SEAS faculty are winning prestigious national research grants, commercializing the technologies coming out of their labs, and winning national prizes.  The vignettes below help tell the story.

Commercializing research: The academic world meets the business world

Prof. Lijie Grace Zhang receives $2 million NIH New Innovator Award
Medical researchers are steps closer to creating human organs using 3D printers, but they have significant barriers to cross before science fiction becomes a reality.  Read more

Lab-on-a-chip
Today’s healthcare system is very reactive: only when a person feels ill does he go to the doctor. The doctor often then examines the patient, performs tests, and gives a diagnosis. Imagine a system, however, in which some of those tests would be unnecessary, because patients would have access to portable medical diagnostic devices for more timely, personalized healthcare.

Smart Materials
”Much of my research involves the use of smart materials in different ways,” says Professor Adam Wickenheiser of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. In fact, Wickenheiser began working with smart materials because he thinks they are the key to miniaturizing sensing and actuation technology.

A Quick Start
Professor Philippe Bardet of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering is an experimentalist in the field of fluid dynamics, the study of how liquids and gases behave in motion under the action of internal and external forces.
 

Computational Material Science
The expression “Go big or go home” means to do something to the fullest—but it doesn’t translate well into the materials science field, where “Go small or go home” is perhaps now more apropos. As engineering moves further into nanoscale technologies, computational materials scientists like Professor Tianshu Li of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering...

Disaster Management
He‘s a doctor—an emergency physician, actually—who is on the engineering faculty . . . and he sees his job as building bridges, but not the concrete or steel variety. Dr. Joseph Barbera, a member of the Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering (EMSE) faculty, sees management science as the bridge that can connect colleagues across disciplines that otherwise do not often communicate or coordinate with each other.

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