August 31 - September 6, 2020

COVID testing has been plagued by bottlenecks and inefficiencies, inhibiting the scale-up of testing to needed levels for the safe re-opening of society. Dr. Erica Gralla (EMSE) and colleagues from the University of Maryland and Polytechnique Montreal are developing models to help COVID testing labs scale up operations and remove bottlenecks, so that more people can be tested and results can be provided faster. They are developing discrete event simulation models to represent the sequence of steps in COVID sample collection and testing, then experimenting with what-if scenarios to show the performance benefits or detriments from changes in process (e.g. batch sizes, sample collection standards, assays) and in regulations. Their collaboration with a major Maryland testing center will enable their models to be validated against a real setting and their insights to be shared and implemented through workshops with Maryland testing stakeholders. The interdisciplinary team consists of Dr. Gralla, Dr. Patti Gravitt (epidemiology) and Dr. Jacques Ravel (genomics) of University of Maryland, Dr. Nadia Lahrichi (operations research) of Polytechnique Montreal, and SEAS systems engineering masters students Kai Friesecke and Jad El Hage. This research is funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation through Grant GBMF9634 to Johns Hopkins University to support the work of the Society for Medical Decision Making COVID-19 Decision Modeling Initiative.

Dr. Luyao Lu (BME) has received a $15,000 GW COVID-19 Research Fund grant to work on the project “Wireless multimodal soft wearable sensors for remote physiological monitoring of COVID-19 symptoms.”

Dr. Saniya LeBlanc (MAE) has teamed with Drs. Joy Gockel and Tanvi Banerjee at Wright State University and the company Arctos to conduct the project “Accelerating Additive Manufacturing Process Design for Energy Conversion Materials using In-situ Sensing and Machine Learning.” Awarded by the U.S. Department of Energy Advanced Manufacturing Office, the two-year, $500,000 ($150,000 GW share) project will wrap a machine learning framework around in-situ thermal tomography, particle ejection monitoring, profilometry, and spectroscopy sensor data during additive manufacturing processing to predict optimal processing parameters for thermoelectric materials.

In the Journal of Biomedical Semantics article “Disclosing Main authors and Organisations collaborations in bioprinting through network maps analysis,” Dr. Lijie Grace Zhang (MAE) and GW are ranked among the most influential authors and institutions, respectively, in the field of bioprinting. Dr. Zhang was ranked 7^th in the study’s “List of most influential authors found on this study” (Table 3), while GW was ranked 10^th in the “Top ten institution[s] and number of publications in bioprinting” list (Figure 4). In addition, the names of many of her lab members appear in the study’s “Co-authors network map.”

The GW SmartGrid Lab, directed by Dr. Payman Dehghanian (ECE) published and virtually presented this paper at the International Conference on Probabilistic Methods Applied to Power Systems, held August 18-21 in Liege, Belgium: M. Nazemi, P. Dehghanian, and Z. Yang, “Swift Disaster Recovery in Resilient Power Grids: Integration of DERs with Mobile Power Sources.”

Dr. Leila Farhadi (CEE) and her PhD student Abedeh Abdolghafoorian have published the following paper: A. Abdolghafoorian and L. Farhadi. “LIDA: a Land Integrated Data Assimilation Framework for Mapping Land Surface Heat and Evaporative Fluxes by Assimilating Space-Borne Soil Moisture and Land Surface Temperature,” Journal of Water Resources Research, Vol. 56, Issue 8.

Dr. Michael Keidar (MAE) is the editor of the recently published book Plasma Cancer Therapy. The book, written by key researchers in the field, provides a comprehensive analysis and overview of the state-of-the-art of plasma-based cancer therapy. Written by a global, cross-disciplinary group of leading researchers, the book covers basic theory, generation, diagnostics, and simulation of cold atmospheric plasma, as well as their clinical application in cancer therapy, immunotherapy, and future outlook, giving a complete picture of the field. Dr. Keidar also recently published the following paper, along with his graduate student Keir Daniels, post-doc Denis Zolotuchin, and their collaborator: D. B. Zolotukhin, K. P. Daniels, L. Brieda, and M. Keidar. “Onset of the magnetized arc and its effect on the momentum of a low-power two-stage pulsed magneto plasma-dynamic thruster,” Physical Review E, 102, 021203(R), 2020.

PhD student Bengisu Sisik (MAE) and Dr. David Nagel (ECE) have published this paper: B. Sisek and D. Nagel. “Review of Seebeck Calorimeters Used in LENR Experiments,” Journal of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science, Vol. 33, pp 234–251.

Dr. Chung Hyuk Park (BME) has published the following journal paper with his PhD student and his former postdoc: H. Javed, W. Lee, and C. H. Park (2020). “Toward an Automated Measure of Social Engagement for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder–a Personalized Computational Modeling Approach,” Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 7, 43.

Dr. Volker Sorger (ECE) and Rishi Maiti have published this article: V. J. Sorger and R. Maiti. “Roadmap for gain-bandwidth product-enhanced photodetectors,” Optical Materials Express, Vol. 10, Issue 9.

Dr. Volker Sorger (ECE) gave four invited talks at the SPIE Optics and Photonics Conference, held virtually August 24-28. The talk titles were: “Photonic tensor cores for machine learning,” “Photonic nonvolatile memory for optical matrix multiplications,” “Massively parallel Fourier-optics based processor,” and “Advanced 2D material optoelectronic devices.”

The IEEE Computer Society president has appointed Dr. Lorena Barba (MAE) as editor-in-chief of Computing in Science and Engineering, a flagship technical magazine for the interdisciplinary computational sciences. The Board of Governors confirmed the appointment on August 18. Dr. Barba will serve for a period of three years, starting January 1, 2021.

On August 12, Dr. Ken Chong (MAE) was appointed as a member of the editorial board of the Engineering Mechanics Journal for a five-year term. Engineering Mechanics Journal, established in 1984, is a premier, comprehensive, monthly journal headquartered at the Tsinghua University, administered by the Chinese Society of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics.

Dr. Matt Kay (BME) has accepted an invitation from the National Institutes of Health to serve as a member of the Myocardial Ischemia and Metabolism Study Section, Center for Scientific Review, for a three-year term. The invitation notes that “Members are selected on the basis of their demonstrated competence and achievement in their scientific discipline as evidenced by the quality of research accomplishments, publications in scientific journals, and other significant scientific activities, achievements and honors.”

Dr. Ekundayo Shittu (EMSE), Dr. Tiffany-Rose Sikorski (GW School of Education and Human Development), and Dr. Erica Wortham (GW Innovation Center) have been awarded a three-year, $300,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for their project, titled “Service Learning Projects to Improve Engineering Students’ Civic Engagement and Capacity for Innovation.” Dr. Shittu is the lead principal investigator and has participated in two national NSF I-Corps programs. The project will seek to develop students’ capacity for innovation while they use their engineering skills and knowledge to decrease suffering, marginalization, or exclusion of particular groups. Many engineering programs emphasize the economic opportunities that engineering degrees will open to graduates, such as working for the private sector. However, engineering students are increasingly interested in ways to use their engineering education to pursue careers in which they can see the human impact of their work. The premise of this project is that opportunities for civic engagement can improve student engagement in engineering education through human-centered design and problem solving with empathy. By helping students develop these skills, students will be better positioned to use their engineering knowledge in the future to benefit society. Ms. Annamaria Konya Tannon (GW Innovation Center) is senior personnel on the project, which will be executed under her capacity as SEAS chief evangelist for innovation and entrepreneurship.