Arizona for more than a three-month period,” she says. “It’s been really fun. I love living in Cambridge and the Boston area. I love my labmates. Everyone is so supportive, whether it’s to give me advice about some science that I’m trying to figure out, or just give me a pep talk if I’m feeling a little discouraged.”

A challenge to recycle

A lot of plastics research today is devoted to creating new materials — including biodegradable ones that are easier for natural ecosystems to absorb, and highly recyclable ones that hold their properties better after being melted down and recast.

But Hocken also sees a huge need for better ways to handle the plastics we’re already making. “While biodegradable and sustainable polymers represent a very important route, and I think they should certainly be further pursued, we’re still a ways away from that being a reality universally across all plastic packaging,” she says. As long as large volumes of conventional plastic are coming out of factories, we’ll need innovative ways to stop it from piling onto the mountain of plastic pollution. In one of her projects, Hocken is trying to come up with new uses for recycled plastic that take advantage of its lost strength to produce a useful, flexible material similar to rubber.

The small-format recycling project also falls in this category. The companies supporting the project have challenged the MIT team to work with their products exactly as currently manufactured — especially because their competitors use similar packaging materials that will also need to be covered by any solution the MIT team devises.

The challenge is a large one. To kick the project off, the participating companies sent the MIT team a wide range of small-format products that need to make it through the sorting process. These include containers for lip balm, deodorant, pills, and shampoo, and disposable tools like toothbrushes and flossing picks. “A constraint, or problem I foresee, is just how variable the shapes are,” says Hocken. “A flossing pick versus a toothbrush are very different shapes.”

Nor are they all made of the same kind of plastic. Many are made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET, type 1 in the recycling label system) or high-density polyethylene (HDPE, type 2), but nearly all of the seven recycling categories are represented among the sample products. The team’s solution will have to handle them all.

Another obstacle is that the sorting process at a large MRF is already very complex and requires a heavy investment in equipment. The waste stream typically goes through a “glass breaker screen” that shatters glass and collects the shards; a series of rotating rubber stars to pull out two-dimensional objects, collecting paper and cardboard; a system of magnets and eddy currents to attract or repel different metals; and finally, a series of optical sorters that use infrared spectroscopy to identify the various types of plastics, then blow them down different chutes with jets of air. MRFs won’t be interested in adopting additional sorters unless they’re inexpensive and easy to fit into this elaborate stream.

“We’re interested in creating something that could be retrofitted into current technology and current infrastructure,” Hocken says.

Shared solutions

“Recycling is a really good example of where pre-competitive collaboration is needed,” says Jennifer Park, collective action manager at The Sustainability Consortium (TSC), who has been working with corporate stakeholders on small format recyclability and helped convene the sponsors of this project and organize their contributions. “Companies manufacturing these products recognize that they cannot shift entire systems on their own. Consistency around what is and is not recyclable is the only way to avoid confusion and drive impact at scale.

“Additionally, it is interesting that consumer packaged goods companies are sponsoring this research at MIT which is focused on MRF-level innovations. They’re investing in innovations that they hope will be adopted by the recycling industry to make progress on their own sustainability goals.”

Hocken believes that, despite the challenges, it’s well worth pursuing a technology that can keep small-format plastics from slipping through MRFs’ fingers.

“These are products that would be more recyclable if they were easier to sort,” she says. “The only thing that’s different is the size. So you can recycle both your large shampoo bottle and the small travel-size one at home, but the small one isn’t guaranteed to make it into a plastic bale at the end. If we can come up with a solution that specifically targets those while they’re still on the sorting line, they’re more likely to end up in those plastic bales at the end of the line, which can be sold to plastic reclaimers who can then use that material in new products.”

“TSC is really excited about this project and our collaboration with MIT,” adds Park. “Our project stakeholders are very dedicated to finding a solution.”

To learn more about this project, contact Christopher Noble, director of corporate engagement at the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative.

See the full article here .

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

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings
Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

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.

MIT AeroAstro campus

MIT Lincoln Laboratory campus

Massachusettes Institute of Technology-Haystack Observatory Westford, Massachusetts, USA, Altitude 131 m (430 ft).

The Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)

MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, 314 Main St. in the Kendall Square technology center of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

From The Kavli Institute For Astrophysics and Space Research

MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science

The MIT Media Lab

MIT PLasma Science and Fusion Center

The MIT School of Engineering

The MIT Sloan School of Management

Spectrum

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.

As of December 2020, 97 Nobel laureates, 26 Turing Award winners, and 8 Fields Medalists have been affiliated with MIT as alumni, faculty members, or researchers. In addition, 58 National Medal of Science recipients, 29 National Medals of Technology and Innovation recipients, 50 MacArthur Fellows, 80 Marshall Scholars, 3 Mitchell Scholars, 22 Schwarzman Scholars, 41 astronauts, and 16 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 Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “Moving water and earth”

From The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

1.11.23
Jennifer Chu

An MIT team has developed a more accurate formula to calculate how much sediment a fluid can push across a granular bed, which could help engineers manage river restoration and coastal erosion. The key to the new formula comes down to the shape of the sediment grains. Credit: Courtesy of the researchers.

As a river cuts through a landscape it can operate like a conveyor belt, moving truckloads of sediment over time. Knowing how quickly or slowly this sediment flows can help engineers plan for the downstream impact of restoring a river or removing a dam. But the models currently used to estimate sediment flow can be off by a wide margin.

An MIT team has come up with a better formula to calculate how much sediment a fluid can push across a granular bed — a process known as “bed load transport”. The key to the new formula comes down to the shape of the sediment grains.

It may seem intuitive: A smooth, round stone should skip across a river bed faster than an angular pebble. But flowing water also pushes harder on the angular pebble, which could erase the round stone’s advantage. Which effect wins? Existing sediment transport models surprisingly don’t offer an answer, mainly because the problem of measuring grain shape is too unwieldy: How do you quantify a pebble’s contours?

The MIT researchers found that instead of considering a grain’s exact shape, they could boil the concept of shape down to two related properties: “friction and drag”. A grain’s drag, or resistance to fluid flow, relative to its internal friction, the resistance to sliding past other grains, can provide an easy way to gauge the effects of a grain’s shape.

When they incorporated this new mathematical measure of grain shape into a standard model for bed load transport, the new formula made predictions that matched experiments that the team performed in the lab.

“Sediment transport is a part of life on Earth’s surface, from the impact of storms on beaches to the gravel nests in mountain streams where salmon lay their eggs,” the team writes of their new study, appearing today in Nature [below]. “Damming and sea level rise have already impacted many such terrains and pose ongoing threats. A good understanding of bed load transport is crucial to our ability to maintain these landscapes or restore them to their natural states.”

The study’s authors are Eric Deal, Santiago Benavides, Qiong Zhang, Ken Kamrin, and Taylor Perron of MIT, and Jeremy Venditti and Ryan Bradley of Simon Fraser University in Canada.

Figuring flow

Video of glass spheres (top) and natural river gravel (bottom) undergoing bed load transport in a laboratory flume, slowed down 17x relative to real time. Average grain diameter is about 5 mm. This video shows how rolling and tumbling natural grains interact with one another in a way that is not possible for spheres. What can’t be seen so easily is that natural grains also experience higher drag forces from the flowing water than spheres do.
Credit: Courtesy of the researchers.

Bed load transport is the process by which a fluid such as air or water drags grains across a bed of sediment, causing the grains to hop, skip, and roll along the surface as a fluid flows through. This movement of sediment in a current is what drives rocks to migrate down a river and sand grains to skip across a desert.

Being able to estimate bed load transport can help scientists prepare for situations such as urban flooding and coastal erosion. Since the 1930s, one formula has been the go-to model for calculating bed load transport; it’s based on a quantity known as the Shields parameter, after the American engineer who originally derived it. This formula sets a relationship between the force of a fluid pushing on a bed of sediment, and how fast the sediment moves in response. Albert Shields incorporated certain variables into this formula, including the average size and density of a sediment’s grains — but not their shape.

“People may have backed away from accounting for shape because it’s one of these very scary degrees of freedom,” says Kamrin, a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. “Shape is not a single number.”

And yet, the existing model has been known to be off by a factor of 10 in its predictions of sediment flow. The team wondered whether grain shape could be a missing ingredient, and if so, how the nebulous property could be mathematically represented.

“The trick was to focus on characterizing the effect that shape has on sediment transport dynamics, rather than on characterizing the shape itself,” says Deal.

“It took some thinking to figure that out,” says Perron, a professor of geology in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. “But we went back to derive the Shields parameter, and when you do the math, this ratio of drag to friction falls out.”

“Drag and drop”

Their work showed that the Shields parameter — which predicts how much sediment is transported — can be modified to include not just size and density, but also grain shape, and furthermore, that a grain’s shape can be simply represented by a measure of the grain’s drag and its internal friction. The math seemed to make sense. But could the new formula predict how sediment actually flows?

To answer this, the researchers ran a series of flume experiments, in which they pumped a current of water through an inclined tank with a floor covered in sediment. They ran tests with sediment of various grain shapes, including beds of round glass beads, smooth glass chips, rectangular prisms, and natural gravel. They measured the amount of sediment that was transported through the tank in a fixed amount of time. They then determined the effect of each sediment type’s grain shape by measuring the grains’ drag and friction.

For drag, the researchers simply dropped individual grains down through a tank of water and gathered statistics for the time it took the grains of each sediment type to reach the bottom. For instance, a flatter grain type takes a longer time on average, and therefore has greater drag, than a round grain type of the same size and density.

To measure friction, the team poured grains through a funnel and onto a circular tray, then measured the resulting pile’s angle, or slope — an indication of the grains’ friction, or ability to grip onto each other.

For each sediment type, they then worked the corresponding shape’s drag and friction into the new formula, and found that it could indeed predict the bedload transport, or the amount of moving sediment that the researchers measured in their experiments.

The team says the new model more accurately represents sediment flow. Going forward, scientists and engineers can use the model to better gauge how a river bed will respond to scenarios such as sudden flooding from severe weather or the removal of a dam.

“If you were trying to make a prediction of how fast all that sediment will get evacuated after taking a dam out, and you’re wrong by a factor of three or five, that’s pretty bad,” Perron says. “Now we can do a lot better.”

This research was supported, in part, by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory.

Science paper:
Nature

See the full article here .

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

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings
Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

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.

MIT Lincoln Laboratory campus

Massachusettes Institute of Technology-Haystack Observatory Westford, Massachusetts, USA, Altitude 131 m (430 ft).

The Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)

MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, 314 Main St. in the Kendall Square technology center of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

From The Kavli Institute For Astrophysics and Space Research

MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science

The MIT Media Lab

MIT PLasma Science and Fusion Center

The MIT School of Engineering

The MIT Sloan School of Management

Spectrum

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.

As of December 2020, 97 Nobel laureates, 26 Turing Award winners, and 8 Fields Medalists have been affiliated with MIT as alumni, faculty members, or researchers. In addition, 58 National Medal of Science recipients, 29 National Medals of Technology and Innovation recipients, 50 MacArthur Fellows, 80 Marshall Scholars, 3 Mitchell Scholars, 22 Schwarzman Scholars, 41 astronauts, and 16 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 University of Delaware : “Preparing for a changing climate”

From The University of Delaware

1.11.23
Maddy Lauria
Photo courtesy of Christopher Lashley, Stephanie Patch and NASA.
Photo illustrations by Joy Smoker.

Jack Puleo, chair of the University of Delaware’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is leading a research effort that could have broad implications for coastal communities and calculating risk in the face of a changing climate and rising sea levels.

UD civil engineers lead research to examine models for coastal readiness at U.S. military bases.

University of Delaware civil engineers are leading a multi-institutional effort to identify the best models to calculate flood risk at coastal military installations where climate change threatens to increase the risk of flood damage from sea level rise and storm surge.

The four-year project, which launched in mid-2022 and will run through spring 2025, is funded by a $2.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). Project partners include faculty and students from the Netherlands, North Carolina State University, the University of South Alabama, Texas A&M and the United States Geological Survey (USGS).

“Many military installations are located along the coast and they can’t be easily relocated. They need to be protected,” said Jack Puleo, chair of UD’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and project lead. “To do that, we need to understand what the flooding risk is.”

The DoD-funded research will explore numerical models that calculate total water levels in the face of sea level rise, tides, wind-induced surge, waves and other environmental variables to determine which approaches not only perform the best but are also the most cost-effective. The team of researchers will apply their work to three military sites: the Virginia-based Naval Station Norfolk on the Atlantic Coast, Tyndall Air Force Base on the Gulf Coast of Florida and the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site on the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean.

The goal is to be able to accurately predict what kind of flooding or damage a certain site might experience during a hurricane impact, for example, when there’s been another foot of sea level rise.

“But it’s not just getting wet that’s important,” Puleo said. “It’s about flooding duration and depth. If a prediction says there will be 1 inch of water on a roadway, maybe you don’t care as much. But if it says you’ll have 1 foot of water for multiple tidal cycles, that’s important to know. It could hamper critical services and evacuation.”

This image shows one of the areas a team of civil engineers will be focusing on — the coastline near Tyndall Air Force Base along the Gulf of Mexico — during a multi-year research project to examine the varying strengths and weaknesses of coastal flooding models, particularly in the face of changing water levels.

Their findings could have broader implications for coastal communities by identifying which applications work best in which settings because running high-fidelity models isn’t cheap or easy.

Modeling strengths and weaknesses

There is a wide range of predictive models available to use, from those that handle basic calculations (but are still highly technical) to those that can produce highly localized results. Combining those models with witness accounts and existing data will help researchers “tease out the importance of knowing the fine details,” Puleo said.

The question is how much information is really needed to make accurate predictions that could help these military installations become more resilient in the face of a changing climate, especially along the coast. It’s also about timing: the models have to be able to process information quickly enough so that there’s time for a response, such as moving assets out of the way if necessary.

“We’re the team testing out all of these models and methods to be able to provide a kind of roadmap for when to use which model and what it will cost computationally or resource-wise to be able to do that,” said Stephanie Patch, an associate professor at the University of South Alabama’s Department of Civil, Coastal, and Environmental Engineering. The answer would largely depend on the event — a heavy rain or a major hurricane — as well as the specific location.

The military is interested in learning about the best options because there can be a steep cost associated with running the higher-end models — upwards of $250,000 per site for data collection, supercomputer access and manpower to generate model input, at a rough estimate. On the other hand, there could also be a steep cost with responding to an event that never happens if the model’s prediction doesn’t play out — or the opposite if an event turns unexpectedly catastrophic and there’s no time to respond.

These images show water elevations after Hurricane Michael of 2018 at Tyndall Air Force Base along the Gulf of Mexico. Total water levels were estimated using a model called XBeach, run by the University of South Alabama’s Stephanie Patch and colleagues.

While Patch is focusing on a model that’s very closely tied to a small area of beach and dune and the impacts of erosion, North Carolina State University’s Casey Dietrich is working with larger-scale models capable of simulating storm effects over large areas, like an entire state or the entire Gulf of Mexico. But the information from the varying models can be linked to help the smaller-scale studies make more accurate predictions, Dietrich explained.

“The goal is to provide guidance to the DoD about the strengths and weaknesses of each model in comparison. They’re all going to have things they’re good with and things they struggle with,” Dietrich said. Those comparisons will help the agencies decide what types of models they want to use to get what types of information — depending on how much time, effort and funding they want to commit.

There’s also a goal of reducing cost and building smarter models, he said.

“If we are able to improve our predictions at very specific sites along the coast, we also can have better predictions at other specific sites along the coast, like someone’s house or a bridge or other infrastructure,” Dietrich said.

Still, differences in the geographic location of the military facilities themselves will play a role in the physics of varying environmental factors, such as wind-driven waves or storm surge, and how those variables interact with the land. That’s why researchers are exploring sites on the Atlantic, Gulf and Pacific coasts. 

But knowing everything everywhere isn’t always possible, Puleo said. Information on what the seafloor or topography looks like may rely on data collected decades ago or sparse patches of information.

“There’s so many models to choose, and they’re not all easy to just pick up and use,” said Patch. “I think this project is so great because we’re getting a team of people together who have this expertise in different models who can determine the benefits of those.”

Planning for the future

Making as-accurate-as-possible predictions despite any data gaps and potential funding restraints is part of the real-world balance decision-makers must tackle in the face of storm preparedness. 

UD postdoc Christopher Lashley is using data from 2011’s Hurricane Irene to see how a particular level of modeling will perform. His job, he said, is to make sure he’s giving the model the correct input — because the model is only as accurate as the information it’s given.

“The more complex the model is, the more physics it includes, the more computationally demanding it is,” Lashley said. “One simulation could take maybe 100 people with individual laptops running at the same time, if you weren’t using a supercomputer. Lesser models can be run in one hour or a few minutes. It can vary significantly.”

These three images show how the position of a hurricane can impact the water level, due to surge, in certain coastal areas.

UD Professor Fengyan Shi, a numerical modeling expert with decades of experience and a core faculty member of UD’s Center for Applied Coastal Research, will lead the modeling group. He said working with fluid environments is very complicated because of the various elements you have to consider, like wind fields and how waves are generated.

Add on top of that the long-term process of sea level rise and physics happening in different places, such as the way water flows in a harbor versus the open ocean, and it’s easy to see how researchers can become very detailed with their modeling approaches.

“This is real applied research,” Shi said, noting that it will also help researchers further study the impact of physics in model predictions.

Ultimately, what the team tests and validates could be useful to everyone, Lashley said. Especially if findings indicate that the less-complex models work well at predicting, say, devastating impacts from a hurricane that would require evacuations days in advance, the coastal engineering work they’re doing could ultimately benefit countries and communities without the access to supercomputers or time to wait for slower models to be run.

“If you know, then you can plan,” he said.

This forward-looking kind of research is also what lies ahead in the future of coastal engineering, said Patch.

“We’re learning a lot about the models in terms of how they compare with each other,” she said. “I hope the outcome of this work doesn’t just benefit these specific locations, but also military installations around the world and communities around the world. It’s so translatable and transferable. I would love to see an outcome of this project — even if it’s indirect — to learn enough to apply it worldwide on all of our coasts as climate changes.”

See the full article here .

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

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

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The University of Delaware is a public land-grant research university located in Newark, Delaware. University of Delaware (US) is the largest university in Delaware. It offers three associate’s programs, 148 bachelor’s programs, 121 master’s programs (with 13 joint degrees), and 55 doctoral programs across its eight colleges. The main campus is in Newark, with satellite campuses in Dover, the Wilmington area, Lewes, and Georgetown. It is considered a large institution with approximately 18,200 undergraduate and 4,200 graduate students. It is a privately governed university which receives public funding for being a land-grant, sea-grant, and space-grant state-supported research institution.

The University of Delaware is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. According to The National Science Foundation, UD spent $186 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 119th in the nation. It is recognized with the Community Engagement Classification by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

The University of Delaware is one of only four schools in North America with a major in art conservation. In 1923, it was the first American university to offer a study-abroad program.

The University of Delaware traces its origins to a “Free School,” founded in New London, Pennsylvania in 1743. The school moved to Newark, Delaware by 1765, becoming the Newark Academy. The academy trustees secured a charter for Newark College in 1833 and the academy became part of the college, which changed its name to Delaware College in 1843. While it is not considered one of the colonial colleges because it was not a chartered institution of higher education during the colonial era, its original class of ten students included George Read, Thomas McKean, and James Smith, all three of whom went on to sign the Declaration of Independence. Read also later signed the United States Constitution.

Science, Technology and Advanced Research (STAR) Campus

On October 23, 2009, The University of Delaware signed an agreement with Chrysler to purchase a shuttered vehicle assembly plant adjacent to the university for $24.25 million as part of Chrysler’s bankruptcy restructuring plan. The university has developed the 272-acre (1.10 km^2) site into the Science, Technology and Advanced Research (STAR) Campus. The site is the new home of University of Delaware (US)’s College of Health Sciences, which includes teaching and research laboratories and several public health clinics. The STAR Campus also includes research facilities for University of Delaware (US)’s vehicle-to-grid technology, as well as Delaware Technology Park, SevOne, CareNow, Independent Prosthetics and Orthotics, and the East Coast headquarters of Bloom Energy. In 2020 [needs an update], University of Delaware expects to open the Ammon Pinozzotto Biopharmaceutical Innovation Center, which will become the new home of the UD-led National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals. Also, Chemours recently opened its global research and development facility, known as the Discovery Hub, on the STAR Campus in 2020. The new Newark Regional Transportation Center on the STAR Campus will serve passengers of Amtrak and regional rail.

Academics

The university is organized into nine colleges:

Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics
College of Agriculture and Natural Resources
College of Arts and Sciences
College of Earth, Ocean and Environment
College of Education and Human Development
College of Engineering
College of Health Sciences
Graduate College
Honors College

There are also five schools:

Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration (part of the College of Arts & Sciences)
School of Education (part of the College of Education & Human Development)
School of Marine Science and Policy (part of the College of Earth, Ocean and Environment)
School of Nursing (part of the College of Health Sciences)
School of Music (part of the College of Arts & Sciences)

From The College of Engineering At Carnegie Mellon University: “Team projects two out of three glaciers could be lost by 2100”

From The College of Engineering

At

Carnegie Mellon University

Glaciers from a research expedition. Credit: Carnegie Mellon College of Engineering.

1.7.23
Dan Carroll
dccarrol@andrew.cmu.edu

David Rounce led an international effort to produce new projections of glacier mass loss through the century under different emissions scenarios.

The projections were aggregated into global temperature change scenarios to support adaptation and mitigation discussions, such as those at the recent United Nations Conference of Parties (COP 27). His work showed that the world could lose as much as 41 percent of its total glacier mass this century—or as little as 26 percent—depending on today’s climate change mitigation efforts.

The most recent IPCC report for policymakers brought together thousands of internationally recognized climate experts in an urgent plea to citizens and their governments to fight for drastic and immediate reductions to greenhouse gas emissions. The report warned that policymakers have less than three years to act to avert catastrophic and irreversible changes to our climate. The shared socioeconomic pathways, or SSPs, they used to model future scenarios for climate change are based on factors like population, economic growth, education, urbanization, and innovation. These new pathways illustrate a more complete picture of socioeconomic trends that could impact future greenhouse gas emissions.

Only recently have researchers been able to produce global predictions for total glacial mass change using the new “SSPs”. Rounce’s work aggregates these future climate scenarios based on their increase in global mean temperature to evaluate the corresponding impacts associated with temperature change scenarios ranging from +1.5° C to +4° C. His model is also calibrated with an unprecedented amount of data, including individual mass change observations for every glacier, and uses state-of-the-art calibration methods that require the use of supercomputers.

Rounce, an assistant professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and his team found that in the SSP with continued investment in fossil fuels, more than 40 percent of the glacial mass will be gone within the century, and more than 80 percent of glaciers by number could well disappear. Even in a best-case, low-emissions scenario, where the increase in global mean temperature is limited to +1.5° C relative to pre-industrial levels, more than 25 percent of glacial mass will be gone and nearly 50 percent of glaciers by number are projected to disappear. A majority of these lost glaciers are small (less than one km2) by glacial standards, but their loss can negatively affect local hydrology, tourism, glacier hazards, and cultural values.

Many processes govern how glaciers lose mass, and Rounce is working to advance how models account for different types of glaciers, including tidewater and debris-covered glaciers. “Tidewater glaciers” refer to glaciers that terminate in the ocean, which causes them to lose a lot of mass at this interface. Debris-covered glaciers refer to glaciers that are covered by sand, rocks, and boulders. Prior work by Rounce has shown that the thickness and distribution of debris cover can have a positive or negative effect on glacial melt rates across an entire region, depending on the debris thickness. In this newest work, he found that accounting for these processes had relatively little impact on the global glacier projections, but substantial differences in mass loss were found when analyzing individual glaciers.

David Rounce: The Response of Glaciers, Water Resources, and Hazards to Climate Change.

His work provides better context for regional glacier modeling, and he hopes it will spur climate policy makers to lower temperature change goals beyond the 2.7° C mark that pledges from COP-26 are projected to hit. Smaller glacial regions like Central Europe, low latitudes like the Andes, and the upper areas of North America will be disproportionately affected by temperatures rising more than 2° C. At a 3° C rise these glacial regions almost disappear completely.

Rounce noted that the way in which glaciers respond to changes in climate takes a long time. He describes the glaciers as extremely slow-moving rivers. Cutting emissions today will not remove previously emitted greenhouse gasses, nor can it instantly halt the inertia they contribute to climate change, meaning even a complete halt to emissions would still take between 30 and 100 years to be reflected in glacier mass loss rates.

Many processes govern how glaciers lose mass and Rounce’s study advances how models account for different types of glaciers, including tidewater and debris-covered glaciers. Tidewater glaciers refer to glaciers that terminate in the ocean, which causes them to lose a lot of mass at this interface. Debris-covered glaciers refer to glaciers that are covered by sand, rocks, and boulders.

Prior work [Geophysical Research Letters (below)] by Rounce has shown that the thickness and distribution of debris cover can have a positive or negative effect on glacial melt rates across an entire region, depending on the debris thickness.

In this newest work, he found that accounting for these processes had relatively little impact on the global glacier projections, but substantial differences in mass loss were found when analyzing individual glaciers.

The model is also calibrated with an unprecedented amount of data, including individual mass change observations for every glacier, which provide a more complete and detailed picture of glacier mass change. The use of supercomputers was thus essential to support the application of state-of-the-art calibration methods and the large ensembles of different emissions scenarios.

Science papers:
Geophysical Research Letters 2021
See the above science paper for instructive material with images.
Science
Science

See the full article here .

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

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

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Carnegie Mellon College of Engineering campus

The College of Engineering is well-known for working on problems of both scientific and practical importance. Our acclaimed faculty focus on transformative results that will drive the intellectual and economic vitality of our community, nation and world. Our “maker” culture is ingrained in all that we do, leading to novel approaches and unprecedented results.

Carnegie Mellon University is a global research university with more than 12,000 students, 95,000 alumni, and 5,000 faculty and staff.

CMU has been a birthplace of innovation since its founding in 1900.

Today, we are a global leader bringing groundbreaking ideas to market and creating successful startup businesses.
Our award-winning faculty members are renowned for working closely with students to solve major scientific, technological and societal challenges. We put a strong emphasis on creating things—from art to robots. Our students are recruited by some of the world’s most innovative companies.

We have campuses in Pittsburgh, Qatar and Silicon Valley, and degree-granting programs around the world, including Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and Latin America.

From The Ohio State University: “Turning coal mine drainage into a source of rare minerals”

From The Ohio State University

1.3.23

Tatyana Woodall
Ohio State News
woodall.52@osu.edu

Coal mine drainage impairs thousands of miles of waterways in the U.S. every year, disrupting the growth of all kinds of aquatic plants and animals. Photo: Getty Images.

Study finds way to extract metals needed for modern tech.

A new study investigates a novel process for lessening the negative environmental impact of coal mine drainage and extracting rare-earth elements from it, precious minerals needed to manufacture many high-tech devices.

“Rare-earth elements, like Yttrium, for example, are necessary components of electronics, computers, and other gadgets that we use every day,” said Jeff Bielicki, co-author of the study and an associate professor in civil environmental and geodetic engineering and the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at The Ohio State University. 

The study, published in the journal Environmental Engineering Science [below], assesses an experimental process patented by the team that was shown to successfully clean coal mine drainage while producing rare-earth elements in samples from various rivers across Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.

“One thing that surprised me was just how well our process cleans up the water,” said Bielicki. “From an environmental standpoint, the major benefit of this work is that we’re successfully trapping and neutralizing so much pollution.”

When abandoned coal mines leak water, the subsequent drainage can pollute thousands of miles of natural waterways, turning them orange, and can cause great injury to the ecosystem.

Although the rare earth elements that are in from coal mine drainage are in increasingly high demand, viable natural deposits of these minerals are found in only a few areas around the world, meaning that only a few countries can provide them.

For example, much of the Western world, including the United States, relies on China to supply about 80% of these critical resources. As a result, many government agencies seek to reduce this dependence by establishing a domestic supply of rare-earth elements, especially because getting them out of the ground can cause immense environmental and social harm, Bielicki said.

“By sourcing these materials from other countries, we don’t really have any oversight of the environmental consequences of how they’re mining and producing the materials,” he said. “Domestic production is good in a variety of ways, in part because we can have regulations that better protect the environment and the people in the communities from where we get them.”

Currently, coal mine drainage is treated using active treatment systems which employ chemicals to clean the water, or passive treatment systems, which often depend on bacterial activity or geochemical methods.

According to the study, passive approaches tend to require fewer resources and have fewer environmental impacts. The Ohio State team used a passive system employing a combination of alkaline industrial byproducts, including materials like water treatment plant sludge, to neutralize the coal drainage and capture the rare earth elements.

“It’s designed to let the natural seepage of coal mine drainage percolate through the material to trap and extract it,” said Bielicki. The average time it takes to rid water of waste often varies, because the process largely depends on how quickly water flows out from the mine.

The process captured a variety of metals used in modern technology, including terbium, neodymium and europium, which play critical roles in phone displays, batteries, microphones, speakers and other parts.

The process is currently more costly than the current market price of rare metals, but further advances will bring the price down, Bielicki said.

Bielicki said he hopes their research will inform future policy surrounding coal waste disposal and help the public to examine the environmental repercussions of mining outside of typical costs, like its impact on human health and the ecosystem at large.

“Nothing we do to our environment is benign, so while shifting away from coal and other fossil fuels is beneficial in several different dimensions, we need to effect these transitions in ways that address a larger sphere of issues than just cost,“ he said. “Our research is a vital step in addressing the legacies of those environmental and social consequences.”

Other Ohio State co-authors of the study were Marcos Miranda, Soomin Chun, and Chin-Min Cheng. Other members of the team include Ohio State professors John Lenhart and Tarunjit Butalia. This work was supported by the Environmental Research Education Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy.

Science paper:
Environmental Engineering Science
See the science paper for instructive material with images.

See the full article here .

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

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

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The Ohio State University is a public research university in Columbus, Ohio. Founded in 1870 as a land-grant university and the ninth university in Ohio with the Morrill Act of 1862, the university was originally known as the Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College.

Ohio State has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best public universities in the United States. Originally focused on various agricultural and mechanical disciplines, it developed into a comprehensive university under the direction of then-Governor and later U.S. president Rutherford B. Hayes, and in 1878, the Ohio General Assembly passed a law changing the name to “The Ohio State University” and broadening the scope of the university. Admission standards tightened and became greatly more selective throughout the 2000s and 2010s.

Ohio State’s political science department and faculty have greatly contributed to the construction and development of the constructivist and realist schools of international relations; a 2004 LSE study ranked the program as first among public institutions and fourth overall in the world. A member of the Association of American Universities since 1916, Ohio State is a leading producer of Fulbright Scholars, and is the only school in North America that offers an Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, Inc-accredited undergraduate degree in welding engineering. The university’s endowment of $6.8 billion in 2021 is among the largest in the world. Past and present alumni and faculty include five Nobel Prize laureates, nine Rhodes Scholars, seven Churchill Scholars, one Fields Medalist, seven Pulitzer Prize winners, 64 Goldwater scholars, six U.S. Senators, 15 U.S. Representatives, and 108 Olympic medalists. It is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity.” As of 2021, Ohio State has the most students in the 95th percentile or above on standardized testing of any public university in the United States.

The university has an extensive student life program, with over 1,000 student organizations; intercollegiate, club and recreational sports programs; student media organizations and publications, fraternities and sororities; and three student governments. Its athletic teams compete in Division I of the NCAA and are known as the Ohio State Buckeyes, and it’s a member of the Big Ten Conference for the majority of its sports. The school’s football program has had great success and is one of the major programs of college football; their rivalry against the University of Michigan has been termed as one of the greatest in North American sports. As of 2017, Ohio State’s football program is valued at $1.5 billion, the highest valuation of any such program in the country. The main campus in Columbus has grown into the third-largest university campus in the United States, with nearly 50,000 undergraduate students and nearly 15,000 graduate students. study ranked the program as first among public institutions and fourth overall in the world.

In 1906, Ohio State President William Oxley Thompson, along with the university’s supporters in the state legislature, put forth the Lybarger Bill with the aim of shifting virtually all higher education support to the continued development of Ohio State while funding only the “normal school” functions of the state’s other public universities. Although the Lybarger Bill failed narrowly to gain passage, in its place the Eagleson Bill was passed as a compromise, which determined that all doctoral education and research functions would be the role of Ohio State, and that Miami University and Ohio University would not offer instruction beyond the master’s degree level – an agreement that would remain in place until the 1950s.

With the onset of the Great Depression, Ohio State would face many of the challenges affecting universities throughout America as budget support was slashed, and students without the means of paying tuition returned home to support families. By the mid-1930s, however, enrollment had stabilized due in large part to the role of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and later the National Youth Administration. By the end of the decade, enrollment had still managed to grow to over 17,500. In 1934, the Ohio State Research Foundation was founded to bring in outside funding for faculty research projects. In 1938, a development office was opened to begin raising funds privately to offset reductions in state support.

In 1952, Ohio State founded the interdisciplinary Mershon Center for International Security Studies, which it still houses. The work of this program led to the United States Department of Homeland Security basing the National Academic Consortium for Homeland Security at the university in 2003.

The Ohio State University and the University of Michigan football programs participated in The Ten Year War between 1969 and 1978. In consistently close matches, it pitted coaches Woody Hayes of Ohio State and Bo Schembechler of Michigan against each other. This heated era led to the persistent Michigan–Ohio State football rivalry.

Ohio State had an open admissions policy until the late 1980s; particularly since the early 2000s, the college has greatly raised standards for admission, and it has been increasingly cited as one of the best public universities in the United States. As of 2021, it has by far the most students in the country in the 95th percentile or above of test-takers on the ACT and SAT of any public university. The trend particularly began under former university administrator William Kirwan in 1998, who set out to greatly increase the quality of applicants and make the university an elite academic university.

Michael V. Drake, former chancellor of the University of California-Irvine, became the 15th president of the Ohio State University on June 30, 2014. He announced on November 21, 2019, that he would retire at the end of the 2019–2020 academic year. In 2019, Ohio State filed for trademark protection of “the” when it is used to refer to Ohio State; the application was denied. On June 3, 2020, the Ohio State Board of Trustees appointed Kristina M. Johnson, the former chancellor of The State University of New York, as the 16th president of the Ohio State University. The main campus in Columbus has grown into the third-largest university campus in the United States.

On June 22, 2022, the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted the university a trademark on the word “the” in relation to clothing, such as T-shirts, baseball caps and hats distributed and/or sold through athletic or collegiate channels. Ohio State and its fans, in particular those of its athletics program, frequently emphasizes the word “THE” when referring to the school.

The Public Ivies: America’s Flagship Public Universities (2000) by Howard and Matthew Greene listed Ohio State as one of a select number of public universities offering the highest educational quality. In its 2021 edition, U.S. News & World Report ranked Ohio State as tied for the 17th-best public university in the United States, and tied for 53rd among all national universities. They ranked the college’s political science, audiology, sociology, speech–language pathology, finance, accounting, public affairs, nursing, social work, healthcare administration and pharmacy programs as among the top 20 programs in the country. The Academic Ranking of World Universities placed Ohio State 42–56 nationally and 101–150 globally for 2020. In its 2021 rankings, Times Higher Education World University Rankings ranked it tied for 80th in the world. In 2021, QS World University Rankings ranked the university 108th in the world. The Washington Monthly college rankings, which seek to evaluate colleges’ contributions to American society based on factors of social mobility, research and service to the country by their graduates, placed Ohio State 98th among national universities in 2020.

In 1916, Ohio State became the first university in Ohio to be extended membership into the Association of American Universities, and remains the only public university in Ohio among the organization’s 60 members. Ohio State is also the only public university in Ohio to be classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Highest Research Activity” and have its undergraduate admissions classified as “more selective.”

Ohio State’s political science program is ranked among the top programs globally. Considered to be one of the leading departments in the United States, it has played a particularly significant role in the construction and development of the constructivist and realist schools of international relations. Notable political scientists who have worked at the university include Alexander Wendt, John Mueller, Randall Schweller, Gene Sharp and Herb Asher. In 2004, it was ranked as first among public institutions and fourth overall in the world by British political scientist Simon Hix at the London School of Economics and Political Science, while a 2007 study in the academic journal PS: Political Science & Politics ranked it ninth in the United States. It is a leading producer of Fulbright Scholars.

Bloomberg Businessweek ranked the undergraduate business program at Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business as the 14th best in the nation in its 2016 rankings. U.S. News & World Report ranks the MBA program tied for 30th in America. Fisher’s Executive MBA program was ranked third nationally for return on investment by The Wall Street Journal in 2008, citing a 170 percent return on an average of $66,900 invested in tuition and expenses during the 18-month program.

The Ohio State linguistics department was recently ranked among the top 10 programs nationally, and top 20 internationally by QS World University Rankings.

Ohio State’s research expenditures for the 2019 fiscal year were $968.3 million. The university is among the top 12 U.S. public research universities and third among all universities in industry-sponsored research (National Science Foundation). It is also named as one of the most innovative universities in the nation (U.S. News & World Report) and in the world (Reuters). In a 2007 report released by the National Science Foundation, Ohio State’s research expenditures for 2006 were $652 million, placing it seventh among public universities and 11th overall, also ranking third among all American universities for private industry-sponsored research. Research expenditures at Ohio State were $864 million in 2017. In 2006, Ohio State announced it would designate at least $110 million of its research efforts toward what it termed “fundamental concerns” such as research toward a cure for cancer, renewable energy sources and sustainable drinking water supplies. In 2021, President Kristina M. Johnson announced the university would invest at least $750 million over the next 10 years toward research and researchers. This was announced in conjunction with Ohio State’s new Innovation District, which will be an interdisciplinary research facility and act as a hub for healthcare and technology research, serving Ohio State faculty and students as well as public and private partners. Construction is expected to be completed in 2023.

Research facilities include Aeronautical/Astronautical Research Laboratory, Byrd Polar Research Center, Center for Automotive Research (OSU CAR), Chadwick Arboretum, Biomedical Research Tower, Biological Sciences Building, CDME, Comprehensive Cancer Center, David Heart and Lung Research Institute, Electroscience Laboratory, Large Binocular Telescope (LBT, originally named the Columbus Project), Mershon Center for International Security Studies, Museum of Biological Diversity, National Center for the Middle Market, Stone Laboratory on Gibraltar Island, OH, Center for Urban and Regional Analysis and Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center.

Ohio State’s faculty currently includes 21 members of the National Academy of Sciences or National Academy of Engineering, four members of the Institute of Medicine and 177 elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2009, 17 Ohio State faculty members were elected as AAAS Fellows. Each year since 2002, Ohio State has either led or been second among all American universities in the number of their faculty members elected as fellows to the AAAS.

In surveys conducted in 2005 and 2006 by the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE), Ohio State was rated as “exemplary” in four of the seven measured aspects of workplace satisfaction for junior faculty members at 31 universities: overall tenure practices, policy effectiveness, compensation and work-family balance.

In the last quarter century, 32 Ohio State faculty members have received the Guggenheim Fellowship, more than all other public and private Ohio universities combined. In 2008, three Ohio State faculty members were awarded Guggenheim Fellowships, placing Ohio State among the top 15 universities in the United States. Since the 2000–2001 award year, 55 Ohio State faculty members have been named as Fulbright Fellows, the most of any Ohio university.

From The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich [ETH Zürich] [Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich] (CH): “Heatwaves thawing Arctic permafrost”

From The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich [ETH Zürich] [Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich] (CH)

7.28.22 [Retrieved from 2022 year-end wrap-up.]
Marianne Lucien

Satellite data affords ETH Zürich researchers a new method for quantifying carbon mobilization in Arctic permafrost. Their findings also reveal how summer heatwaves accelerate the rate of Arctic landslides in thawing permafrost.

Retrogressive thaw slump, Mackenzie River Delta, Canada. (Image: ETH Zürich / Simon Zwieback)

In the northernmost region of the earth the arctic permafrost is melting at an accelerated rate. For more than a decade, an international team of researchers from ETH Zürich, the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and the German Aerospace Center have observed topographical pock marks – large depressions referred to as, “retrogressive thaw slumps”. The slumps occur when permanently frozen layers of soil (ice-​rich permafrost) melt leaving arctic hillslopes vulnerable to landslides. The landslides signal a risk for the potential release of carbon that has been stored in the permafrost for tens of thousands of years.

Risk for release of organic carbon

Their findings, recently published in the European Geosciences Union journal, The Cryosphere [below], reveal substantial changes to the topography of Siberia’s Taymyr peninsula, in northern Russia. The study’s results reveal a strong, 43-​fold increase in retrogressive thaw slump activity and a 28-​fold increase in carbon mobilization. The increase also happens to coincide with an extreme heatwave that occurred in northern Siberia in 2020 in which temperatures reportedly reached 38 degrees Celsius (more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit) – record-​breaking temperatures for the Arctic region.

“The strong increase in thaw slump activity due to the Siberian heatwave shows that carbon mobilization from permafrost soils can respond sharply and non-​linearly to increasing temperatures,” asserts the paper’s lead author, Philipp Bernhard, Institute of Environmental Engineering, ETH Zürich.

Measuring changes to Arctic permafrost

Using satellite data, the research team has been able to develop a new method to quantify carbon mobilization in permafrost soil. Currently no other large-​scale method exists that measures, to such a high level of spatial and vertical resolution, the changes in permafrost regions. This method allows researchers to provide a more accurate estimate of the state of the carbon cycle to the global carbon budget.

Building on an earlier field and airborne flight study conducted in Canada’s Mackenzie River Delta, the researchers collected pre-​study data that they later used to compare and analyze with satellite acquired data over the same region. Since 2010, the German Aerospace Center has been operating an innovative satellite mission using single-​pass synthetic aperture radar, the TanDEM-​X mission, to collect 3-​dimensional elevation data over the earth surface. In addition to the radar data, from 2015, researchers analyzed data obtained from the optical Sentinel-​2 satellites deployed as part of the European Space Agency’s Earth Observation mission, Copernicus Programme with the focus on the arctic landscape.

ESA Copernicus Sentinel-2.

European Space Agency [La Agencia Espacial Europea][Agence spatiale européenne][Europäische Weltraumorganization](EU) Copernicus Sentinels

TanDEM-​X radar elevation comparison between 2010 – 2017 of Mackenzie River Delta, Canada. (Image: ETH Zürich )

Neglected part of Arctic carbon cycle

Siberia’s Taymyr peninsula, like many areas of the arctic, is a remote and nearly inaccessible region making scientific field studies a challenging, if not impossible, operation. The findings of this study indicate; however, that summer heatwaves and warming arctic regions pose a significant environmental risk that are worth monitoring.

The Arctic permafrost reportedly encases approximately 1.5 trillion metric tons of organic carbon, about twice as much as currently contained in the atmosphere. Bernhard agrees that the potential risks associated with this type of carbon mobilization is “a major, but largely neglected component of the Arctic carbon cycle”. The research team anticipates that satellite remote sensing will be an indispensable tool for continuous monitoring of carbon mobilization resulting from melting permafrost across the Arctic.

Science paper:
The Cryosphere
See the science paper for instructive material with images.

See the full article here .

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

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

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich [ETH Zürich] [Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich] (CH) is a public research university in the city of Zürich, Switzerland. Founded by the Swiss Federal Government in 1854 with the stated mission to educate engineers and scientists, the school focuses exclusively on science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Like its sister institution The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne [EPFL-École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne](CH) , it is part of The Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology Domain (ETH Domain)) , part of the The Swiss Federal Department of Economic Affairs, Education and Research [EAER][Eidgenössisches Departement für Wirtschaft, Bildung und Forschung] [Département fédéral de l’économie, de la formation et de la recherche] (CH).

The university is an attractive destination for international students thanks to low tuition fees of 809 CHF per semester, PhD and graduate salaries that are amongst the world’s highest, and a world-class reputation in academia and industry. There are currently 22,200 students from over 120 countries, of which 4,180 are pursuing doctoral degrees. In the 2021 edition of the QS World University Rankings ETH Zürich is ranked 6th in the world and 8th by the Times Higher Education World Rankings 2020. In the 2020 QS World University Rankings by subject it is ranked 4th in the world for engineering and technology (2nd in Europe) and 1st for earth & marine science.

As of November 2019, 21 Nobel laureates, 2 Fields Medalists, 2 Pritzker Prize winners, and 1 Turing Award winner have been affiliated with the Institute, including Albert Einstein. Other notable alumni include John von Neumann and Santiago Calatrava. It is a founding member of the IDEA League and the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU) and a member of the CESAER network.

ETH Zürich was founded on 7 February 1854 by the Swiss Confederation and began giving its first lectures on 16 October 1855 as a polytechnic institute (eidgenössische polytechnische schule) at various sites throughout the city of Zurich. It was initially composed of six faculties: architecture, civil engineering, mechanical engineering, chemistry, forestry, and an integrated department for the fields of mathematics, natural sciences, literature, and social and political sciences.

It is locally still known as Polytechnikum, or simply as Poly, derived from the original name eidgenössische polytechnische schule, which translates to “federal polytechnic school”.

ETH Zürich is a federal institute (i.e., under direct administration by the Swiss government), whereas The University of Zürich [Universität Zürich ] (CH) is a cantonal institution. The decision for a new federal university was heavily disputed at the time; the liberals pressed for a “federal university”, while the conservative forces wanted all universities to remain under cantonal control, worried that the liberals would gain more political power than they already had. In the beginning, both universities were co-located in the buildings of the University of Zürich.

From 1905 to 1908, under the presidency of Jérôme Franel, the course program of ETH Zürich was restructured to that of a real university and ETH Zürich was granted the right to award doctorates. In 1909 the first doctorates were awarded. In 1911, it was given its current name, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule. In 1924, another reorganization structured the university in 12 departments. However, it now has 16 departments.

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.

Reputation and ranking

ETH Zürich is ranked among the top universities in the world. Typically, popular rankings place the institution as the best university in continental Europe and ETH Zürich is consistently ranked among the top 1-5 universities in Europe, and among the top 3-10 best universities of the world.

Historically, ETH Zürich has achieved its reputation particularly in the fields of chemistry, mathematics and physics. There are 32 Nobel laureates who are associated with ETH Zürich, the most recent of whom is Richard F. Heck, awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2010. Albert Einstein is perhaps its most famous alumnus.

In 2018, the QS World University Rankings placed ETH Zürich at 7th overall in the world. In 2015, ETH Zürich was ranked 5th in the world in Engineering, Science and Technology, just behind the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and University of Cambridge (UK). In 2015, ETH Zürich also ranked 6th in the world in Natural Sciences, and in 2016 ranked 1st in the world for Earth & Marine Sciences for the second consecutive year.

In 2016, Times Higher Education World University Rankings ranked ETH Zürich 9th overall in the world and 8th in the world in the field of Engineering & Technology, just behind the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, California Institute of Technology, Princeton University, University of Cambridge(UK), Imperial College London(UK) and University of Oxford(UK) .

In a comparison of Swiss universities by swissUP Ranking and in rankings published by CHE comparing the universities of German-speaking countries, ETH Zürich traditionally is ranked first in natural sciences, computer science and engineering sciences.

In the survey CHE Excellence Ranking on the quality of Western European graduate school programs in the fields of biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics, ETH Zürich was assessed as one of the three institutions to have excellent programs in all the considered fields, the other two being Imperial College London (UK) and the University of Cambridge (UK), respectively.

From The Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science At The University of California-Los Angeles: “Go ahead – Tell Gaurav Sant his ideas won’t work”

From The Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science

At

The University of California-Los Angeles

12.13.22

Sant, the son and grandson of civil engineers, says working at UCLA has given him the flexibility to pursue projects that are atypical for academia. Credit: Temasek Foundation.

Sometimes taking on a big problem means trying to do something that others say won’t work. For an example, look no further than Gaurav Sant, UCLA’s Pritzker Professor of Sustainability.

With an eye toward providing remedies for climate change, he and his colleagues take approaches to removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that are considered unlikely by some. Several of his projects have emerged from UCLA’s labs to spawn startups that are bringing new technologies into the marketplace, where they can make a difference in people’s lives.

In an interview, Sant — a professor of civil and environmental engineering and of materials science and engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA — reflected on tackling major challenges, what he does when someone says his ideas won’t work, how his research fits into a tradition, and how it doesn’t.

What shaped your research interest in sustainability?

If you look at the arc of civilization, civil engineers have been at the forefront of improving our standard of life in many ways. Major improvements from sanitation and water treatment to roads and highways have come from civil engineering.

So, in the spirit of working on big problems with big societal implications, I was drawn to this particular one: While cement and steel have undoubtedly been foundational to our way of life, the carbon footprint of producing construction materials is enormous. I became interested in reducing the carbon intensity of these materials.

To that end, for nearly a decade you’ve been developing technology to produce concrete using carbon dioxide. What did the prospects look like early on?

When I first talked about it with people in academia and industry — folks for whom I have incredible respect — they told me, “There’s little possibility this is ever going to work.” And I said, “Challenge accepted.”

It turns out that nobody had carefully looked at this process for using carbon dioxide to make concrete. We went through the due diligence to make sure it wasn’t physically infeasible, and we eventually realized that we could build and scale up the process. From there, I think we just persevered longer than others might have. It’s taken hard work from generations of Ph.D. students, postdoctoral researchers and staff scientists.

Your team won the NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE, a global competition for carbon removal technologies. How did that affect your work?

Participating in the competition prompted us to think much bigger than we might have otherwise. It really made us focus on trying to develop processes that will be viable in the real world, something that most academics aren’t necessarily challenged or inclined to do.

You founded the company CarbonBuilt, based at CNSI’s Magnify incubator, to move the technology forward. What’s the latest on that venture?

The company is building its first commercial plants in the U.S. at this point, and CarbonBuilt’s technology will be deployed at an industrial scale in early 2023.

With colleagues, you have also helped develop a system for removing carbon from the ocean, so that seawater can take up more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. What inspired that initiative?

I have a really simple way of looking at it. Carbon management requires two levels of solutions. You need sector-specific ones, such as decarbonizing construction. But you also need solutions focused on decarbonizing our global economy and way of life.

We thought more broadly about how we could make our technologies more applicable to society at large. That framing led us to create this technology, which a UCLA startup is now commercializing.

Both projects are connected to UCLA’s cross-disciplinary Institute for Carbon Management, which you direct. What do you see as the institute’s role?

Our goal is to translate research into impact. The ICM plays in a space where academia, industry and national laboratories generally don’t operate. Academia and government labs tend to work on fundamental research related to materials and processes. And for-profit companies are disinclined to take on technology development efforts that aren’t assured commercial success.

At the ICM, we emphasize translation rather than discovery, where success means bringing technologies to maturity — rapidly, scalably and repeatably — so commercial ventures can take them and scale them to success. We set out to build devices, systems and processes that are the first of their kind.

We do this in two areas: carbon management solutions, with a focus on removing, mitigating and avoiding emissions; and new processes for expanding supplies of lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese and molybdenum, which are materials foundational to the clean-energy transition.

Given that so much of your work deals with limiting climate change, where do you find such optimism in the face of an increasingly dire problem?

Fundamentally, we rely on the idea that with careful planning, focused effort and commitment, success often emerges. Such optimistic thinking is prerequisite to making a change for the better.

Optimism is important, and ambition is important, because otherwise the question turns into, “Why bother?” And “Why bother?” does not lead to innovative solutions. Fortunately, optimism and ambition are endemic to human character.

What first sparked your interest in science and engineering?

I’m a third-generation civil engineer. My grandfather built prominent projects in a city in India called Pune, and my father built prominent projects in Goa, the state in India where I grew up. As a consequence, I’ve been engineering-oriented since I was a little kid.

How does your work fit into that family tradition?

I’m hesitant to equate these things, because there’s a great difference between what my grandfather did, what my father continues to do and what I do. They did things that made a difference in people’s day-to-day lives. With the work that we’re doing, the benefits are delayed. That said, if we succeed — which will take a decade or more to know — the outcome could be just as impactful.

But the philosophical commonality is that all three of us, in our own ways, have done, or are doing, things that matter to us as individuals, and to society at large.

You’ve been at UCLA for your entire career as a professor. What keeps you here?

This is a world-class community. I’ve received support from some incredible people — in our leadership, among my peers and among our supporters, not just at UCLA Samueli but around the campus, in L.A. and around the world. I’ve had the freedom and flexibility to do things that were perhaps not typical for academia, and to take chances. So I have been fortunate to be doing fun things with a team of people I want to work with today, tomorrow and from there on.

See the full article here .

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

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings
Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science is the school of engineering at the University of California-Los Angeles. It opened as the College of Engineering in 1945, and was renamed the School of Engineering in 1969. Since its initial enrollment of 379 students, the school has grown to approximately 6,100 students. The school is ranked 16th among all engineering schools in the United States. The school offers 28 degree programs and is home to eight externally funded interdisciplinary research centers, including those in space exploration, wireless sensor systems, and nanotechnology.

The University of California-Los Angeles

For nearly 100 years, The University of California-Los Angeles has been a pioneer, persevering through impossibility, turning the futile into the attainable.

We doubt the critics, reject the status quo and see opportunity in dissatisfaction. Our campus, faculty and students are driven by optimism. It is not naïve; it is essential. And it has fueled every accomplishment, allowing us to redefine what’s possible, time after time.

This can-do perspective has brought us 12 Nobel Prizes, 12 Rhodes Scholarships, more NCAA titles than any university and more Olympic medals than most nations. Our faculty and alumni helped create the Internet and pioneered reverse osmosis. And more than 100 companies have been created based on technology developed at UCLA.

The University of California-Los Angeles is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. The University of California-Los Angeles traces its early origins back to 1882 as the southern branch of the California State Normal School (now San Jose State University). It became the Southern Branch of The University of California in 1919, making it the second-oldest (after University of California-Berkeley ) of the 10-campus University of California system.

The University of California-Los Angeles offers 337 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in a wide range of disciplines, enrolling about 31,500 undergraduate and 12,800 graduate students. The University of California-Los Angeles had 168,000 applicants for Fall 2021, including transfer applicants, making the school the most applied-to of any American university.

The university is organized into six undergraduate colleges; seven professional schools; and four professional health science schools. The undergraduate colleges are the College of Letters and Science; Samueli School of Engineering; School of the Arts and Architecture; Herb Alpert School of Music; School of Theater, Film and Television; and School of Nursing.

The University of California-Los Angeles is called a “Public Ivy”, and is ranked among the best public universities in the United States by major college and university rankings. This includes one ranking that has The University of California-Los Angeles as the top public university in the United States in 2021. As of October 2020, 25 Nobel laureates; three Fields Medalists; five Turing Award winners; and two Chief Scientists of the U.S. Air Force have been affiliated with The University of California-Los Angeles as faculty; researchers or alumni. Among the current faculty members, 55 have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences; 28 to the National Academy of Engineering ; 39 to the Institute of Medicine; and 124 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . The university was elected to the Association of American Universities in 1974.

The University of California-Los Angeles student-athletes compete as the Bruins in the Pac-12 Conference. The Bruins have won 129 national championships, including 118 NCAA team championships- more than any other university except Stanford University, whose athletes have won 126. The University of California-Los Angeles students, coaches, and staff have won 251 Olympic medals: 126 gold; 65 silver; and 60 bronze. The University of California-Los Angeles student-athletes have competed in every Olympics since 1920 with one exception (1924) and have won a gold medal in every Olympics the U.S. participated in since 1932.

History

In March 1881, at the request of state senator Reginaldo Francisco del Valle, the California State Legislature authorized the creation of a southern branch of the California State Normal School (now San José State University) in downtown Los Angeles to train teachers for the growing population of Southern California. The Los Angeles branch of the California State Normal School opened on August 29, 1882, on what is now the site of the Central Library of the Los Angeles Public Library system. The facility included an elementary school where teachers-in-training could practice their technique with children. That elementary school is related to the present day University of California-Los Angeles Lab School. In 1887, the branch campus became independent and changed its name to Los Angeles State Normal School.

In 1914, the school moved to a new campus on Vermont Avenue (now the site of Los Angeles City College) in East Hollywood. In 1917, UC Regent Edward Augustus Dickson, the only regent representing the Southland at the time and Ernest Carroll Moore- Director of the Normal School, began to lobby the State Legislature to enable the school to become the second University of California campus, after University of California-Berkeley. They met resistance from University of California-Berkeley alumni, Northern California members of the state legislature, and Benjamin Ide Wheeler- President of the University of California from 1899 to 1919 who were all vigorously opposed to the idea of a southern campus. However, David Prescott Barrows the new President of the University of California did not share Wheeler’s objections.

On May 23, 1919, the Southern Californians’ efforts were rewarded when Governor William D. Stephens signed Assembly Bill 626 into law which acquired the land and buildings and transformed the Los Angeles Normal School into the Southern Branch of the University of California. The same legislation added its general undergraduate program- the Junior College. The Southern Branch campus opened on September 15 of that year offering two-year undergraduate programs to 250 Junior College students and 1,250 students in the Teachers College under Moore’s continued direction. Southern Californians were furious that their so-called “branch” provided only an inferior junior college program (mocked at the time by The University of Southern California students as “the twig”) and continued to fight Northern Californians (specifically, Berkeley) for the right to three and then four years of instruction culminating in bachelor’s degrees. On December 11, 1923 the Board of Regents authorized a fourth year of instruction and transformed the Junior College into the College of Letters and Science which awarded its first bachelor’s degrees on June 12, 1925.

Under University of California President William Wallace Campbell, enrollment at the Southern Branch expanded so rapidly that by the mid-1920s the institution was outgrowing the 25-acre Vermont Avenue location. The Regents searched for a new location and announced their selection of the so-called “Beverly Site”—just west of Beverly Hills—on March 21, 1925 edging out the panoramic hills of the still-empty Palos Verdes Peninsula. After the athletic teams entered the Pacific Coast conference in 1926 the Southern Branch student council adopted the nickname “Bruins”, a name offered by the student council at The University of California-Berkeley. In 1927, the Regents renamed the Southern Branch the University of California at Los Angeles (the word “at” was officially replaced by a comma in 1958 in line with other UC campuses). In the same year the state broke ground in Westwood on land sold for $1 million- less than one-third its value- by real estate developers Edwin and Harold Janss for whom the Janss Steps are named. The campus in Westwood opened to students in 1929.

The original four buildings were the College Library (now Powell Library); Royce Hall; the Physics-Biology Building (which became the Humanities Building and is now the Renee and David Kaplan Hall); and the Chemistry Building (now Haines Hall) arrayed around a quadrangular courtyard on the 400 acre (1.6 km^2) campus. The first undergraduate classes on the new campus were held in 1929 with 5,500 students. After lobbying by alumni; faculty; administration and community leaders University of California-Los Angeles was permitted to award the master’s degree in 1933 and the doctorate in 1936 against continued resistance from The University of California-Berkeley.

Maturity as a university

During its first 32 years University of California-Los Angeles was treated as an off-site department of The University of California. As such its presiding officer was called a “provost” and reported to the main campus in Berkeley. In 1951 University of California-Los Angeles was formally elevated to co-equal status with The University of California-Berkeley, and its presiding officer Raymond B. Allen was the first chief executive to be granted the title of chancellor. The appointment of Franklin David Murphy to the position of Chancellor in 1960 helped spark an era of tremendous growth of facilities and faculty honors. By the end of the decade University of California-Los Angeles had achieved distinction in a wide range of subjects. This era also secured University of California-Los Angeles’s position as a proper university and not simply a branch of the University of California system. This change is exemplified by an incident involving Chancellor Murphy, which was described by him:

“I picked up the telephone and called in from somewhere and the phone operator said, “University of California.” And I said, “Is this Berkeley?” She said, “No.” I said, “Well who have I gotten to?” ” University of California-Los Angeles.” I said, “Why didn’t you say University of California-Los Angeles?” “Oh”, she said, “we’re instructed to say University of California.” So, the next morning I went to the office and wrote a memo; I said, “Will you please instruct the operators, as of noon today, when they answer the phone to say, ‘ University of California-Los Angeles.'” And they said, “You know they won’t like it at Berkeley.” And I said, “Well, let’s just see. There are a few things maybe we can do around here without getting their permission.”

Recent history

On June 1, 2016 two men were killed in a murder-suicide at an engineering building in the university. School officials put the campus on lockdown as Los Angeles Police Department officers including SWAT cleared the campus.

In 2018, a student-led community coalition known as “Westwood Forward” successfully led an effort to break University of California-Los Angeles and Westwood Village away from the existing Westwood Neighborhood Council and form a new North Westwood Neighborhood Council with over 2,000 out of 3,521 stakeholders voting in favor of the split. Westwood Forward’s campaign focused on making housing more affordable and encouraging nightlife in Westwood by opposing many of the restrictions on housing developments and restaurants the Westwood Neighborhood Council had promoted.

Academics

Divisions

Undergraduate

College of Letters and Science
Social Sciences Division
Humanities Division
Physical Sciences Division
Life Sciences Division
School of the Arts and Architecture
Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science (HSSEAS)
Herb Alpert School of Music
School of Theater, Film and Television
School of Nursing
Luskin School of Public Affairs

Graduate

Graduate School of Education & Information Studies (GSEIS)
School of Law
Anderson School of Management
Luskin School of Public Affairs
David Geffen School of Medicine
School of Dentistry
Jonathan and Karin Fielding School of Public Health
Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior
School of Nursing

Research

University of California-Los Angeles is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity” and had $1.32 billion in research expenditures in FY 2018.

.

From Drexel University: “Study – Turning Wastewater into Fertilizer Is Feasible and Could Help to Make Agriculture More Sustainable”

From Drexel University

11.18.22

The wastewater draining from massive pools of sewage sludge has the potential to play a role in more sustainable agriculture, according to environmental engineering researchers at Drexel University. A new study, looking at a process of removing ammonia from wastewater and converting it into fertilizer, suggests that it’s not only technically viable, but also could help to reduce the environmental and energy footprint of fertilizer production — and might even provide a revenue stream for utilities and water treatment facilities.

Agriculture fertilizer Credit: iStock.

The production of nitrogen for fertilizer is an energy-intensive process and accounts for nearly 2% of global carbon dioxide emissions. In the last several years researchers have explored alternatives to the Haber-Bosch nitrogen production process, which has been the standard for more than a century. One promising possibility, recently raised by some water utility providers, is gleaning nitrogen from the waste ammonia pulled from water during treatment.

“Recovering nitrogen from wastewater would be a desirable alternative to the Haber-Bosch process because it creates a ‘circular nitrogen economy,’” said Patrick Gurian, PhD, a professor in Drexel’s College of Engineering who helped lead the research, which was recently published in the journal Science of the Total Environment [below]. “This means we are reusing existing nitrogen rather than expending energy and generating greenhouse gas to harvest nitrogen from the atmosphere, which is a more sustainable practice for agriculture and could become a source of revenue for utilities.”

Graphical abstract. Credit: Science of The Total Environment (2022).

A Cleaner Way to Clean

Under the Clean Water Act of 1972 municipal water treatment facilities have been challenged to meet water quality standards for water that they discharge into waterways. Increasingly ammonia is seen as both a concern for aquatic environments as elevated levels of ammonia can result in overgrowth of vegetation in streams and rivers which can endanger fish species. The options for removing ammonia are generally time and space consuming and can be energy-intensive undertakings.

One option being explored by several facilities in North America and Europe is a process called “air-stripping”. It removes ammonia by raising the temperature and pH of the water enough to convert the chemical into a gas, which can then be collected in concentrated form as ammonium sulfate.

But deciding on making the investment to convert to air-stripping requires a complex study – called a lifecycle analysis — of its technological and financial viability.

Exploring the Option

The team, led by Gurian and Sabrina Spatari, PhD, from Technion Israel Institute of Technology, regularly perform these analyses to take stock of the full environmental and economic impact of various options for recycling and reuse of waste or side-stream products as sustainable solutions. Their analysis of this wastewater scenario suggests there is a complementary relationship that could result in a more sustainable path for both farmers and water management authorities.

“Our analysis identifies a significant potential for environmental mitigation and economic benefit from implementing air-stripping technology at wastewater treatment plants for producing ammonia sulfate fertilizer,” they wrote. “In addition to ammonia sulfate production as a marketable product, the benefit of reducing the ammonia load in the side-stream before it is recycled into the wastewater stream at the wastewater treatment plant provides an additional justification for adopting air-stripping.”

Using data from Philadelphia’s water treatment facility and several others across North America and Europe, the team conducted its lifecycle assessment and economic feasibility studies. They looked at factors ranging from the cost of installing and maintaining an air-stripping system, to the concentration of ammonia and flow rate of the wastewater; to the sources of energy used to drive the collection and conversion process; to the production and transportation cost and market price of the fertilizer chemicals.

Promising Results

Findings of the life-cycle analysis show that air-stripping emits about five to 10 times less greenhouse gas than the Haber-Bosch nitrogen-producing process and uses about five to 15 times less energy.

From an economic perspective, the overall cost of producing fertilizer chemicals from wastewater is low enough that the producer could sell them at a price more than 12 times lower than Haber-Bosch-produced chemicals and still break even. 

“Our study suggests that recovering ammonia can be cost-effective even at low concentration,” they write. “Although high ammonia concentration is environmentally favorable, and can simultaneously support marginal production of ammonium sulfate with lower environmental impact, particularly for life cycle energy, greenhouse gas emissions, and several human and ecosystem health indicators, compared to the Haber-Bosch production.”

In addition, the study suggests that water treatment facilities may enjoy energy savings by air-stripping the ammonia to reduce levels before the water it reenters the waste treatment process. This is because it would cut the time and processing needed to treat the water and fits in well with softening processes that help to slow chemical deposition on the treatment plant infrastructure.

While the team acknowledges that air-stripping would churn out fertilizer in smaller amounts than the industrial Haber-Bosch process, being able to collect and reuse any quantity of resources helps to improve the sustainability of commercial agriculture and prevents them from becoming water pollutants.

“This indicates that air-stripping for recovery of ammonium sulfate could be a small part – but an important step – toward recovering and reusing the massive amount of nitrogen we use to sustain global agriculture,” Spatari said. “And, significantly it presents an alternative for chemical production that does not have the same level of deleterious environmental and human health effects as the current process. This research suggests that water utility providers could also consider investing in technologies that would capture phosphorous and recycle it for agricultural use.”

Science paper:
Science of the Total Environment

See the full article here .

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

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Global Research University, Experiential Learning Leader

Drexel University is a comprehensive global research university ranked among the top 100 in the nation. With approximately 26,000 students, Drexel is one of America’s 15 largest private universities.

Drexel has built its global reputation on core achievements that include:

Leadership in experiential learning through Drexel Co-op.
A history of academic technology firsts.
Recognition as a model of best practices in translational, use-inspired research.

Founded in 1891 in Philadelphia, Drexel now engages with students and communities around the world via:

Three Philadelphia campuses and other regional sites.
The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, the nation’s oldest major natural science museum and research organization.
International research partnerships including China and Israel.
Drexel Online, one of the oldest and most successful providers of online degree programs.

Drexel is one of Philadelphia’s top 10 private employers, and a major engine for economic development in the region. Drexel has committed to being the nation’s most civically engaged university, with community partnerships integrated into every aspect of service and academics.

From The Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science: “Electrified Processes at the Intersection of Water, Energy & Climate”

Yale SEAS

From The Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science

at

Yale University

8.31.22
Kevin Pataroque

Lea Winter joined the Yale’s Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering this past July as an assistant professor. Born and raised in New Haven, she is excited to continue her career at Yale, where she previously completed her undergraduate degree and a postdoctoral fellowship.

Lea Winter.

Eleven years ago, she began her academic journey as an aspiring chemical engineering major. Throughout her four years at Yale, she explored different research topics under summer research fellowship opportunities, ranging from immuno-genomics to alternative fuels. She spent part of her academic career under the mentorship of Dr. Menachem Elimelech, whose research centers around developing membranes for water treatment technology. Winter’s involvement in sustainability research fostered her interest in environmentally-focused research to preserve human health.

“I realized that people get sick because of a lack of access to clean water, malnutrition, air pollution, extreme climate events relating to climate change…I wanted to work on these environmental issues to prevent these situations from happening,” Winter said. “I wanted to increase access to clean water, or increase access to fertilizer and ways to improve food security, or try to mitigate climate change to prevent catastrophic climate events from happening.”

After completing her degree at Yale in 2015, she began her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at Columbia University under the mentorship of Dr. Jingguang Chen, who researches heterogeneous catalysis and electrocatalysis to improve chemical manufacturing processes.

Throughout her graduate career, she developed electrically-driven pathways to generate chemicals from sustainable inputs. Many industrial processes that produce consumer goods are indirectly driven by fossil fuels: for example, conventional alcohol production is reliant upon hydrogen, which is largely sourced from natural gas and coal, as a key reactant. As an alternative, alcohols could be made by reacting CO2 with ethane, an underutilized compound extracted with natural gas, as the hydrogen source to generate alcohols. This reaction cannot occur using heat-driven processes, but it is achievable using an electricity-based plasma process at room temperature and ambient pressure.

“It’s possible that the best way to find electricity-based processes isn’t just to take the same reaction and run it on electricity [instead of heat], but instead to do it in an entirely different way, or even to have different inputs in the process,” she said. “And by changing those details for how we do the process, we might be able to find more efficient routes to making these products.” In her graduate research, she targeted carbon dioxide as a reactant to generate fuels and chemicals widely used in industrial processes.

Credit: The Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science.

As she was finishing her Ph.D. at Columbia, she began applying for postdoctoral fellowships that complemented her research in energy and sustainable inputs. She soon discovered that researchers in the Elimelech Lab were beginning a project coupling membranes and electrically-driven phenomena. Applying her expertise in heterogeneous catalysis and plasma catalysis, Winter rejoined the Elimelech Lab in 2020 to develop electrified membranes.

Conventional membranes do not break apart contaminants in water supplies, but rather separate these from a target stream. As a result, membranes produce a “waste stream” that must be disposed of, running the risk of recontaminating water supplies. In contrast, electrified membranes are advantageous because they can both capture and degrade contaminants into harmless byproducts.

“It was serendipitous,” Winter said. “I had this idea about making membranes that could do electrochemistry, and there were people in the Elimelech Lab who were thinking of writing a review paper on that topic at the same time. I had read a paper from the Elimelech Lab on using photocatalysts in membranes to degrade contaminants. You need to somehow deliver the solar energy to photocatalysts in water. Imagine coating a membrane with a catalyst: that membrane needs to be exposed to the water, and be exposed to sunlight. The reaction might be limited by how much sunlight can get to the membrane surface under the water.”

Traditional technologies have used photocatalysts, particles that use light to jumpstart electron-based reactions, to degrade contaminants. However, these catalysts are reliant upon light exposure, limiting their use in industrial facilities to the daytime. In contrast, conventional water treatment systems are running at all hours of the day to constantly supply clean water to the general public.

The electrified membranes that Winter is developing decouple the renewable energy capture from the catalytic reaction. By using a conductive membrane, electricity can be transferred from an external source, extending the hours that these membranes can be used in industry.

“I thought — what if we were to decouple the solar radiation capture from where the reaction is happening? In other words, what if we were to separate out the solar panel from where the catalysis is happening?”

Already, the Winter Lab has an ambitious group of researchers who are collaborating with centers both internally and externally, such as The Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture and the NSF’s Nanosystems Engineering Research Center for Nanotechnology Enabled Water Treatment (NEWT), a collaboration that spans across four different universities to improve methods for water treatment technology. Her research will focus on water treatment technologies, a traditional strength of the Yale Environmental Engineering program, as well as energy storage, resource loops, and electrically-driven processes.

As an environmental engineering faculty with a chemical engineering background, she seeks to utilize traditional chemical engineering principles towards challenges that the environment is facing. In the upcoming academic year, Winter is planning on teaching courses such as the Water Energy Nexus and Engineering Solutions to Climate Change to better prepare environmental engineers to tackle issues relating to climate change.

In the span of eleven years, when she began her undergraduate career at Yale, the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering has changed drastically. Many faculty members that taught her courses have left or retired, and new professors with novel research areas have joined the faculty. Still, she notes that the spirit of Yale’s engineering departments, which she hopes to contribute to throughout her future career as a Yale professor, was as she remembers it.

“Something that I learned from my peers when I was a Yale undergraduate: follow your passions,” Winter said. “When I was a Yale undergraduate, people tended to work on things that they were passionate about, and that’s something which I think is really important. If you work on something you’re passionate about, you’ll enjoy it, and you’ll do it well.”

See the full article here .

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

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science Daniel L Malone Engineering Center
The Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science is the engineering school of Yale University. When the first professor of civil engineering was hired in 1852, a Yale School of Engineering was established within the Yale Scientific School, and in 1932 the engineering faculty organized as a separate, constituent school of the university. The school currently offers undergraduate and graduate classes and degrees in electrical engineering, chemical engineering, computer science, applied physics, environmental engineering, biomedical engineering, and mechanical engineering and materials science.

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.

As of October 2020, 65 Nobel laureates, five Fields Medalists, four Abel Prize laureates, and three Turing award winners have been affiliated with Yale University. In addition, Yale has graduated many notable alumni, including five U.S. Presidents, 19 U.S. Supreme Court Justices, 31 living billionaires, and many heads of state. Hundreds of members of Congress and many U.S. diplomats, 78 MacArthur Fellows, 252 Rhodes Scholars, 123 Marshall Scholars, and nine 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 spent $990 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 15th in the nation.

Yale’s faculty include 61 members of the National Academy of Sciences , 7 members of the National Academy of Engineering and 49 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. According to 2020 data, 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 252 Rhodes Scholarships, 123 Marshall Scholarships, 67 Truman Scholarships, 21 Churchill Scholarships, and 9 Mitchell Scholarships. The university is also the second largest producer of Fulbright Scholars, with a total of 1,199 in its history and has produced 89 MacArthur Fellows. The U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs ranked Yale fifth among research institutions producing the most 2020–2021 Fulbright Scholars. Additionally, 31 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, 19 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.