Pitt Swanson School of Engineering

Ben Leslie works in a Pitt heart research lab while maintaining a full academic load. In his time off? He serves as a captain for the university’s varsity hockey team.

Sophomore Isabella Hsia gained a new understanding of how the energy and cybersecurity fields overlap through the interdisciplinary SHURE-Grid program.

Evan Miu and his colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh have developed a method that accurately predicts how metal oxides interact with hydrogen in a reaction important to energy storage and catalysis.

Under a power purchase agreement, for the next two decades, all of Gaucho Solar’s produced energy will go directly to Pitt, effectively meeting 18% of the university’s energy needs

“It took years to pull this off experimentally,” said Katherine Hornbostel, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering. “So it was super rewarding to see when the experimental results finally matched our model[s].”

“Pyrolysis is relatively low in cost and can generate high-value products, so it presents an appealing, practical solution,” Giannis Mpourmpakis, an associate professor of chemical and petroleum engineering at Pitt, said in a news report about the study published in ScienceDaily.

Chemical engineering researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering have built upon their previous research to overcome the challenge of designing such properly self-aligning structures by using fluid mechanics, chemo-mechanical processes – and a little stickiness.

“Our partnership with Vesper on the Gaucho solar array demonstrates Pitt’s commitment to not just purchasing renewable electricity, but purchasing local renewable electricity that has cascading local, economic and environmental benefits,” said Aurora Sharrard, Pitt’s Executive Director of Sustainability.

At the Swanson School of Engineering, this was one of the topics of workshops offered pre-semester by the Engineering Education Research Center. Bob Kerestes, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and the director of the Electrical Engineering Undergraduate Program, led the discussion on “Best Practices for Dealing with Student Absences in the Wake of the Pandemic.”

The GR-100 robot from Four Growers, a startup that is based in Turtle Creek, can now harvest cucumbers in addition to select cherry tomato varieties. It's an achievement that comes as CEO and Co-Founder Brandon Contino BSECE prepares the company for a Series A funding raise.

Some PFAS molecules resemble the fatty acids we burn for fuel and use as cellular building blocks, says Carla Ng, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. Our cells thus recognize them as beneficial and bring them inside their outer membrane as they do other resources. “The things that PFAS look like,” she says, “are the things our body is used to dealing with as food and parts of ourself.”

Two programs at the University of Pittsburgh can serve as models. At the Swanson School of Engineering, for instance, a co-op program pairs students with local businesses for internships, which often lead to first jobs. The program is so popular, there’s a waiting list for area companies looking to join.

"That list, that number, is not going to go down," said Kent Harries, a structural engineering professor at the University of Pittsburgh. "We've been neglecting our infrastructure pretty much since we built it. I'm not certain that it's perceived as critically by the public as it should be."

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh are devising ways to capture this carbon dioxide using membranes. In two new studies, they present details of experiments and computational studies that show how two types of membrane-based capture devices could remove carbon dioxide from the ocean.

A team of scientists from the University of Pittsburgh have optimized a low-cost process called pyrolysis to chemically recycle waste plastics into high-value chemical products.

In recognition of her dedication to excellence in engineering education, Karen Bursic, professor of industrial engineering and undergraduate program director, was elected a fellow of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE).

Engineering Science student Noah French was featured in The Circuit News, a news program founded by the University of Southern California. Noah used his “Junior Design Fundamentals” class, taught by Samuel J. Dickerson, to create a mobile weather station that could be used to detect severe weather events like tornadoes and storms in a target area.

One of the major issues the industry faces is the need for land use. The Direct Ocean Capture (D.O.C.) technology put forth by a research team led by Katherine Hornbostel, an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering, and Tagbo Niepa, an assistant professor from Pitt’s Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, will remove the land use requirement while still accomplishing the same task.

"There are two major challenges," says Takashi (TK) Kozai, associate professor of bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering, who leads the BIONIC Lab (Bio-Integrating Optoelectric Neural Interface Cybernetics).

Pitt engineers show self-organization of sticky micron-to-mesoscale 3D structures in confined fluids.

Katherine Hornbostel is well-versed in the field of carbon capture technologies. She has been actively collaborating with Assistant Professor Tagbo Niepa from Pitt’s Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering to develop innovative ocean carbon capture solutions.

While water is an obvious pathway for PFAS, they also are in air and soil. Except for people living near military facilities, landfills and other hotspots, more direct PFAS exposure comes from household cleaning products, personal care items, cosmetics, textiles, food packaging, carpet spray, and the like, points out Carla Ng, a University of Pittsburgh associate professor of civil and environmental engineering.

Ramakrishna Mukkamala and Aman Mahajan received a $2,707,906 grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop "Smart Cuff" – a multifunction device that can reliably monitor blood pressure, cardiac output, and ventricular ejection fraction on its own.

Too often, even the current engineering curriculum “largely ignores the threats and possible cyberattacks on engineering systems that are continuously evolving,” says Mai Abdelhakim, faculty member in the Swanson School of Engineering’s electrical and computer engineering department.