Throughout his journey to America and into academia, Pant never forgot the generous support he received from Pitt. This summer, he decided it was time to give back. Pant and his wife have launched the Prahlad and Bindu Pant Endowed Student Resource Fund in Civil Engineering, a $100,000 gift that will support Swanson School of Engineering students pursuing degrees in civil engineering.

Two suitcases

Growing up in Nepal’s capital Kathmandu, Pant enjoyed math and science and had to decide which to pursue. “At that time,” he said, “if you wanted to go for higher education, you applied for a scholarship for engineering or medicine.” He chose the former.

After studying engineering at BIT Sindri, in India, Pant returned to Nepal and began working for the government, where he tried unsuccessfully to obtain a passport to go abroad. Undaunted, he worked on a USAID-funded project building highways in the mountains, which sent him to Pitt to study for a summer semester.

Before returning to Nepal, Pant’s professor invited him, his wife, and a few other students to his house for dinner. “As we were about to leave,” Pant recalled, “the professor asked if I wanted to continue studying at Pitt.”

Pant had obligations in Nepal but at the professor’s urging, he filled out a graduate school application and dropped it in the mail before he flew home.

“I had almost forgotten about that, and in March of 1976, I received a letter that I had been admitted to the master's program in the Department of Civil Engineering,” Pant said.

In late August that year, he and his wife flew back to Pittsburgh, this time to stay. “We came with only one suitcase each,” Pant said. “Then we were at the Pittsburgh airport and didn't know where to go, so we just called the cab and said, ‘Okay, take us to a hotel near the University.’”

The next day, Pant met with the professor and things fell into place. Apartments around the university were full, so they found one in Squirrel Hill. Classes started, and Pant was immersed in his studies.

“The academic part was challenging, and I had to work hard,” Pant said. He and his wife also had to adjust to the weather. The winter of 1976 – 1977 was famously cold, with the city setting a record of 33 consecutive days with temperatures below freezing. In Kathmandu, temperatures occasionally reach freezing, but most days are warm and sunny.

When Pittsburgh bus drivers went on strike in December, Pant recalled trudging through the snow to campus. “Luckily the strike only lasted a couple days.”

Despite the cold and the challenges of earning graduate degrees in a foreign country, Pant “loved it. I was also lucky. I was supported by the civil engineering department every semester that I was there.”

A dream realized

“Being a professor was my dream,” Pant said. “Coming to America, I wasn’t interested in any other thing.”

After earning his PhD, Pant applied for three teaching positions and received two offers. He chose the University of Cincinnati, where in 1980 he became the first Nepali engineering professor in America.

Suddenly, Pant found himself entering a classroom not as a student but as a professor. “I had no training in teaching. I said, ‘How am I going to teach these courses?’ It was a learning experience.” He learned quickly and for over 20 years conducted research and taught courses in transportation and traffic engineering.

In 2003, Pant retired as a professor emeritus and launched the startup company PDP Associates, a successful transportation research and traffic management company. After staying on at the University of Cincinnati until 2007 to support his last graduate students, he and his wife, in search of a warmer climate, moved to Atlanta.

The opportunity to give back

Pant recalled the two suitcases he and his wife brought to America. “That’s all we had, nothing else,” he said. “Now we had something and could give back to Nepal.”

In 2008, the couple launched the Prahlad & Bindu Pant Orphans Foundation (now called the Pant Family Foundation). Today, the foundation has expanded its scope to support other areas including orphaned children in Nepal.

Last month, the foundation and Pant himself introduced the Pant Family Endowed Student Resource Fund in Civil Engineering. The $100,000 gift will support education-related expenses for Pitt undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students in civil engineering, with a focus on those studying transportation engineering.

The fund will help make research, conferences, travel, and global experiences more accessible to more students. It seeks to create opportunities for students who, like Pant when he first came to America, need extra financial support to reach their dreams.

For Pant, the decision to support Pitt was easy. “Pitt helped me so much during my studies,” he said. “It was very straightforward. I had to give back something to help today’s students.”

The University of Pittsburgh’s Tatsuya Sakurahara served as technical program chair for the conference, coordinating with 22 committee members to organize 220 presentations into 50 technical sessions. The conference gave Pitt students in Sakurahara’s Risk Analysis and Reliability Engineering (RARE) Laboratory the chance to present their research, network, and see the inner workings of a conference. For Emmie Stouffer and Krzysztof Radziszewski, the experience changed their trajectory.

“Today, with everything from technology to climate to the threat landscape changing so quickly, a conference dedicated to developing safer and more reliable systems is incredibly important,” said Sakurahara, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at the Swanson School of Engineering. Sakurahara combines probabilistic and non-probabilistic uncertainty theories and models to assess risk and improve safety and efficiency in nuclear energy systems.

“PSAM is one of the largest international conferences in this field, and for my students who helped it run smoothly and who presented their research, it was a special experience,” Sakurahara added. “It was an honor to showcase Pittsburgh, the Swanson School, and its students.”

One such student was Emmie Stouffer. She has always liked math and statistics, and last year as she began looking for research opportunities, she was drawn to Sakurahara’s RARE Lab. “It's important to understand large systems and how they might fail and the probability of those failures, especially if you’re thinking about something like a nuclear power plant,” she said.

Stouffer reached out to Sakurahara and joined during the summer of 2025, the start of her second year as a mechanical engineering student. “Since joining, I’ve worked with a PhD student, designing a framework for a natural gas subnetwork of an integrated energy system. I’ve been building a Python code that can calculate the risk given various uncertainties.”

Prior to this July, Stouffer had never attended let alone supported an international conference like PSAM. “Just looking at the list of research labs and companies participating was incredible,” she said. “I met so many professionals from around the world.”

She also had the opportunity to present her research, “Probabilistic Risk Assessment for Multi-Network Integrated Energy Systems: Gap Analysis and Preliminary Results,” available on the research repository D-Scholarship at Pitt. For two weeks before the presentation, she would find an open classroom in Benedum Hall and deliver her talk to empty chairs.

“I was leaning towards going straight to a career after graduating,” she said, “but this conference helped me see how much I enjoy research. I can see myself continuing with it at the graduate level.”

Stouffer added, “I’ve always wanted to do something that makes a difference. At the conference and in the RARE Lab, that’s what I’m doing.”

Like Stouffer, Krzysztof Radziszewski joined the RARE Lab in 2025 and participated in the PSAM conference. A collegiate swimmer on Pitt's Swimming and Diving team who earned his mechanical engineering degree this May, he had little experience with risk assessment and probabilities or even laboratory research but, as he said, “Dr. Sakurahara gave me a chance, and here I am.”

Radziszewski began investigating uncertainty quantification in modern nuclear reactors, such as small modular reactors and microreactors. He set out to see how new forms of automation and digitization in these systems impact Human Reliability Analysis, which seeks to determine the likelihood and the consequences of human error affecting a complex system.

The work fascinated him. As Radziszewski said, “I fell in love with the field.”

His research resulted in an academic paper, in which he is the first author. “Quantifying and Reducing HRA Uncertainty in Advanced Reactors: Bayesian Inference Approach” is available on the research repository D-Scholarship at Pitt.

Like Stouffer, Radziszewski presented his work at the conference, an experience he found nerve-racking but rewarding. As he said, “I’d literally just earned my bachelor’s degree and was presenting to a room of experts.”

In addition to fielding these experts’ questions, he networked with them. “It was new to me, talking to researchers from peer universities, national labs, and industry, and it was super valuable.”

Before the RARE Lab and the PSAM conference, Radziszewski had considered pursuing a master’s degree, but that changed. “I applied for the PhD program, and this fall will continue working with Dr. Sakurahara in the RARE Lab,” Radziszewski said. “Dr. Sakurahara has been an amazing mentor, and I’m excited to continue my research to help keep complex systems safer.”

"Imagine spending your entire life snorkeling, and then suddenly you go scuba diving," Batista said. "You'll quickly realize you were only scratching the surface of a deeper reality."

For Batista, a neural engineer with decades of research exploring brain-computer interfaces at the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering, that realization stemmed from his earliest visits to Dr. Jorge González-Martínez's operating room, which became the foundation for a novel postdoctoral training program: Neural Engineering in Neurosurgery: Bridging Engineering to Clinical Practice. 

“Engineers tend to think about the brain by thinking about computational circuitry that underlies behavior, while surgeons are thinking about how they can treat individuals who are suffering today,” Batista said. “And despite the fact that our engineering laboratories sit just an eight-minute walk from the neurosurgery operating rooms, it’s a distance that we’ve rarely covered, until now.”

Supported by a new National Institutes of Health (NIH) T32 award (1T32NS147937-01), the program will connect postdoctoral fellows from the Swanson School of Engineering's Department of Bioengineering, residents from the School of Medicine's Department of Neurological Surgery, and 32 affiliated faculty members and clinicians to work on research projects that improve neurosurgical practice. 

“This program is a perfect example of how Pitt's strengths across professional disciplines promotes the creation of interprofessional teams.” said Paul Wallach, vice chancellor for health sciences education and executive vice dean for academic affairs at the School of Medicine. “These teams then serve as drivers of innovation in clinical care."

Teaming Up to Improve Neurosurgical Practice

Co-directed by Batista, professor of bioengineering at the Swanson School, and Jorge González-Martínez, professor and vice-chair of neurological surgery at the School of Medicine, the program will bring together eight trainees, including four postdoctoral associates and four residents, who will work side by side on team-based research projects.

“Postdocs will shadow neurosurgeons in the operating room, and residents will pursue a deep dive into laboratory research under the direct supervision of their engineering mentor,” Batista said. “That way, our trainees will get to work on a project that actually matters for doctors.”

Designed to close the gap separating neurosurgery and bioengineering, each pair will be matched to one of eight collaboration clusters built around surgical areas where bioengineering and clinical strengths already overlap: epilepsy, stroke, speech and language mapping, sensory restoration, pain, trauma, movement disorders, and brain tumors.

“I’m excited about partnering with engineers to build a better understanding of the mechanisms related to epilepsy," González-Martínez said. “And, we can use this program to better understand how the signals we see in our micro-electrode recordings interact with behavior, not only for epilepsy, but also for language and movement disorders."

Several ongoing collaborations at the University provided the groundwork for the type of research that the program hopes to accelerate. Among them, work by González-Martínez and School of Medicine collaborator Elvira Pirondini uses stimulation in the thalamus, a central coordinator for the brain’s cerebral cortex, to help restore speech and motor function in patients recovering from stroke.

Other projects include helping surgeons better decide how much tissue is safe to remove during tumor resection, developing new spinal cord stimulation approaches for chronic pain, and building next-generation implantable sensors and closed-loop neuromodulation systems for movement and emotional disorders.

"As doctors, we typically stay in the OR, so we don't have many chances to interact with engineers," González-Martínez said. "We know the challenges and the gaps we need to work on, but we don't always know how to answer those challenges.”

Trainees will also complete a yearlong course, BIOENG 2805: Translational Neural Engineering, to explore the current landscape of neural engineering and identify paths for innovation. Both Batista and González-Martínez hope the program will end up doing far more than just train individual researchers — they see it as a first step toward building a lasting, formal bridge between engineering and medicine at the University.

"This is a very unique opportunity to finally create an educational environment that combines neural engineering and neurosurgery," González-Martínez said. "We’ve never had something like this, and it’s just the first step to creating a larger integration between bioengineering and neurosurgery.”

On Tuesday, September 8, Rory A. Cooper will present the inaugural conversation, “Building HERL: From an Idea to a Research Enterprise.” Cooper will share the story of developing Pitt’s Human Engineering Research Laboratories (HERL), along with lessons he learned while building a collaborative research enterprise with lasting impact.

Michele V. Manuel, U. S. Steel Dean of Engineering, will provide opening remarks. Following Cooper’s presentation, Anne M. Robertson, distinguished service professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and associate dean for faculty development, will moderate a conversation with Cooper.

“‘Leadership Conversations’ is an opportunity to learn from colleagues whose work demonstrates how leadership, innovation, and service can come together to create meaningful and lasting impact,” said Robertson. “Dr. Cooper is an ideal person to open the series. Throughout his career, he has translated innovative ideas into technologies that improve people’s lives while building a collaborative research enterprise grounded in service and human-centered design. His experience offers important lessons about what it takes to turn an idea into sustained impact.”

Cooper, PhD, PLY, is Director of the Human Engineering Research Laboratories, a Pitt institute reporting to the Senior Vice Chancellor for Health Sciences and the Senior Vice Chancellor for Research. He is the FISA & Paralyzed Veterans of America (PVA) Professor and Distinguished Professor in Pitt’s Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation in the School of Medicine. He is also a professor of bioengineering, electrical engineering, and orthopedic surgery. Cooper is a VA senior research career scientist and serves as associate vice chancellor for research for STEM and health sciences collaboration.

Cooper founded HERL in 1994 and continues to serve as its director. HERL is home to a VA Rehabilitation Research and Development Center; a National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR) Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center; and the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) Robotic Assistive Mobility and Manipulation Platform (RAMMP) program.

A National Medal of Technology and Innovation laureate, National Inventors Hall of Fame member, National Academy of Engineering member, and Paralympian, Cooper will reflect on what it takes to grow a research idea into a sustained, multi-decade enterprise. He will share candid stories, hard-won lessons, and practical insights for anyone building, leading, or funding research that aims to outlast its founder.

Free and open to the public, the inaugural conversation will take place on Tuesday, September 8, from noon to 1:00 p.m. in 102 Benedum Hall. Learn more and register now.

In 2024, over 100 Pitt faculty who had shared interests in space from across a variety of schools and disciplines joined force, launching Pitt Space. With it, the first official suite of four space-engineering core courses at Pitt was rolled out to seniors and graduate students.

Earlier in 2026, Health Sciences launched the Trivedi Institute for Space and Global Biomedicine, one of the first dedicated institutes focused on applying insights from spaceflight to improve human health on Earth.

What else can Pitt do to prepare students with the background, knowledge and skills needed to come out on top in the second space age?

“Our next step is to start establishing formal academic programs to make Pitt a recognized space university,” said Alan George, department chair, Mickle Endowed Chair, and professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) in the Swanson School of Engineering.

Beginning in Fall of 2026, Pitt students will have the opportunity to enroll in a new academic degree program which will offer a space-engineering minor for undergraduates, and a space-engineering certificate for graduate students.

The program is intentionally broad as to be able to include students across a variety of STEM fields. “I am excited at how accessible we've made this minor,” said Samuel Dickerson, vice chair for education, associate professor, and director of the Computer Engineering Undergraduate Program. 

“We've created courses that should be accessible to most STEM majors at the University, reflective of the interdisciplinary nature of the Space field.”

Ultimately, Pitt Space expects to roll out two additional academic programs; in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, faculty are building upon longstanding strengths in physics, astronomy, and geology to develop new courses and programs in Space Science. Similarly, led by the Trivedi Institute, Health Sciences are building upon their world-renowned strengths to develop new courses and programs in Space Biomedicine.

The inaugural engineering program stands apart from offerings at most schools in several key ways, all designed to help Pitt graduates stand out from the crowd.

“Some engineering schools have aerospace engineering,” George said, “but that’s not what we’re doing. We are focusing strictly upon space engineering.” That translates into a leaner, more focused pathway for students who know they want to work on engineering problems in space, not closer to home.

The second differentiator grew out of a historical quirk. “Most aerospace engineering departments grew out of mechanical engineering,” George said. Pitt’s program, however, is situated in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

“Now, and going forward, electrical and computer engineering is a bigger part of space engineering than mechanics.” As the founder and director of SHREC, George and his students have been working on the leading edge of this evolution, building more powerful and affordable computer systems that are resilient to withstand the harsh environment of space. “We are focused upon the way things are going, not the way they have been.”

The new degree offerings should appeal to students in another way: as a minor or a certificate, it won’t hold students back from gaining the full depth and breadth of their chosen discipline. 

“For example, say you get your bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and add a minor in space engineering on top of that. You will have a discipline degree, so you will be a fully qualified electrical engineer,” George said. A student with those qualifications could contribute as an electrical engineer in just about any domain.  

“But on top of that,” he said, “you will be a space engineer,” with specialty skills that few others can match.

A solution to help limit CSO involves capturing and repurposing stormwater, but cost concerns can deter implementation. Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering are seeking to change that. Professors Vikas Khanna and Sarah Haig, with PhD student Ahteshamul Haq and Pitt alumnus SriGanesh V. Pennathur (BS EE ’26), have developed a decision-support framework that automatically identifies cost-effective, energy-efficient, and low-emission treatment systems for captured stormwater based on how the water will ultimately be used.

Their research “From runoff to circular resource: an integrated optimization framework for cost, energy, and GHG performance in urban stormwater systems” (DOI: 10.1038/s41545-026-00585-4) was published in the journal npj Clean Water. It provides planners with a valuable tool to help design viable, resilient, low-emission systems for water reuse, reducing the strain on single pipe networks and keeping untreated sewage out of local ecosystems.

"Cities like Pittsburgh face a legacy infrastructure problem, and it gets worse as storms in the region become more frequent and heavier," said Haq, first author of the paper. “Right now, that rain only adds load to the sewer. Captured and treated to the right level, it becomes a usable resource.”

Underpinning the team’s research is a “One Water” approach, which views all sources of water – whether from the tap, a nearby river, stormwater, or even the sewer – as parts of one interconnected urban water cycle. The approach explores the many ways different kinds of water can be used across an area.

“Stormwater doesn’t need to be treated to drinking-water standards to be a valuable resource,” said Haig, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering. “Instead, we can think about treating stormwater to be fit for its intended use. If the water is going to be used for irrigation, industrial processes, infrastructure, or surface-water recharge, we may not need the same level of treatment required for drinking water. Matching treatment to the end use could reduce the cost and energy required while still allowing us to put that water to beneficial uses."

To illuminate the varying costs of treating stormwater for each use, the team developed a mixed-integer nonlinear programming model built on a menu, or “superstructure,” of all plausible water treatment steps and how they can be wired together.

The menu integrates cost, energy, and life-cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions data as it applies to various technologies used to treat water, such as coagulation, sedimentation, constructed wetlands, filtration, membranes, and disinfection. Whatever water use a planner might consider, the model solves separately for the lowest cost, the lowest energy use, and the lowest emissions.

While the team used Pittsburgh as its case study, the framework is built on published U.S. stormwater quality data and the water-quality standards for each end use, so other cities with aging combined sewer systems can apply it. Planners can incorporate local electricity prices, grid carbon intensity, and regulations to determine their unique situation. The model gives them a quantitative way to decide how to best use captured stormwater.

“We found that matching treatment intensity to the intended use can lower costs and avoid unnecessary treatment,” said Khanna, professor and interim chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “The goal is not to treat every gallon to the highest possible standard. It is to provide the appropriate treatment for how that water will be used.”

For drinking-water production, the researchers found that treating typical-strength stormwater could have lower treatment costs and greenhouse-gas emissions than seawater desalination. Even stormwater with relatively high pollutant concentrations remained competitive with other alternative water sources in the study’s treatment-only comparison.

The team’s research reveals how something that increasingly causes untreated sewage to spill into waterways can become an asset to a city. Instead of overwhelming old pipes, it can be used to make new concrete, recharge surface water, and cool industrial equipment.

As Haq said, “By decreasing flood damage and reducing costly pollution from overflows, cities can help offset the cost of building a stormwater reuse system.”

By showing how captured runoff can be treated for uses ranging from irrigation and concrete production to industrial supply and drinking water, the research reframes stormwater as more than an urban burden. With appropriate treatment and infrastructure, it could become part of a more circular and resilient water system.

R&D World recognized Pitt professors Paul Ohodnicki and Kevin Chen and their collaborators with 2026 R&D 100 Awards for three emerging technologies: Photonic BMS, TeleSENSE, and REFLEX. Each year, R&D World magazine recognizes 100 of the most significant new products, processes, and materials worldwide.

“Receiving three R&D 100 Awards in one year is a tremendous achievement and highlights the innovative, collaborative spirit that thrives at the Swanson School,” said Heng Ban, the Richard K. Mellon Professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and interim associate dean for research and facilities.

Monitoring and managing grid-scale batteries

Co-developed with Ohodnicki’s Pittsburgh-based startup Sensible Photonics, Photonic BMS developed technology that monitors and manages grid-scale batteries, such as those used in energy-intensive AI data centers. These large batteries are essential in maintaining load and frequency regulation. However, a failure in one cell can set off a chain reaction that can spark a fire that engulfs the entire battery system.

“Photonic BMS uses fiber optic technology to provide passive monitoring of temperature and chemistry in real time, allowing facility operators to identify risks before it’s too late,” said Khurram Naeem, research assistant professor at Pitt, who helped develop the technology with Ohodnicki, postdoctoral researcher Yang-Duan Su, and graduate student Shovan Shrestha.

“In addition to the novel sensor hardware, Photonics BMS technology also includes novel algorithms for data fusion, data integration, and battery management system integration,” added Su.

“This award underscores the importance of university collaborations with small businesses, startups, and spin-outs through federal funding like the U.S. Department of Energy's Small Business Innovation Research program,” said Ohodnicki, professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at the Swanson School, R.K. Mellon Faculty Fellow in Energy, and director of the University of Pittsburgh Center for Energy. “A Phase I DOE SBIR grant to Sensible Photonics provided the catalytic capital required to develop and demonstrate this technology. The support and collaboration are vital to transitioning technologies from university laboratory concepts to impactful ideas in the marketplace.”

Funding support from the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation and an SBIR grant from the U. S. Department of Energy Office of Electricity was instrumental in the development and maturation of the technology.

Last year, Ohodnicki received two R&D 100 Awards and has been recognized five years in a row, for a total of eight awards over his career, including this year’s Photonic BMS.

Expanding sensing capabilities

TeleSENSE is a flexible manufacturing platform that uses a patented reel-to-reel laser process to transform standard telecommunications fiber into customized, high-performance distributed sensing fiber at substantially lower cost. The technology uses an agentic AI-enabled robotic manufacturing system to automate optical alignment, laser processing, and quality feedback.

“Our technology reduces labor-intensive fabrication while improving repeatability and scalable production,” said Chen, the Paul E. Lego Professor of electrical and computer engineering and the department’s vice chair for research. “The technology is designed to expand sensing applications across energy systems, infrastructure, telecommunications, robotics, and medical devices, while strengthening U.S. manufacturing capacity and competitiveness in advanced fiber-optic sensing.”

The technology was developed by Chen with collaborator Heng Ban and students Shuda Zhong and Emeka Ikpeazu at Pitt, Corning Incorporated, and Chen’s Pittsburgh-based AiMiLi Inc.

Building smarter, more-resilient clean-energy systems

REFLEX (Real-time Embedded Feedback and Layered Excitation) represents an ambitious new architecture for the hydrogen economy and next-generation power systems. Rather than treating solid oxide fuel cells and electrolyzers as passive stacks monitored from the outside, the technology embeds distributed fiber-optic sensing, electrical pathways, and active thermal-control elements directly into the interconnects at their core.

Developed by Chen in collaboration with Dong Ding, Directorate Fellow and Senior Advisor for the Hydrogen, Fuel Cells, and Electrochemistry Program, and colleagues at Idaho National Laboratory, as well as scientist Michael Buric and colleagues at the National Energy Technology Laboratory, REFLEX creates an intelligent energy-system platform capable of mapping internal temperature and strain in real time, detecting and mitigating hot spots, accelerating startup, and supplying the data required for predictive digital twins and closed-loop control.

By turning a traditionally passive component into the equivalent of a high-temperature battery-management system, REFLEX could help make hydrogen production, long-duration energy storage, synthetic-fuel generation, and resilient power systems more efficient, durable, responsive, and commercially viable.

“It’s an honor to receive these two awards,” said Chen. “It’s incredibly rewarding to see the research that began here at Pitt becoming a reality thanks to our collaboration with national laboratory partners.”

About the awards

For more than six decades, R&D World has hosted the annual competition to highlight groundbreaking innovation from around the world. This year’s winners were selected from 149 finalists in six categories. The 2026 honorees will be recognized at an award gala at the Grand Hyatt Scottsdale Resort in Arizona on November 19, 2026.

A multidisciplinary, multi-institutional group of researchers focused their expertise in genetics, mechanics, chemistry and biology on a chip the size of a postage stamp in order to model a particular class of heart conditions.

In a first for the field, a team led by Guang Li, associate professor in the School of Medicine’s Department of Cell Biology, has grown heart valves on organoids — miniature, simplified versions of a human heart chamber. This work, published August 11 in the journal Cell Stem Cell, is an important step toward better understanding and treating a number of serious heart disorders.

This kind of research often depends on animal models, which allow researchers to study the development of heart valves that grow much quicker than those of humans, which take nearly 10 weeks to fully develop.

Also, Li said, “human valves are very different from animal valves.” Imagine the physiological and genetic differences between a person and, for instance, a zebrafish. “To study human valve diseases, we need human valve models.”

Grown from pluripotent, adult human stem cells, organoids offer just such a model. The stem cells can be generated from skin, blood or other cells, then coaxed into developing into cells from a body part of interest. In this case, a human heart. Different types of organoids can be combined into “assembloids” to better model complex organs that natively originate from combinations of different tissues.

But a living, functioning heart is more than a cluster of certain types of cells. Its development and continued operation is dependent, among other things, on a complex interaction of different forces. To build analogs of those forces into the model, Li sought the engineering expertise of colleagues, including Lance Davidson, the William Kepler Whiteford Professor in the Swanson School of Engineering’s Department of Bioengineering, and Si-Yang Zhen, a professor of biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

“This kind of project is really a hallmark of the community of researchers in Pittsburgh,” Davidson said.

To create a model, Li grew a valve on the surface of a heart assembloid — two organoids made from different types of heart cells that were combined into one platform. Then the team went on, able to stimulate growth by designing ways to mimic the forces that would act on an embodied heart: a flowing medium to simulate blood, an endothelial culture to act as the cells that line heart valves and even a set of magnetized beads that moved according to the placement of a magnetic belt to mimic muscle contraction.

With the organoid working to replicate a heart with valves, the team now had a model they could use to study four types of valve disorders, including mitral valve prolapse (MVP), a genetic disorder affecting 7 million to 8 million individuals in the United States at any given time.

When Li introduced a mutation associated with the disease, the developing valves showed signs of MVP. In other cases, damage was simulated or introduced to mirror the damage that can occur to a person’s valves throughout life in conditions such as valve calcification, cryo-injury, and complications from hypoglycemia and diabetes.

Li was able to begin studying the organoids, identifying some pathways responsible for the development problems associated with MVP and ways they can be corrected. He was also able to develop models for the acquired deficiencies and will go on to look for ways to treat them.

Next, he plans to add complexity to his assembloids, growing two chambers with valves inside them, instead of on the surface, to better model a real human heart.

This research was supported in part by the University of Pittsburgh Center for Research Computing (RRID:SCR_022735); specifically, this work used the HTC cluster, supported by the National Institutes of Health (S10OD028483). Additional support was provided by the NIH (R00HL133472 and DP2HL163745) and by a Single Ventricle Research Fund grant from Additional Ventures.

Dopamine is a chemical messenger that regulates the brain’s circuits responsible for planning and executing controlled movement. Current treatments include deep-brain stimulation (DBS) via implanted electrodes to jam faulty signals caused by the neurodegeneration, often in conjunction with dopamine-promoting medication.

Helen Schwerdt, assistant professor of bioengineering, hypothesizes that using a separate brain probe to measure dopamine as a biomarker at a high resolution can help establish the optimum parameters for the use of DBS and medication, reduce side effects, and produce better clinical outcomes.

She and her second-year doctoral student, Ritesh Shrivastav, are the recipients of the 2026 Hunter Family Foundation Innovation in Neuroscience Program award, which supports translational research in neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh. Schwerdt and Shrivastav collaborate with Jorge González-Martínez, vice chair of the Department of Neurological Surgery, on the clinical applications of the technology.

“The field lacks knowledge of what abnormal dopamine signals look like in Parkinson’s that are potentially causing the motor issues in people suffering this disease,” Schwerdt said. “We’re trying to address this by creating a tool that can provide a readout of the dysregulated neurochemical environment to potentially personalize the treatment.”

Shrivastav, who has been working in Schwerdt’s lab since he was an undergraduate, said he learned of the Hunter program by attending the Community of Innovators meetings held weekly by the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship during both the fall and spring semesters.

“These high-risk/high-reward studies are difficult to get funded, but are exactly how device feasibility must be proven for clinical translation,” he said. “My interest is in translating these tools for research and commercial use. The Hunter funding is critical for validating clinical use cases for our probe.”

The award funds will be used to conduct animal and human studies in which their dopamine sensor can be incorporated into neurosurgical procedures performed by González-Martínez.

“Deep brain stimulation has been around for decades now, but nobody knows for sure how it works,” Shrivastav said. “These studies will help us determine dopamine’s value as a biomarker for the first time and how it can be measured to improve clinical outcomes. If we are successful, we can move onto regulatory testing and potentially pursue the approvals necessary to get this to market and improve patients’ lives.”

“Dr. Schwerdt and her team are tackling one of the most persistent unknowns in Parkinson’s care: what’s actually happening at the neurochemical level during deep brain stimulation. If their dopamine biomarker proves successful, it could transform DBS from a broadly effective but imprecise tool into a truly personalized therapy — one that’s calibrated to each patient’s unique neurochemistry,” said Evan Facher, vice chancellor for innovation and entrepreneurship and associate dean for commercial translation at the Pitt School of Medicine. “That kind of impact, translating fundamental bioengineering research into real clinical benefit for people living with Parkinson’s, is precisely what the Hunter Family Foundation Innovation in Neuroscience Program was created to accelerate.”

The Hunter Program is made possible by the generous support of the Hunter Family Foundation. Learn more.

This article was originally published by the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (7/28/26). Reposted with permission.

Q: Can you briefly introduce yourself?

Rachel McLoughlin: I’m in my first year of my PhD in Bioengineering at Pitt, and I’m working under Dr. April Chambers in the Human Movement and Balance Laboratory (HMBL). Prior to starting my PhD, I completed both my undergraduate degree and my DPT here. My undergraduate education included a B.S. in Bioengineering along with a minor in Exercise Science. Both my undergraduate and graduate engineering studies focused on biomechanics.

Q: Why did you want to pursue both a PhD and a DPT, not one or the other?

Rachel McLoughlin: Sports have always been a cornerstone of my life, from the time I began playing recreational soccer at four years old to high school, where I was a three-sport athlete. Throughout my athletic career, I saw firsthand the debilitating effects that injuries have on athletes. Therefore, I decided that I wanted to center my future career around shortening the time athletes spend on the sidelines due to injury. 

When I visited Pitt as a high school senior and witnessed the deep-rooted collaboration between bioengineering research labs and medical facilities, I knew I had found the school for me. I chose to pursue both a DPT and a PhD because together they equip me to make the greatest impact on injured athletes. The DPT provides me with a deep understanding of the human body and allows me to interact directly with patients through clinical practice. Regularly helping patients rehab back to the activities they love gives me a more immediate sense of fulfillment while also revealing the unmet clinical needs that inspire my research. The PhD allows me to investigate those unmet needs and gives me the technical skills to develop solutions that can make a greater long-term difference in the field. The teaching responsibilities that accompany the PhD present additional opportunities for impact through sharing information with the next generation of clinicians and engineers. 

Q: Where do your specific research / clinical interests lie? What are you working on at the moment?

Rachel McLoughlin: My specific research and clinical interests lie in sports performance. Seeing an athlete get injured is devastating, but being in the trenches with them each day after to support them through rehab and then watching them take the field for the first time post-injury is a feeling unlike any other. I also think the interdisciplinary collaboration that occurs within high-level sports teams is fascinating and presents countless opportunities for learning. Because I’m still in my first year of my PhD, I’m working on a few different projects to explore potential thesis topics. I’m planning a research study in collaboration with the Department of Sports Medicine and Nutrition to determine the accuracy of markerless motion capture for analyzing common weightlifting movements. I’ve also helped collect biomechanical pitching data for the baseball team and hope to conduct a similar analysis for the softball team. In addition, I’ve been working on data collection and analysis for a project in collaboration with Dr. Benedict Alter, Director of Translational Pain Research in the School of Medicine's Division of Pain Medicine, to investigate the relationship between pain signals in the brain, joint biomechanics, and physical therapy outcome measure scores in individuals with knee osteoarthritis.

Q: How has your experience been so far? What have you learned that surprised you?

Rachel McLoughlin: My experience has been great so far! One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is how differently people from different disciplines approach the same problem. That may seem relatively obvious, but in interdisciplinary clinical and research settings, it can almost seem like people are speaking different languages. Even though everyone is working toward a common goal, their individual priorities are based on their specific backgrounds and experience. Now that I have both an engineering degree and a clinical degree, I’ve been surprised to see how my problem-solving thought process has evolved. I feel like I can see both sides more clearly, so it’s become much easier to collaborate across disciplines and find common ground.

Q: What would you say are some of your favorite aspects of the program?

Rachel McLoughlin: My favorite aspect of the program so far has been the community. My class in the DPT program was very close-knit. We spent nearly every day together for two and a half years! Everyone was constantly rooting for each other’s success, and we started fun traditions like ice cream Thursdays and run club Saturdays to maintain a good school-life balance. I’ve been excited to start carrying these traditions over to my lab now too! Both the DPT and Bioengineering faculty have also been extremely supportive throughout my time at Pitt. They lift me up when I doubt myself and are always willing to use their expansive networks to help me advance towards my dream career. I feel fortunate to have so many mentors pour into my development.

Q: Any challenges or details that prospective students should know about?

Rachel McLoughlin: At times, the amount of school I committed myself to can seem daunting. My time at Pitt has honestly flown by, though, and I can’t believe that I’m already past the halfway point here. The main thing I would advise prospective students to be aware of is the transition between each phase of the program. Physical therapy and engineering require different ways of thinking and learning, so it can take some time and patience to adjust back and forth and realize that they complement each other. It’s well worth it, though, and that’s where I found it especially beneficial to lean on my classmates and professors. If you’re considering the program, I’d be happy to answer questions or share more about my experience. Please don’t hesitate to reach out ◡̈

“Last year, we launched this effort to build a broader cybersecurity ecosystem that connects technology and policy to address critical challenges in protecting vital infrastructure,” said Erica Owen, associate professor in Pitt’s School of Public and International Affairs and co-organizer of the event. “That first workshop and the luncheon that followed have set in motion a collective, sustained, multidisciplinary effort to improve safety, security, and resilience across essential, connected systems.”

The workshop will feature two keynote speakers who bring complementary perspectives on the technology-policy interface:

• Chad Heitzenrater, senior information scientist at RAND, will present his recent research on how advanced AI is poised to reshape the economics of cybersecurity.
• Ginger Wright, program manager for Cyber-Informed Engineering (CIE) at the Idaho National Laboratory, will explore the challenges of translating CIE principles into operational practice.

In addition to the speakers, the workshop will feature working sessions built around real sector-specific problems. A structured panel representing political, economic, social, and technological perspectives will identify the most persistent barriers to cybersecurity adoption in the water and wastewater sector. Workshop organizers will present a specific solution addressing this problem. Participants will break into working groups, evaluating this solution through the lenses of desirability, feasibility, and viability.

“Complex challenges like closing the gap between what operators need to do to secure critical infrastructure and their actual capacity to do it can't be solved in a bubble. It takes cooperation across technology and policy to support adoption. And that can't happen overnight,” said Daniel Cole, associate professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at the Swanson School of Engineering, director of the Cyber Energy Center, and co-organizer of the workshop.

Cole added, “We’re honored to welcome cybersecurity leaders like Chad Heitzenrater and Ginger Wright to share their important research and participate in working sessions that will address a concrete problem while continuing to build a stronger cybersecurity ecosystem.”

The workshop will take place from 8:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. at Pitt’s University Club on the Oakland campus. Registration is open.

What began in 2004 as five students from the Swanson School of Engineering working with a few faculty members today is a university-wide initiative. This year, 35 students across disciplines were paired with a Pitt faculty member, and for ten weeks they traded the classroom for the lab, becoming full-time researchers alongside their mentors, graduate students, and community partners.

On Wednesday, July 22, that research will be presented at the 2026 Summer Sustainability Research Symposium, where students will deliver eight-minute presentations of their projects. Free and open to the public, the event takes place on Wednesday, July 22, from 9:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., on the fifth floor of the William Pitt Union.

“It's amazing to see the students grow and learn, to see what they accomplish in ten weeks,” said Gena Kovalcik, co-director of administration and external relations at MCSI, who helps direct the program. “Very quickly they become experts, in their own way, on the topic they've been working on.”

Connecting students, faculty, and the community

Each fall, MCSI invites its approximately 100 sustainability-associated faculty members from across Pitt to propose research projects. In January, students can apply, selecting their top two projects. The selection committee reviews the applications and works with faculty to match students to projects.

“It's a competitive program,” Kovalcik said. “This year we had 114 applicants for our 35 spots. All the students were incredibly talented, so it’s difficult to pick who gets funded.”

From May to July, students conduct research for ten weeks and work in labs, in the field, or at computers alongside their faculty mentor and that mentor’s graduate students. In addition to research, students attend weekly lunch-and-learn events where featured speakers discuss sustainability, and they participate in two service projects. They partnered with Pittsburgh-based nonprofit Global Links to explore ways to mitigate medical waste, and they also worked in the Oakcliffe area of South Oakland to remove invasives and cut back overgrown plants and to help maintain the garden.

“The students are working full-time for their faculty member getting specific research experience, but we're also trying to give them a broader understanding of sustainability,” Kovalcik said.

This year, the program grouped students into three cohorts with University partners: Pittsburgh Water Collaboratory (water); Office of Sustainability in the Health Sciences (sustainable healthcare); and HAIL (AI and data science). “We wanted to connect students so they could explore their topic more deeply with their peers and with partner centers across campus,” said Kovalcik.

“They really learn skills that are different from what they learn in the classroom, where everything's kind of prescribed for them.” The independence, Kovalcik added, gives students a genuine taste of graduate school as well as the kind of problem-solving they will encounter in the workplace.

The relationships students build over the ten weeks can extend well beyond the summer. Faculty frequently keep strong students on in their labs, and for some, the experience can shape a career, as former summer research participant Pocket Pizzutillo’s story attests.

A transformative experience

“This summer program gave me the opportunity to fully immerse myself in the role of a researcher compared to my previous part-time research experience,” said Mia van Heerden, a bioengineering student who worked with Steven Little, distinguished professor and department chair of chemical and petroleum engineering. “I could take full ownership of starting and managing a new project that I had little to no knowledge about. Besides the lab work, through this program I learned to present my research in different formats.

“Outside of research, it was fascinating to learn about Pittsburgh's environmental history and the university's sustainability practices. This experience confirmed that I genuinely love the day-to-day work of research.”

Added William Peralta, an industrial engineering student who worked with Amin Rahimian, assistant professor of industrial engineering, “The research this summer provided me with the opportunity to see how individual actions can improve the sustainability efforts of a community. This includes my own research but also discussing the other efforts my peers have done. I hope to continue with sustainable efforts in my engineering career, no doubt inspired by this summer.”

“The MCSI Summer Research Program completely transformed how I see myself as an engineer,” said Sophia Prybyslavskyy, an environmental engineering student who worked with Jacob King, assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering. “In just ten weeks, I went from calibrating a pH probe and pipetting standards to building my own two-cell electrochemical setup to treat acid mine drainage.

“Collecting samples from impacted sites around Pittsburgh and analyzing them in the lab taught me how to troubleshoot real-world problems. Working on a sustainability challenge that directly impacts our region made the work incredibly meaningful. This experience strengthened my confidence as a researcher, and it has inspired me to keep pursuing solutions to water quality and environmental challenges.”

Engineering alumni and friends help fund the Summer Research Training Program in Sustainability. In addition to funding from Jack Mascaro, some students are also supported through the generosity of Charles and Linda Sorber, Doug Condon, and Frank and Daphna Lederman.

Wanting to round out his education, Pizzutillo applied to the Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation (MCSI) Undergraduate Summer Research in Sustainability program. He was paired with Pitt’s Wei Xiong, a professor he admired, and for ten weeks Pizzutillo investigated more sustainable alternatives to cobalt as a binding agent in tungsten carbide.

His project and the research experiences that followed proved invaluable. They helped Pizzutillo land a job as a process engineer at 6K Additive, a local company that sustainably transforms scrap metal into high-performance metal powders. And they prepared him to thrive at his work.

“I came to Pitt because of the co-op opportunities and because I liked how we all started as just engineers and had a year to decide on the specific field we would pursue,” said Pizzutillo, who enrolled in fall of 2020, during the height of the pandemic. “It was all online then, and I’d learn about the different fields during Zoom calls with department heads.”

A meeting with Associate Professor and Materials Science and Engineering Program Director Markus Chmielus piqued Pizzutillo’s interest. “Materials science was all about why things behave the way they do. I’d never thought about that, about how, for example, different types of steel behave differently.” When his first year ended, he knew the field he would pursue.

By the end of his third year, Pizzutillo had completed co-op rotations at Stratus Materials, Inc. and Timet, and he was ready for a new challenge. “I’d taken Dr. Xiong’s Materials Thermodynamics course and wanted to conduct research to balance the industry side. I’ve always been drawn to sustainability and applied to the MCSI summer research program.”

Through the program, he was paired with Xiong, associate professor and William Kepler Whiteford Faculty Fellow in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science. Pizzutillo set to work investigating binding agents that didn’t contain cobalt.

“Carbides are composites that contain hard materials, like tungsten, and they’re cemented together using a metallic binder like cobalt,” Pizzutillo said. “Cemented carbides can be used to create drill bits or tools that cut through surfaces as hard as diamonds. Most anything that functions under extremely high heat requires these carbides.”

While a highly effective binder, cobalt is carcinogenic and often unethically mined. “We were looking for a more sustainable alternative,” Pizzutillo said.

He started his project by reading the scientific literature and then began running thermodynamic simulations and calculations. After he helped narrow possible alternative materials, he got into the lab preparing the samples and viewing them under an electron microscope, characterizing them and comparing the various samples against each other and against more traditional binders. From his findings, he wrote a paper and presented his work.

The experience afforded Pizzutillo a unique window into research. “I worked with PhD and postdoctoral researchers in Dr. Xiong’s lab and got to see firsthand what investigating more sustainable solutions looks like.”

They produced five carbide binders that used iron-nickel alloys, some that included zirconium or other metals, and of those samples they focused on three. “In our initial testing, the three alternatives showed promise in producing strong tungsten carbides, but they will require more research,” Pizzutillo said. “While it’s uncertain if this research will change the industry, the experience was incredibly rewarding and reflects the promise of finding sustainable alternatives.”

Indeed, what started that summer continued into the fall as Pocket became a fixture of Xiong’s lab.

“Pocket is an excellent example of the impact of the MCSI summer internship program. He continued to work with me after the summer internship program through his senior research design project in my lab,” Xiong said. “He grew as a researcher and produced an excellent senior project.”

This past November, Pizzutillo accepted a position as a process engineer at 6K Additive. The company turns scrap metal into high-quality metal powder that can be used in 3D printing. “We take scrap metal out of the supply chain and reintroduce it as a high-quality material,” he said.

Pizzutillo added, “Research is vital to my work as an engineer, and being comfortable working independently, learning as I go, and using my hands all started with the summer program. Now I get to do that every day, for a company dedicated to sustainability.”

For the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering’s American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) student chapter, the 2026 National Concrete Canoe Competition on Friday, June 26, was their first chance to compete at nationals, the result of years of fine tuning their mix and design, learning to row together, and most importantly, solving problems as a team.

Making concrete float

"Concrete is almost synonymous with civil engineering," said Mae Cook, president of Pitt’s ASCE student chapter. "Civil engineers essentially figure out how to use concrete in a variety of applications, and instead of buildings and roads, we're building a canoe."

Although the challenge has inspired ASCE student chapters since the 1960s, it wasn’t until 1988 that concrete canoe races were officially sanctioned. The event has become popular at the symposia, which feature challenges in bridge building, surveying, and problem solving. Today, the National Concrete Canoe Competition draws teams from around the world and across the country.

“It’s a commitment and a team effort,” said Cook. Pitt’s team splits responsibilities across mix design, construction, project management, aesthetics, and of course the actual rowing. Everyone comes together to lift the unwieldy boat.

Finding the right mix

Essential to a concrete canoe is finding the right mix of concrete. For Pitt’s team, that process is ever evolving. Over the years, they have compiled what Amelia Kuzneski (BS CEE ’26), last year’s mix co-lead, calls “a big messy Excel sheet” that has become a comprehensive calculator used to determine the mix.

“Improving upon our mixes from previous years, we were finally able to figure out the combination that got us here [nationals],” said Sanjna Goyal, the mix design captain this past year. “Our main goal was to decrease the density, which is why we added Poraver. I like to think of it as glass popcorn — it’s a super light material that helps fill space without adding weight. To help maintain strength, we still use Portland cement but also incorporate silica fume, fly ash, and Re-Act 4, which are sustainable cement replacements. Additionally, acrylic fibers help with holding our concrete together and further strengthen the mix.”

The team tests as many as 12 to 13 mixes, compressing and pulling apart concrete cylinders to gauge its strength. They test its slump, or how much it will droop before hardening.

Kuzneski, an environmental engineer, has applied her learning to help produce a mix with a smaller carbon footprint. “Concrete is not very sustainable, at least not the production process,” she said. “We try and do good to the environment. Half our boat is probably some form of recycled glass.”

Building a canoe

After the team settles on its mix, the construction leads organize the pour, utilizing a CNC company to cut a mold out of Styrofoam, which arrives in three pieces. Then comes the fun.

“Everyone comes in at 6:00 a.m., and we fit the pieces together and make sure everything is lined up. We line it with epoxy, so the concrete won’t stick,” said Kuzneski, this year’s construction co-captain along with Greg Herbst (BS CEE ’26). “Everyone gets to trowel, though we end up using our hands a lot.”

Between layers, the team adds mesh to reinforce the concrete and help the canoe keep its shape. For increased buoyancy, they fill caps in the fore and aft with foam and then apply more concrete. This year they added concrete ribs for increased strength. (Two years ago, the team dropped the canoe and had to duct-tape the stern to keep it together. They raced, but the boat capsized at the finish line.)

“This is the best one I’ve ever seen,” said Charles “Scooter" Hager, CEE Structures / Materials Technician at Pitt. He works in the Benedum Hall sub-basement and, as Cook said, “helps with literally everything we need, even teaching us how to row.”

The Andy War-Hull

Beyond questions of design and mix are the canoe’s name and its theme. At meetings, students share ideas, most with a nod to Pittsburgh, until one or two take hold. Last year, the team settled on the alliterative Monongahela Megalodon. Before that it was the Three Rivers Safari.

This year, they turned to one of Pittsburgh’s favorite sons: pop artist Andy Warhol. Punny names ensued, and the Andy War-Hull stuck. For artistic inspiration, team members took a guided tour of the Warhol Museum on Pittsburgh’s North Shore.

“After the canoe cured and we sanded it, the aesthetics team set to work, drawing designs in pencil before staining them into the concrete,” said Kayley Dorfman, an aesthetics co-lead and next year’s project management captain. “The team did everything by hand.”

The boat is adorned with pickles, Heinz condiments, a banana, Marilyn Monroe lips, Dippy the Dinosaur, a panther paw, and the Cathedral of Learning.

Rowing a concrete canoe

Constructing the canoe is a remarkable feat. Rowing in it isn’t particularly easy either. At 215 pounds and 17.5 feet long, the Andy War-Hull requires stamina and skill to weave through buoys in the slalom or to sprint 200 meters.

In previous years, the teams did little in the way of actual rowing practice. Experience was spotty, and the results weren’t always great.

Hager has set out to change that. He has a canoe and lives near the Ohio River. For the past 17 years, he has encouraged students to come and practice, and two years ago, they took him up on the offer. “That first practice, we just sent them out,” Hager said. “They got a lot of time on the water, just figuring out how to work together.”

This spring, their teamwork and the rowing practice paid off. At the 2026 ASCE Mid-Atlantic Student Symposium in Johnstown, PA, Pitt’s Concrete Canoe team placed first overall, earning them the trip to the nationals.

Nationals

This year’s ASCE Civil Engineering Student Championships was held at Fairmont State University in Fairmont, West Virginia. Concrete Canoe teams from as far away as China, India, Quebec, Seattle, and San Diego brought their boats to nearby Tygart Lake State Park to compete.

Pitt’s team rented a Penske truck, and Miles Hartlage, next year’s construction co-lead, drove the Andy War-Hull two hours south, maneuvering the winding roads to the state park. He parked amid a long row of trailers typically used for race cars, many emblazoned with university logos.

While a niche college event, Concrete Canoe has its own flair. Teams wore matching shirts, one team even matching party hats. Pitt’s team, during the regional competition, dressed as their boat’s namesake, donning silver wigs.

Members of one team walked the banks of the lake banging drums. Another team hoisted a cowbell the size of a garbage can and clanged it (a three-person endeavor) whenever their canoe set out to the starting line. Teams twirled ratchet noise makers.

The canoes themselves are amazing, ornately stained, with designs that tell stories of its university, city, or state. A few boats even had cement figureheads – a pelican, for instance – on the bow.

There are five events: women’s and men’s slalom, women’s and men’s sprint, and co-ed sprint. Boats are timed individually. As the rowers navigated buoys or frantically dug their paddles into the water to go faster, teammates and fans on the shore cheered them on and chanted their school’s name. They waved university flags. Everyone was having fun.

Beyond racing and the fun, the students gained practical experience that will help them after they graduate. Each team must develop an extensive proposal submitted to judges, which outlines details such as the cement mix, the design, the construction, and the cost. At the competition, students must pitch their canoe, selling judges on its merit and fielding questions. The canoe itself is rigorously tested and judged.

“The idea is that we are designing a concrete canoe that will be manufactured on a wide scale,” Cook said. "The canoe is a working prototype and the presentation is a business pitch. The racing is more for fun.”

While Pitt’s team couldn’t repeat its regionals performance, for their first time at nationals, they held their own. Beyond the results, the team bonded, sharing snacks and stories, lifting members into and out of the Andy War-Hull, working together to navigate a complex slalom course. They met fellow engineers from far-off schools and talked with industry representatives eager to see what the students had created.

“I could not be more proud of them,” said Amir Alavi, the team’s faculty advisor and associate professor and B.P. America Faculty Fellow in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. "It’s so rewarding to see how much heart the students put into this work. Concrete Canoe is not just about building and racing a canoe. It is about students learning to trust each other, solve problems together, and see that civil engineering is also about creativity, imagination, and teamwork,”

“Our department is close knit and supportive, and Concrete Canoe captures this spirit,” said Kate Volna (BS CEE ’26), project management captain this year. “Even though this was my last go round with Concrete Canoe, I’ll always be cheering them on.”

The Resilient Energy Technology and Infrastructure (RETI) Consortium, led by West Virginia University in collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University and more than 60 regional partners, will use $321 million in public and private funding to develop the nation’s next leading industrial energy innovation hub in the heart of Appalachia.

After a competitive two-year selection process, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the RETI Consortium as one of 12 NSF Regional Innovation Engines award recipients on July 14.

Charged with building a regional innovation ecosystem composed of national market leaders, the new NSF Engine will receive up to $160 million over the next decade from NSF, plus another $161 million from RETI’s established industry, workforce, philanthropy, state government and community partners.

Pitt Chancellor Joan Gabel said RETI represents the physical, intellectual, industrial and workforce assets necessary to create a successful model of energy resilience that can be scaled to meet national need.

“This is a landmark moment that highlights our shared vision and collaboration with WVU and other partners to modernize the energy grid, revitalize advanced manufacturing and create thousands of new jobs across our region,” Gabel said. “I’m proud of our researchers and grateful to the NSF for investing in the kind of bold, cross-border collaboration that will define the next generation of American energy innovation.”

The funding is projected to generate 21,000 jobs, 150 startups and more than $1 billion in economic growth for the region. NSF RETI Engine CEO Erienne Olesh said the award is timely, given the surging demand for power driven by AI, data centers and the reshoring of U.S. industry.

“RETI is built to meet this challenge,” Olesh said. “Anchored in the heart of America’s historic energy corridor, the consortium will develop hardware, software and AI-technologies to help secure America’s energy supply, strengthen the grid and power the next generation of U.S. manufacturing.”

Over the past two years, the RETI team has harnessed an innovation-driven strategy poised to enhance industrial competitiveness through scalable energy-efficient technologies, strengthen grid resilience to support U.S. manufacturing, accelerate commercialization of energy innovations, build a skilled regional workforce, support a growing community of deep tech entrepreneurs and expand venture capital focused on hard tech.

“Pitt has been advancing energy innovation for more than a century, and RETI gives us a powerful new way to use that expertise to tackle one of the country’s most urgent challenges,” said Rob A. Rutenbar, Pitt’s senior vice chancellor for research. “Working with WVU, Carnegie Mellon, and our industry and community partners, the work of RETI will help strengthen the grid, support energy-intensive industries and build the workforce that will power the region’s future.”

To address industry needs, the NSF Engine will focus on accelerating developments in advanced manufacturing, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and energy technology.

“Through RETI, Pitt researchers will work with our partners on novel ways to make our region’s energy infrastructure more resilient,” said Rob Cunningham, co-principal investigator on RETI and Pitt’s vice chancellor for research infrastructure. “Our unique expertise in energy grid sensing, security and resiliency, and advanced manufacturing will be critical to developing these new technologies and translating them into practical solutions for our region.”

State leaders in both West Virginia and Pennsylvania have long touted the region’s energy economic development opportunities. Pitt’s participation in the consortium aligns with the University’s strategic public impact priorities: RETI enables a cross-state, cross-sector consortium to foster entrepreneurship and advance industry across Appalachia, which directly contributes to economic competitiveness of the region. It also creates a connected, energy-centered workforce development pipeline from K-12 to career-focused and technical education as well as baccalaureate and post-graduate training.

“Congratulations to Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, West Virginia University and all of the partners on earning this outstanding NSF Regional Innovation Engines award,” U.S. Senator Dave McCormick said. “I was proud to support this opportunity because it’s exactly the kind of collaboration that keeps our region at the forefront of innovation. This investment will help strengthen our economy, generate technological competitiveness, create new jobs, and build on our commonwealth’s leadership in energy, AI and advanced manufacturing.”

“Pennsylvania has consistently been a leader in developing cutting-edge technology thanks to the talent and research at our universities and businesses,” U.S. Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) said. “As a member of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, I’m glad NSF is recognizing and rewarding the ongoing work at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, West Virginia University, and other RETI partners to address the challenges of powering our economy.”

The NSF Engines program, launched by NSF Technology, Innovation and Partnerships, is building and scaling regional innovation ecosystems nationwide. Each NSF Engine is powered by a broad coalition of private sector, regional and scientific leaders and organizations to accelerate breakthrough emerging technology research and development that drives growth and ultimately bolsters U.S. economic competitiveness and national security. 

“NSF Engines investments in critical technologies and future industries will transform America’s innovation infrastructure for decades to come,” said Brian Stone, performing the duties of the NSF director. “The NSF RETI Engine will strengthen U.S. energy security and grow the industry by advancing resources for energy grid management, storage and cybersecurity.”

The NSF RETI Engine is located at the WVU Innovation Corporation site in Morgantown, West Virginia, with a branch office at the Energy Innovation Center in Pittsburgh. 

Learn more about the NSF RETI Engine.

Through the Manufacturing PA program, local companies partner with universities across Pennsylvania, matching Manufacturing PA’s award of up to $70,000 to fund a project over the course of the school year. Companies work closely with faculty and students to solve persistent problems and develop new technology and products.

This year’s Pitt projects and industry partners are: 

• Brandon Grainger, “Reduced-Inductance Modular Multilevel Converter for High Voltage Direct Current Systems: A Control-Driven Approach to Lower Magnetic Material Utilization and Increase Power Density” (Innomotics).
• Paul Leu, “EMI Shielding and ESD Performance of Polycarbonate Materials for Electronic Applications” (Covestro).
• Paul Ohodnicki, “Nanostructuring and Composition Engineering of Novel Ferrite Based Permanent Magnets” (National Magnetics / CorePower Magnetics).

“This program builds connections between Pitt and local industry to fuel innovation in the region and beyond. At the same time, it provides an amazing opportunity to our students, preparing the industry leaders of tomorrow,” said Heng Ban, Richard K. Mellon Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Interim Associate Dean for Research and Facilities. “We’re grateful for Manufacturing PA’s and our partners’ ongoing support of important projects like these.”

Together, the recognitions reflect both the impact of Rizzo's research and his growing leadership in the structural health monitoring community. His research is paving the way for nondestructive inspection that could, when mature, allow inspectors to measure how much longitudinal force a track is carrying, information that it is important to prevent train derailments.

Structural Health Monitoring is an international, peer-reviewed journal that publishes exceptional research advancing “the body of knowledge and its application in the discipline of structural health monitoring.” Rizzo’s appointment followed a competitive search, and he began serving as Managing Editor on July 1, 2026.

“Structural Health Monitoring is a tremendous source of cutting-edge, multidisciplinary research that is advancing our field,” said Rizzo, professor in the Swanson School of Engineering’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “As a past contributing author, it’s a great honor to serve as its managing editor and help amplify how researchers are improving structural monitoring research to ultimately protect public safety.”

Along with his appointment to Managing Editor, Rizzo, with first author Alireza Enshaeian (PhD ECE ’24); Matthew Belding (BS ECE ’19, PhD ECE ’25); and Shayan Baktash, a PhD student in civil engineering, received the 2026 Outstanding Paper Award from the American Society for Nondestructive Testing. The award recognizes individuals whose research and papers make important contributions in nondestructive testing. Their paper, “Vibration Nondestructive Testing of Continuous Welded Rails: A Finite Element Analysis,” (DOI: 10.1080/09349847.2024.2433483) was published in Research in Nondestructive Evaluation.

Rizzo and his team investigated railroad tracks that use continuously welded rails (CWR) instead of those joined by bolts and gaps. Although welded rails produce smoother rides and require less upkeep, they are more susceptible to temperature fluctuations that can make them unsafe. 

To improve how these rails are monitored, Rizzo and his team developed a “tap and listen approach,” in which they struck the CWR with an instrumented hammer, recorded the vibrations, and analyzed the frequencies of the vibrations. However, instead of recording vibrations across many sections of rail, they focused on a five-meter stretch and simulated scenarios at various temperatures. With this data, the team trained an AI model to predict stress conditions based on the vibration frequencies.

“We found that more than temperature, what affects the vibrations is how firmly the track is held down,” said Enshaeian. “We also discovered the limitations of using AI to predict extreme conditions, which would require significantly more data.”

“Our research shows the potential of generating synthetic data to train AI models at a time when collecting real-world data is incredibly slow and expensive,” Rizzo said. “We are excited to continue expanding the model beyond a limited rail profile.”

The University of Texas at Austin will host the symposium with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in Austin, Texas, on September 21 – 24. A cross-disciplinary cohort of early-career engineers recognized for their exceptional research will explore four overarching themes:

• Innovation in Bioengineered Materials
• Compute Challenges for Artificial Intelligence
• Agriculture as a System-of-Systems: From Molecules to Markets
• Hypersonics 

“I am honored to be selected for the 2026 symposium,” said Bedewy, who also serves as Graduate Program Coordinator of Materials Science and Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at the Swanson School of Engineering and leads the NanoProduct Lab. “What excites me most is the interdisciplinary nature of this unique event. As engineering challenges become increasingly complex and disciplinary boundaries become less rigid, forums like this one are essential. Many of the most important advances in materials science and manufacturing engineering will depend on our ability to think across fields and build connections between different research communities.”

Bedewy’s research focuses on the advanced manufacturing and process science of functional nanomaterials, with particular emphasis on laser-induced graphene, carbon nanomaterials, and polymer-derived materials for flexible electronic and bioelectronic devices. By integrating materials science, manufacturing engineering, nanotechnology, and biointerfaces, his group develops new processes and material platforms for applications including biosensing, neural interfaces, medical technologies, energy systems, and implantable or wearable devices.

His recent research into using laser-induced graphene to develop flexible microelectrodes and neurochemical biosensors was selected as a cover feature in Issue 7 of Advanced Materials Technologies. Bedewy’s work blending laser-induced graphene with kirigami to develop transparent barriers that block harmful electromagnetic interference was also a cover feature in ACS Applied Engineering Materials. In May 2025, Bedewy received a $549,947 NSF grant to research new ways to use machine learning to model, characterize, simulate, and predict growth of iron nanoparticles.

Bedewy has also received many prestigious awards including an NSF CAREER Award in 2023, the Frontiers of Materials Award from the Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society (TMS) in 2022, and the Outstanding Young Investigator Award from the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers’ Manufacturing and Design (IISE M&D) Division in 2020.

Bedewy joins a group of Swanson School faculty who have previously participated in the symposium, including Di Gao, associate professor of chemical and petroleum engineering and W. K. Whiteford Faculty Fellow; Steven Little, distinguished professor and department chair of chemical and petroleum engineering; Patrick Loughlin, professor of bioengineering and associate dean for faculty affairs; and Warren Ruder, associate professor of bioengineering.

“Mostafa, who has secondary appointments in bioengineering, chemical and petroleum engineering, and industrial engineering, embodies the cross-disciplinary spirit of the Frontiers of Engineering symposium,” said Heng Ban, Richard K. Mellon Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and interim associate dean for research and facilities. “He will be an excellent representative of Pitt and the Swanson School, and I’m excited to see what he brings back from this important event.”

A new publication from University of Pittsburgh researchers offers some answers. In "Advanced Tissue Clearing and Three-Dimensional Imaging Approaches to Visualize Neural Innervation in the Rat Knee Joints” (doi.org/10.1038/s44303-026-00167-6), Alejandro Almarza, professor of oral and craniofacial sciences in the School of Dental Medicine with a secondary appointment in the Swanson School of Engineering’s Department of Bioengineering, used specialized imaging techniques to map the architecture of nerves inside knee joint tissue. For Almarza, this research lays critical groundwork for visualizing how nerve patterns in densely innervated joints are related to pain, allowing him to better understand disorders of the temporomandibular joint (TMJ).

“Most of us go through life without much pain in the face that isn't related to a tooth, but the TMD umbrella is very broad, and the cause behind that pain is relatively unknown,” Almarza said. “For the vast majority of TMDs, we're dealing with muscle-based or joint-related problems, and this work could help us understand why these occur." 

A Joint Effort 

TMJs on both sides of the face connect the jawbone to the skull and act like a sliding hinge, allowing us to talk, chew and yawn. The relationship between nerve density and pain in joints like the TMJ is relatively unknown, and the traditional method for studying these joint nerves involves slicing tissue into thin slivers and staining them with dyes to make nerve cells visible under a microscope.

Cutting tissue apart, however, destroys its three-dimensional structure, making it impossible to see how the nerves branch throughout a joint. To get a clear picture of these nerve structures in 3D, Almarza partnered with two professors from Pitt's Center for Biologic Imaging (CBI) to use both light sheet fluorescence microscopy and an imaging technique known as tissue clearing. 

“Tissue clearing makes an entire piece of tissue transparent for 3D imaging so you can visualize the nerves inside, and the microscope we used works like a wall of light sweeping through the volume of tissue all at once, making it faster than a traditional microscope while still achieving near-confocal resolution with minimal tissue damage,” Almarza said. “Some of the best of these systems in the world are custom-built here at Pitt by Simon Watkins, and the clearing methods have been developed by Alan Watson."

Watkins, distinguished professor of cell biology and immunology, founded the CBI in 1991. Unlike a typical fee-based core facility, CBI faculty collaborate directly with researchers to design specialized microscopes and imaging techniques from the ground up. While Watkins is the expert in building the scopes themselves, his colleague Alan Watson, associate professor of cell biology, provides the other half of the equation: the computing infrastructure, tissue clearing protocols, and programming expertise to store and analyze the enormous volumes of data these systems produce. Because no current commercial solution exists for imaging nerves inside of large, dense tissue, the team built one.

“Clearing joint tissue isn't entirely new, but it presents some really interesting challenges. Alejandro came to us with a problem that was hard to deal with, one we'd also struggled with for years, and as a group we were able to work together and find a solution," Watson said. “And these high-speed imaging techniques generate enormous amounts of data, so we've developed high-performance computing systems to store, process and visualize it all.” 

Clearing the Way for Understanding Pain

The team ultimately compared two tissue clearing methods: PEGASOS, a previously established protocol for bone-containing tissue, and c-Clear, developed in-house at the CBI. PEGASOS left behind autofluorescence protein that both blocked the microscope’s laser from fully penetrating the tissue and caused high background, but c-Clear introduced a 24-hour photobleaching step that inactivated those molecules before staining, allowing fluorescent antibodies to bind to neurofilament and produce a complete three-dimensional map of the joint's nerves. 

“The c-Clear method takes about six to eight weeks to obtain an image, making it far more labor and time-intensive than normal histological methods, but the result is an extremely powerful and clear representation of how these nerves branch,” Almarza said. 

C-Clear does come with one significant caveat: the sheer size of the data it generates. A single three-dimensional nerve map of the knee contains about one terabyte of information, and the full collection from the project runs about 16 terabytes. Luckily, supporting that feat is the CBI's computing infrastructure: seven petabytes of storage and an H200 GPU cluster used to stitch, clean and analyze every dataset, making it possible to deposit the full collection publicly for anyone to access and download on the National Institute of Health’s SPARC Portal. 

"I believe we’re the first to publish this new type of imaging dataset on the portal,” Almarza said. “The photos and videos are amazing, and our next challenge is quantification and figuring out the computational pipelines to really analyze what we're seeing."

Ultimately, looking at a rat's knee may seem far removed from the joint that helps humans chew and talk, but the connection is deliberate. Through the NIH HEAL Initiative, Almarza is part of the ReJoin Consortium, a $50 million project aimed at mapping nerve architecture across joints, species and disease states to expand understanding of pain signaling in collaboration with the University of Florida's Kyle Allen, Yenisel Cruz-Almeida, and Robert Caudle.   With c-Clear now validated on some of the most challenging tissue the consortium has yet encountered, Almarza can turn his attention to the structure he set out to study all along. 

"There are a lot of people whose radiographs look like they should have pain in their TMJ, but they're actually talking just fine," Almarza said. "Is it because of the type of nerves in there? And why is it different from people with pain? That's the type of question this research is hoping to answer."

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This past May, as Bursic transitioned to emeritus faculty, the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) recognized her contributions to engineering education with its prestigious 2026 Donald G. Newnan National Engineering Economy Teaching Excellence Award. Bursic was honored in person at the 2026 ASEE Annual Conference, held in Charlotte, North Carolina, June 21 – 24. The award, which celebrates exceptional teaching and scholarship, is a testament to Bursic’s dedication to her students, to industrial engineering, and to the craft of teaching.

On the plant floor 

When Bursic enrolled at Pitt in 1980, she knew she wanted to be an engineer but wasn’t sure what kind. As she recalled, “I picked industrial engineering because they said you get to use these new things called computers a lot.”

Bursic thrived in the program and after earning her bachelor’s degree, she took a job with General Motors at a metal-stamping plant in West Mifflin, PA, where she became a supervisor on the plant floor. While at GM, she enrolled in graduate courses at Pitt, earning her MS in industrial engineering.

Although Bursic would later work as a senior consultant at professional services company Ernst & Young, she continued graduate courses at Pitt and earned her PhD in 1990.

Of her early successes, Bursic is grateful for her thesis advisor, David Cleland, who wrote the book on project management and is considered a leading figure in the field. “He was probably the most influential person early in my career because he never doubted that I could do the PhD. He made sure I progressed through the program and never questioned my ability as a female engineer, which was kind of a big thing back then.”

Bursic also credits her husband, Frank Bursic (BSECE ’80, MSIE ’87), who supported them as she pursued her PhD. “He encouraged me throughout my career,” she said.

Into the classroom

By 1994, Bursic had taken time to start a family but wanted to translate the realities of the production floor into the classroom. She taught a course at Penn State and others through professional societies. Then Harvey Wolfe, emeritus professor of industrial engineering at the Swanson School, hired Bursic to teach part time at her alma mater.

Back at Pitt, Bursic quickly immersed herself in pedagogy. She’d been a member of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) since studying as an undergraduate and would then join ASEE. She found support from Professor Bopaya Bidanda, who was then chair of industrial engineering and who encouraged her to attend conferences and take on leadership positions.

Bursic also learned from mentors like Kim LaScola Needy (BSIE ’84, MSIE ’87), former professor of industrial engineering at Pitt and now Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Arkansas. The two had met as undergraduates, and LaScola Needy became a supportive colleague who, as Bursic said, “still mentors me today.” 

LaScola Needy served as the undergraduate program director, and when she stepped down from this role, she encouraged Bursic to apply. “That's what I did, and the rest is history.” That history has involved advising countless students, helping them progress in the program just as she had years earlier.

“Karen is one of the best hires we made,” Bidanda said. “During her time, she transformed our undergrad program into a leading-edge program that had initiatives that no other industrial engineering program had.”

Bursic had begun teaching full time and applied what she was learning at conferences and in the literature. “When active learning first became a thing, I would always sign up to any workshop that I could. I would go to them all and see what techniques I could use to improve teaching.”

For Bursic, though, it wasn’t enough to just try something new. She applied her industrial engineer principles to test the efficacy of these techniques. She turned her classes into teaching labs to collect data and see what worked. She immersed herself in assessing student learning.

Her research and conversations with colleagues like Mary Besterfield-Sacre and Larry Shuman led Bursic to write “An Engineering Economy Concept Inventory,” which was published in the journal The Engineering Economist and later won the ASEE Eugene L. Grant Award, which is annually given to the best paper published in that journal.

“It stunned me,” Bursic said of the award. “I was not expecting that.”

It was one of many honors for Bursic. She is a Fellow of IISE and ASEE and has received IISE’s Engineering Economy Wellington Award and the Engineering Economy Division Outstanding Teaching Award. In 2014, she was named the Swanson School’s Outstanding Educator.

These awards reflect Bursic’s dedication to her craft and to supporting her students, a commitment that extends beyond the classroom. Just as Bursic credits invaluable mentors throughout her career, she has become that very person for junior faculty. 

“Karen was instrumental in how I advise industrial engineering students,” said Renee Clark, associate professor of industrial engineering at the Swanson School, who was recognized as the 2025 Swanson School Educator of the Year. “When I was learning how to do this, no question I asked her was ever too simple or too repetitive. Her responses sent me down the path of being able to significantly contribute to my department in this way today.”

“Karen’s contributions to our program and our students cannot be overstated,” said Lisa Maillart, Leighton E. Orr and Mary N. Orr Professor and department chair of industrial engineering. “She is an exceptional teacher and advisor and a supportive colleague who uplifts all those around her. This award is a perfect culmination to an amazing career.”

In retirement, Bursic is excited to spend more time with her five grandchildren. “That's the number one thing – family,” she said. She also plans to be more active in her church. And she’s planning to teach engineering management to University of Nebraska graduate students online, asynchronously, so she might not be done with teaching just yet.  

This year’s annual industry meeting will follow the jointly organized Power Sources Manufacturers Association (PSMA) / AMPED “Power Magnetics @ High Frequency Satellite Workshop,” an inaugural international workshop held on August 18, 2026, also at the EIC.

“The annual industry meeting provides a unique opportunity for current leaders in power magnetics to engage directly with the future of this industry,” said Paul Ohodnicki, professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at the Swanson School, RK Mellon Faculty Fellow in Energy, and director of the University of Pittsburgh Center for Energy. “That this meeting is paired with the first joint PSMA / AMPED satellite workshop and includes two remarkable keynote speakers represents the important work happening here in Pittsburgh.”

In addition to connecting current AMPED Consortium students with industry partners through student panels and a poster session, the industry meeting will feature two distinguished keynote speakers: Elif Balkas, Chief Technology Officer at Wolfspeed, and Troy Beechner, Mission Leader – Electrification at GE Vernova.

Dr. Balkas brings extensive experience and expertise in research and development of silicon carbide, a wide-bandgap (WBG) semiconductor. For over 14 years, she held leadership and research positions at Cree (now Wolfspeed) before becoming the company’s chief technology officer, with a current focus on technology strategy, R&D, and commercialization across materials, devices, mechanisms, and reliability. Headquartered in Durham, North Carolina, Wolfspeed is a global leader in silicon carbide materials and devices, which drive needs for advanced high-frequency, high-power magnetics at the core of the AMPED Consortium mission.

Dr. Beechner is an expert in WBG power electronics systems and has held engineering leadership and research and development roles at companies including the Navy Nuclear Lab, Mainstream Engineering Corporation, and RCT Systems. He currently serves as Mission Leader – Electrification at the GE Vernova Advanced Research Center, focusing on power electronics and energy systems for large scale commercial and military applications.

“We’re honored to have Dr. Balkas and Dr. Beechner share their experience and insight. Their addresses will motivate students and faculty while underscoring the importance of the AMPED Consortium for the critical challenges of electrification and rapidly increasing electrical energy demand moving into the future,” Ohodnicki said.

Celebrating the fifth anniversary of the Consortium, its leadership team has also organized a workshop featuring AMPED student alumni currently working in relevant areas within industry. These student alumni will discuss their current work and how the consortium prepared them for their current industrial careers within industry.

Panelists include:

• Sneha Narasimhan, ABB.
• Joshua Lubin (BS ECE ’23 MS ECE ’24), Innomotics.
• Mark Nations, CorePower Magnetics.
• Kyle Schneider, CorePower Magnetics.

“This workshop represents more than five years since the AMPED Consortium launched, and it’s exciting to welcome these students back to explore the impact that it has had on their careers,” said Brandon Grainger, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and Eaton Faculty Fellow, director of the Electric Power Technologies Lab, and co-director of the Energy GRID Institute and Pitt AMPED. “Essential to these workshops is the emphasis on student presentations and engagement with industry. They build and strengthen the interdisciplinary community required to solve challenges in advanced magnetics to support electrification and the growing demands for electricity.”

The workshop will also include technical sessions that feature presentations from researchers and industry professionals as well as technology demonstrations. It will end with a networking and poster session.

Registration for the August 19 industry meeting is open. Registrants for the August 18 satellite workshop will receive complimentary access. 

View the Annual Industry Meeting agenda.

About the AMPED Consortium

The Advanced Magnetics for Power and Energy Development (AMPED) Consortium is a University of Pittsburgh-led, industry-engaged initiative based at the Swanson School of Engineering’s Center for Energy. AMPED builds on Pittsburgh’s legacy in the electric power industry, including the original headquarters of the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, a pioneer of the electric power grid. Today, the Pittsburgh region and Pennsylvania remain pre-eminent in electric power conversion and grid technologies, spanning soft magnetic materials, distribution and power transformer manufacturers, and the utilities and end users that deploy them. Find more information.

The Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT) - PhD in Bioengineering program, a collaboration between the Swanson School of Engineering and the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences (SHRS), has been awarded a NIH T32 training grant. Co-directed by Rakié Cham, professor of bioengineering, and Patrick Sparto, professor of physical therapy, the five-year grant offers annual funding for students to integrate a physical therapy education with bioengineering research training, training clinician-scientists to be leaders in rehabilitation research. 

"Whether our trainees ultimately go into physical therapy or bioengineering in their career, this program allows them to become better clinical researchers." Cham said. "A physical therapist with strong technical skills can tackle the right research questions, and an engineer with clinical training will better understand what's relevant to patients."

Students begin the dual-degree program by pursuing their DPT at SHRS in the Department of Physical Therapy, then transitioning to a research lab of their choice to obtain a PhD in Bioengineering. Throughout both the DPT and PhD curriculum, trainees funded by this grant will complete integrated clinical and bioengineering research training, including mentored research, lab rotations, seminars, clinical practice, and teaching experience. 

“This is a great opportunity for both faculty and students.” Sparto said. “The potential pool of PhD advisors expands, because advisors know upfront that a student already has two years of support, allowing more freedom for our students to pursue their research interests and helping our faculty plan ahead when taking on a new student.”

The grant will support each student with one year of tuition during their DPT education, two years of support toward their PhD studies, and an additional stipend to help cover cost of living expenses. 

“We have a wonderful group of participating faculty with a variety of diverse research programs and experience that students can go into, and our alumni have gone on to be really successful in their careers and with postdoctoral fellowships.” Sparto said. “I think these outcomes have really helped to demonstrate the power of funding a program like this to benefit our students.”

Steven Jacobs has been around radios his entire life. His father, Paul Jacobs, designed them and launched three companies that built systems for data communication. Jacobs worked at these companies over many summers and was fascinated by the technology that could send and receive bits of data through the air.

Engineering intrigued Jacobs, but he hesitated to pursue it until a college course and its professor won him over. The experience set Jacobs on a path to devote his career to teaching electrical engineering at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering. 

This past May, after three decades in the classroom, Jacobs retired, but he leaves a legacy of engaging and challenging his students, mentoring junior faculty, and occasionally surprising them all with his saxophone.

Signals and Systems

Jacobs grew up in Chicago and moved to a suburb of Rochester, New York, as a teenager after his dad took a job with Harris Corporation, which produced technology like wireless equipment and tactical radios.

After high school, he returned to the Midwest to attend Washington University in St. Louis, where a Signals and Systems course taught by Professor Donald L. Snyder would alter Jacobs’ trajectory.

“Signals and Systems is foundational for students interested in any kind of signal processing, especially communications and control systems,” Jacobs said. “It’s also a famously difficult course.”

Yet Jacobs said that Snyder made the material accessible and inspired in him something more than just an interest in the material: he showed Jacobs the power of good teaching. 

“He was an outstanding instructor, really gifted at grabbing your attention and leading you through difficult material so you understood it,” Jacobs said of Snyder. “That experience had a huge influence on me in terms of being excited about the field and in trying to be an instructor who inspired students the way he did.”

The teaching track

Jacobs would go on to earn his BS and MS in electrical engineering at WashU, and as a master’s student he met his future wife, Julie Fiez, who was studying psychology and neuroscience.

After beginning his PhD studies at Northwestern University, Jacobs returned to WashU to earn his degree, investigating how automated radar systems could recognize different types of aircraft. While the problems he wrestled with fascinated him, Jacobs realized that it was teaching that captivated him the most. 

In 1997, Jacobs and his wife both accepted jobs at Pitt, with Jacobs hired as a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Jacobs said that he thrived on teaching and engineering education. He became an assistant professor and in 2016 was promoted to associate professor, the same year that he received the Swanson School Educator of the Year Award.

“Steve is one of the most influential educators that I’ve ever had,” said Samuel Dickerson, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and Vice Chair for Education and Director of Computer Engineering Undergraduate Program. “I was one of his students, and he taught the class that I now regularly teach. I modeled much of my teaching style after his and even now still use the notes that he used to teach me digital logic circuits.”

Added Dickerson, “Steve is known as the most rigorous faculty member we have. He is also one of our most beloved and celebrated educators by both faculty and students.”

The power of a well-documented lab

Essential to Jacobs’ teaching philosophy is a belief that students should learn by doing, which starts with well-documented labs. “Everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve built labs for courses and written documents to describe what the students should do and learn.” 

While at Northwestern University, where he took as many teaching assistant positions as possible, Jacobs encountered mimeographed handouts that had been passed down year to year and served as the labs for the circuit courses. In what would become a hallmark of Jacobs’ career, he set to work rewriting and updating all the documents for the labs, providing detailed explanations, on his own initiative.

At Pitt, he would do the same for the courses he taught. If labs existed, he’d create new documentation. If there were no labs or too few, he would build them from scratch.

“In the last year and a half, for my digital communications course, which I've taught for years, I developed a new series of demos,” Jacobs said.

He created computer programs that students use to learn about error-correcting codes, the protocols that detect and correct errors that can arise when bits of information are sent wirelessly. Students experiment with the codes, including those used on the Voyager spacecraft to reconstruct digital images sent from outer space. 

“Even if it’s not a lab course, I always like to put things like this into my classes,” Jacobs said. “These activities are opportunities for the students to apply what they've learned because, you know, that's the reason why they're here as engineers.”

“Dr. Jacobs was passionate when it came to teaching analog communications,” said Jacob Jones, who is a second year master's student in electrical and computer engineering. “He would write equation after equation, derivation after derivation on the board that he made seem almost like art. We were in for a treat when he wheeled in equipment that was probably older than all of us just to show off a simple concept. His classes may have been hard, but we always walked away learning something new.”

Jacobs’ belief in engaging his students has extended beyond the classroom. In 2014, he became a faculty advisor for Pitt’s Beta Delta Chapter of Eta Kappa Nu (HKN), the honor society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Participation in Pitt’s chapter had waned. Recognizing the importance of fostering community and support in the program and across universities, Jacobs, with colleague Amro El-Jaroudi, helped rebuild the chapter.

“There were many people who didn’t see value in our chapter and in HKN as an organization,” said Sabrina Helbig, a Pitt PhD student in electrical engineering who held many leadership positions in the honor society. “I could tell that Dr. Jacobs cared. The success of our chapter mattered to him because he saw its potential and because it mattered to us. Having respected, visible, and caring leaders made such a difference.”

Indeed, by 2023–2024, the chapter received an Outstanding Chapter Award, the society’s highest honor.

“Steve has been such a valuable part of our program and has made a lasting impact on his students and colleagues,” said Alan George, department chair, R&H Mickle Endowed Chair, professor of electrical and computer engineering, and founder of SHREC and Pitt Space. “Through example, generosity, and creativity, he has been an amazing mentor to our newer faculty, especially to our teaching-track professors. I wish him all the best in his retirement.”

The sax

In the morning after the Swanson School spring graduation ceremony, Jacobs woke up and thought, “I don’t have anything I need to do today. How is that?”

What Jacobs did that Sunday morning was work on creating another lead sheet, arranging the parts he and fellow horn players use while performing.

Jacobs began playing the saxophone in fifth grade and played in marching and jazz bands in junior high and high school. While in graduate school, he received a phone call from a fraternity brother whose rock band needed a horn section. Jacobs grabbed his sax and joined. 

After moving to Pittsburgh, he played open mics until 2006, when he joined a rockabilly band that lasted until 2022. In 2019, he also joined a Blues Brothers tribute act, the Fabulous Booze Brothers.

Jacobs has increasingly become interested in arranging original songs. Using open-source software, he creates full charts. “I've made probably 30 charts in the last six months, entire songs – what all the horns have to do in every measure,” he said.   

Whether he is designing and documenting new labs or new songs, Jacobs heads into retirement still inspired by his students and fueled by his fascination with sound, signals, and systems.

Working through RAPID – the U.S. Department of Energy–sponsored Manufacturing USA institute focused on modular chemical-process intensification – Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering and Lubrizol re-engineered a key chemical dispersant line from large-batch to continuous production, housed in a compact, shipping-container-sized module. The result was a 65% reduction in capital costs and a 60% reduction in operating costs, alongside improved product quality.

“This is the impact of translational research between industry and academia – Pitt expertise meeting an industry problem and producing a result measured in real cost and capability,” said Rob A. Rutenbar, University of Pittsburgh senior vice chancellor for research. “Seeing it recognized at the federal level affirms the value of the long-term industry partnerships we work to build.”

The work grew out of the process-intensification research of Götz Veser, the Nicholas DeCecco Professor of Chemical Engineering in the Swanson School, whose laboratory developed the prototype reactor that became the basis for new continuous-production modules at Lubrizol. The project is one chapter in a decade-long Pitt and Lubrizol research alliance spanning chemical engineering, sustainability and workforce development.

“Process intensification enables us to do more with a far smaller physical, economic, and environmental footprint, and Lubrizol was willing to collaborate and put it into practice,” said Veser. “That partnership is what turns a promising idea in the lab into a working production line.”

The collaboration reflects the partnership-driven approach at the center of the Swanson School’s strategic plan, Bridging People, Innovation and Possibility to Achieve Collective Impact, and the research-translation goals of the University’s Plan for Pitt 2028. Industry collaboration is a critical component to the plan and is symbolized in part by the Swanson School’s 13-year partnership with Lubrizol.

“This collaboration is a model for how academic-industry relationships can provide positive momentum in reinventing supply chains through modular chemical process intensification,” noted Glenn Cormack, Technical Fellow and Global Process Innovation Manager for Lubrizol. “Furthermore, the collaboration with Department of Energy and RAPID played a pivotal role in bringing step-out technology to commercial scale and building a roadmap for how to apply the learnings more broadly to specialty chemicals.”

For over a decade, University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering students have been up for this challenge. Pitt’s Chem-E Car has weathered competitions where their car didn’t start or where it veered out of bounds or went backwards or wouldn’t stop. Yet the opportunity to build a battery from scratch, design and create a car, and devise a stopping mechanism continues to captivate Pitt students eager to hone their engineering decision-making skills.

This past spring, at the AIChE Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference, held at Virginia Commonwealth University, in Richmond, Virginia, the Pitt team’s car came .02 meters (an eighth of an inch) from advancing to the national competition in November, and the team hopes that it might get there yet.

Starting

“Three years ago, as a second-year student, I joined Chem-E Car because it was a hands-on opportunity to work with chemicals,” said Toby Rozengarten (ChemE BS ’26), president of the club this past year. “I liked the problem-solving aspect of it as well as the freedom to design what we choose.”

The heart of each Chem-E Car is its power source, and each year the team must decide what kind of battery. Standard lead-acid battery? Hydrogen fuel cell, or an electrochemical cell? How will it fit safely into a model car? And how much power will it provide?

Questions like these are answered collectively, with upper-level students mentoring newer members. Pitt’s team had 12 members this past year, and they decided to develop a lead-acid battery.

“We’d seen these batteries at previous competitions and wanted to make one of our own,” said Rozengarten. They develop a system composed of six electrochemical cells wired to deliver about 12 volts, more than enough to power the motor and gears.

Beyond the chemistry involved in building the battery, the team designs and creates the car, which this year included a lighthouse structure, which inspired the car’s name, Lighthouse.

“This was my first real experience working as a team to design and build something,” said Ben Hill, who just finished his first-year at the Swanson School. “It pushed me to learn things that weren't explicitly taught in the classroom.”

“Last year, we had an electrical engineer who did all our circuitry, but she graduated,” said Alette Kegerreis (ChemE BS ’26). “We needed to start from scratch, and I took the opportunity to learn something new. It was a great experience.”

It was also successful. Each year, around 20 teams compete in the Mid-Atlantic region, and of those teams, about half, sometimes more than half of the cars won’t even start. In 2024 and 2025, the Pitt team’s car didn’t make it past the start line.

This year, the team had to tune their car to reach 17.22 meters (56.6 feet). In the allotted hour, they calculated and mixed the chemicals, which they added to the reactor and the battery. They flipped a switch and the Lighthouse came to life. Staying within bounds, it began rolling, heading toward the finish line.

Stopping

Unlike a traditional car race, in the Chem-E Car Competition, speed isn’t as important as stopping. To qualify, a car must stop within three meters of the set distance.

To do so, the Pitt team turned to a process used at some crime scenes: chemiluminescence. “We used luminol, which helps investigators detect blood,” said Luke Roup (ChemE BS ’26). “The chemical compound reacts with the iron, producing a light-blue glow.”

The team built a reactor, which they placed atop the lighthouse. They used an iron-based catalyst, which would determine how long the light would glow. “We set up a sensor that reads the light’s brightness, and as soon as it’s not bright enough, the sensor shuts off the entire system,” Roup said.

Ostensibly, if the team mixes the correct concentration of reactants and catalysts, the car rolls to a stop at the finish line. And the team did calculate correctly… for the dusty floors of the Benedum Hall sub-basement, where they also share a space with researchers testing concrete.

“On the smooth surface at the competition, the Lighthouse kept going,” said Kegerreis.

It rolled past the finish line and came to a stop at 20.24 meters.

Waiting

In a competition where nearly half the cars don’t even make it past the starting line, to finish just beyond the outer bounds was both maddening and gratifying for the team.

“An eighth of an inch and we would’ve placed fifth,” said Roup. “The top five cars go on to compete in the nationals.”

The team has hope, though: they will apply to a waitlist. “The official judging our race told us that we need to apply, that we were so close to qualifying that we have a great chance of getting in.”

Even if they miss nationals, the experience has been extremely rewarding. The competition is about much more than starting and stopping a model car through chemical reactions. It’s about the creative, collaborative problem solving and decision making that occur all year. It’s about the connections that form in Benedum Hall and beyond. As part of the competition, teams present posters and share ideas. Pitt’s team fielded many questions about their unique stopping mechanism and the high voltage of their battery. Teams network. On race day, they cheer each other on.

“I’m so proud of our Pitt team,” said Taryn Bayles, professor and director of undergraduate education in the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering. Bayles has been the team’s faculty advisor since 2016. “They were incredible representatives of the Swanson School, and their car reflects a creative, innovative approach essential to our program.”

Many of those systems depend on devices that exhibit bifurcation behavior, reading inputs and turning them into outputs in ways that can sharpen sensitivity or ease of use. And those similarities turn up across disciplines.

Bajaj, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science in Pitt's Swanson School of Engineering, has been awarded a $649,684 National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award to help him flip the usual design process on its head. For systems that shift behavior abruptly – buckling, flutter, the snap-through of an ultrasensitive sensor – designers often can't aim straight at the result they want; they tune by trial and error. Bajaj wants to reverse that: start from explicit behavior specification and engineer the system backwards. The framework targets nonlinear systems such as micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS), including ultrasensitive gas-leak detectors capable of sensing hazardous compounds at parts-per-billion levels, as well as energy harvesters and aerospace structures.

In a system with bifurcations, a quantitative change produces a qualitative one: a change in the value of the input changes the type of outcome. Once a certain threshold is met, the system doesn’t do more of what it was doing; it instead does something different. For example, a somewhat flexible column loaded with heavier and heavier weights will compress more and more, but once a specific load is placed on it, it will move in a different way, bulging out to one side or buckling.

Today, researchers can characterize these kinds of systems using a lot of trial and error and analogies to previous systems. “Say I’m building a car, and I want it to have 400 horsepower,” Bajaj said. If he didn’t know how to hit that number, he might take any engine and keep tweaking it, tightening something here, disconnecting a part there, until it worked. And horsepower is an easy case, a smooth dial you can turn up or down. The challenge multiplies when the goal is a threshold behavior: getting a system to switch into a new kind of motion at exactly the right input, and not a moment before.

“Designing in bifurcation behavior can feel a bit like working in the dark,” Bajaj said. Even so, the field has made remarkable progress. Across nonlinear systems, libraries of relationships have accumulated for many decades as researchers test inputs and observe outputs via theory and experiment. They’ve found that systems with bifurcations of all kinds (a wing vibrating erratically at speed, a material buckling under pressure, a neuron firing in the brain) seem to be governed by similar principles. The equations aren’t identical, but when systems engineers compare notes, they find meaningful similarities behind the different variables and outputs.

“We play the same mathematical games, just on different fields,” Bajaj said. At a nonlinear dynamics conference, he might have a specific engineering question on his mind. “But then I could run into someone doing the same thing on a biological system and I think, ‘I can use their method to apply to my problem.’”

The award also supports an education plan that spans the length of the pipeline. Bajaj will carry the science of nonlinear behavior (the buckling and the sudden shifts that turn up everywhere from bridges to neurons) to K–12 students and the public through science center and library exhibits, and will fold the same design methods into undergraduate and graduate coursework. A layered mentorship model reaching students at different stages aims to broaden participation in STEM, giving newcomers both a way in and a reason to stay.

Bajaj will use his CAREER Award to develop a unified computational framework for designing nonlinear systems from a desired behavior, rather than discovering their behavior through trial and error. “I want to pick all my parameters, all the knobs I can turn, so that it does the things I want it to do and not necessarily the things that are undesirable.” The framework is intentionally general; he will demonstrate the approaches on small and large scales, from MEMS gas sensors at the micrometer scale to flutter in aircraft wings.

This past spring, Ibragimov and his team partnered with students from the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering’s Department of Industrial Engineering to visualize stronger healthcare ecosystems. The senior design capstone project was one of three collaborations between the Swanson School and UPMC. From mapping care ecosystems, to applying human factors to critical-care tools, to building interactive models for capacity planning, these projects highlight how new perspectives can create lasting solutions.

“I was craving that outside view.”

Last fall, Ibragimov read an email about the UPMC-Swanson School partnership, where students applied industrial engineering principles to healthcare challenges. Intrigued, he met with Lisa Maillart, Leighton E. and Mary N. Orr Professor and department chair of industrial engineering, and Scott Streiner, assistant professor of industrial engineering and undergraduate program director, and soon a project came into focus.

Ibragimov and colleague Collin Morrow, director of finance for Community Ambulatory Services, work to “provide an integrated approach between the physician and the hospital side, in everything from the urgent care standpoint, to surgery centers, to outpatient imaging.”

“Our goal,” as Morrow said, “is to build stronger ecosystems across Western Pennsylvania where patients can access convenient care and doctors spend less time traveling.”

They welcomed the outside perspectives of industrial engineering students Brady Fintan, Jordan During, Alan Ghosh, Danny Marren, and Max Rimdzius.

“We provided the team with data of all the appointments surgeons and patients have, and how far they must travel to different locations,” Ibragimov said. “We asked them to document the current state and develop an optimized system based on an ecosystem model that decreased a surgeon’s ‘windshield time’ and that created a better experience for patients.”

The team met in person weekly and, as Morrow noted, “We approached this project by having them serve as consultants and we were the client.”

Every week and then bi-weekly, the students returned with fresh analysis and visualization. What they produced far exceeded expectations: a series of interactive maps highlighting facility types near urgent care centers and the drive time of doctors across the system. They also overlaid the UPMC network on census-based maps to highlight population shifts in and around Pittsburgh.

“We could clearly see how the region is changing and where we have gaps,” Ibragimov said. He and Morrow called the project a “game changer” that could play a vital role in decision making. 

“I enjoy programming and solving complicated operational challenges, and this one was unique,” said team member Danny Marren, who noted that the data analysis and visualization skills would carry into his career. “My favorite part was unlocking a whole new view for them.”

“It’s a high-pressure, high-risk, low-frequency event.”

In the Cardiothoracic Intensive Care Unit at UPMC Presbyterian Hospital, two emergency carts hold supplies needed in the unlikely event of opening a patient’s chest to provide immediate life support.

“The carts have been around for over 50 years, and they weren’t designed with a systematic approach that applies human factors elements,” said Holt Murray, medical director of the Cardiothoracic Intensive Care Unit at UPMC Presbyterian Hospital and assistant professor of Critical Care Medicine. The carts are also infrequently used.

“Even our higher-volume procedures, like an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), happen around 90 times a year. When you factor in a nurse’s schedule, working three and a half shifts a week, there is low exposure to them,” he said.

Yet the specialty supplies are extremely time-sensitive, and someone with minimal experience must be able to reach them quickly.

Murray was eager to partner with the Swanson School to rethink how the carts were constructed and organized. “I was delighted to have a bunch of engineers come in and look at our processes.”

Those engineers were Pitt seniors Maya Jain, Cindy Lkhagvasuren, Garrett Rojik, Madelyn Shaw, and Aidan Wolynn. The team visited the hospital and met with Murray, nurse practitioner Lorenza Schwartzmiller, and nurses on the floor. They worked closely with Schwartzmiller, combining physician nursing and engineering to solve a complex problem. 

“From the get-go, we understood how high-risk it is,” Jain said.

As they began the redesign, the team ran tests, timing nurses as they pulled equipment from the existing carts. “They could see within a few nurses what the fundamental engineering problem was,” Murray said.

The students inventoried the carts, measuring and weighing all items, and set to work modeling and designing something new. “We really had to understand how all the supplies were used so we could develop the order in our cart,” said Rojik.

“We turned to our visual management techniques. You know, when operators go on the manufacturing floor, they know exactly where their tools are. They have an outline for it and a standard workspace,” Jain added.

The two carts are used for different lifesaving procedures. As the team explored models, they chose to combine both into one larger cart, with each half devoted to a procedure. “We spent hours trying to figure out how we could fit everything into the carts,” Jain said.

After they settled on a design, the students took the project a step further: they built a full prototype. “We were cutting wood and putting it together, sanding, painting, attaching wheels, and labeling everything,” Rojik said. “I liked woodworking in high school, so to get my hands dirty again was great.”

Then they were pushing the cart up the hill to Presbyterian Hospital, where they ran tests again with nurses, this time using their cart. The results reflected success.

“The team did a great job starting from square one,” Murray said. “We’re moving forward with steps to implement them on a large scale.”

“They don’t come in with any preconceived notions.”

Although Audrey Alcorn (ENGR BS ’84) works in healthcare administration at UPMC Shadyside, she’s an industrial engineer, and a Pitt alum. She knows the perspective industrial engineers can bring to healthcare.

“This was my ninth project through the partnership with UPMC and the Swanson School,” said Alcorn, PE and CSP, and innovation improvement specialist at UPMC Shadyside. “Previous projects focused on efficiency, effectiveness, and process improvement. This one was different.”

Adjacent to Shadyside Hospital is the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center, recognized worldwide for its treatment. Shadyside provides inpatient cancer care while Hillman delivers outpatient services. “As we continue to bring on highly recognized oncologists, we’re receiving many more patients,” Alcorn said.

With the increase, her team needed to understand how adding physicians and patients would affect capacity and current resources. “It was time to apply an engineering mindset.”

That mindset came from students Andrea Adamski, Camren Corbett, Ava Hartman, Alexis Hong, and Yuankai Zhang. The team received a trove of real operational data and set to work making sense of it.

“In our classes, the data is clean,” said Hong. “For this project, we were working with real data. We had to work around gaps and make assumptions.”

Added Corbett, “The most challenging aspect of the project was cleaning the data so it could be properly modeled.” 

The team analyzed oncology patient capacity to understand how increased physician recruitment and patient volume would impact resources. In Microsoft Excel, they created interactive, color-coded tables that let users input hypothetical changes and see immediate results: if a result appears red, they’re over capacity; if it’s green, they have room. 

On both the inpatient and outpatient side, the models help administrators understand how facilities are used and provide the data necessary to improve decision making and patient care.

“Everybody’s been blown away,” Alcorn said. “They’re like, ‘wow, wow, wow,’ because it’s different from what they’re used to seeing. The project has helped us see gaps and opportunities to care for more patients.”

The project also impressed judges at the Swanson School’s 23^rd Design Expo, where the project won second place in Industrial Engineering.

“Knowing who this project would impact definitely motivated us,” Corbett said.

Indeed, across these projects, students understood the gravity of their work. Each team treated their capstone project like a consulting engagement, meeting regularly with UPMC leaders, testing assumptions against real constraints, and turning engineering analysis into tools that clinicians and administrators can use.

As Ibragimov noted, “This was a great experience, and I’m truly going to miss it.”

Hu, associate professor and William Kepler Whiteford Faculty Fellow in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Swanson School of Engineering, develops life-saving embedded systems that operate inside or on the body. He creates smarter, more efficient devices that function within constraints such as size, battery life, and heat. 

“When I was growing up, I would watch shows with characters who could perform magic, who had superpowers to make things function remotely, and it fascinated me,” Hu said. “Today, I’m working to create remote technology that can sense changes and act to save lives on its own.”

Hu has helped transform implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICD), a device that monitors the heart and, when necessary, provides an electric shock to maintain a rhythmic heartbeat. He developed an architecture for the ICD that efficiently integrates artificial intelligence, so the sensing technology can learn a patient’s unique patterns and respond accordingly. The technology improves decision making.

Hu is currently collaborating with the UPMC Rehabilitation Institute to develop assistive devices that will improve patient outcomes. “We’re working to advance wheelchair and glasses technology to help people experiencing loss of motion or sight,” Hu said.

“I’m honored to receive this award from IEEE – TCCPS and to be listed among these researchers who are transforming cyber-physical systems and building our community,” Hu added.

“Jingtong’s research is making an impact on the lives of people dealing with significant health challenges,” said Alan George, Department Chair, R&H Mickle Endowed Chair, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and SHREC and Pitt Space founder. “He is a tremendous asset to our program and the broader Pitt community, and he is highly deserving of this award.”

Now an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering, Sakurahara continues to advance how risk is assessed in complex systems. This May, he received a 2026 Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award of $5,000 to develop a computational risk-assessment tool for nuclear facilities.

As many countries increasingly turn to nuclear power for cleaner energy, Sakurahara’s research seeks to help keep nuclear plants safer and running more efficiently.

“Traditionally, we have used probabilities to represent uncertainty. But incredible events like those that led to the Fukushima Daiichi disaster reveal the limitations of probabilistic modeling, especially if we lack sufficient data,” said Sakurahara, who also directs the Risk Analysis and Reliability Engineering (RARE) Laboratory. “We need a multi-disciplinary, multi-faceted approach to better understand and model uncertainties in complex systems.”

To build his framework, Sakurahara will begin by reviewing and assessing theories and methods used in fields such as information sciences and computational sciences. He will apply new theories and build upon his research to develop a prototype that combines multiple methods.

“We use systems modeling to understand how the different components in a plant interrelate, but then we must look at each component specifically using hardware reliability models,” Sakurahara said. “There is also a human element, which requires human reliability models so we can estimate the likelihood and the consequences of human failures.”

The framework will integrate probabilistic and non-probabilistic uncertainty theories and methods to characterize uncertainties associated with these models.

Sakurahara will combine these methods to more effectively answer the essential risk-assessment questions of what can go wrong, how likely it is to go wrong, and what are the consequences. To demonstrate the prototype, he will test it against other methods using the Fukushima Daiichi disaster as a case study.

“I’m honored to receive this award and to have the opportunity to visit the Oak Ridge National Lab and learn from experts there,” said Sakurahara.

Each year, ORAU recognizes junior faculty members across five STEM-related disciplines with Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Awards. This year, 172 researchers applied, and Sakurahara was one of 36 awardees. Pitt will match the $5,000 award, providing seed funding to help launch a larger research project.

For Sakurahara, that project will be inspired by his experiences in Tokyo immediately after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident following the terrible earthquake and tsunami. He will continue to discover new ways to assess multiple dimensions of risk to determine the optimal way of operating nuclear power plants.

The stories below attest to that fact. While professors who remained in Pittsburgh may have felt the pull of their labs, graduate students, and service obligations, they still had the much-needed time and space that took them in new directions. Their experiences highlight that intention, planning, flexibility, and curiosity – not travel – are the essential ingredients to a productive, inspiring, even life-changing sabbatical.

“I needed the chance to take a deep dive.”

Ready to redirect his research, Daniel Cole, associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Director of Pitt’s Cyber Energy Center, finally took a sabbatical 17 years after he started a Pitt.

“It was simply time,” Cole said. “Not enough people take sabbaticals.”

Cole partnered with the Idaho National Lab (INL), working closely with chief cybersecurity scientist Greg Shannon. With funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, he spent a year exploring how formal methods, a mathematical approach used to test complex systems, could be applied to controls, safety, and security of critical infrastructure.

The partnership, which INL profiled, provided Cole an opportunity that he missed. “Too often as professors, we’re managing research. Now I could explore new ideas, try things, ask ‘what if,’ and write. I read a lot, learned new coding languages, and struggled in ways I never would have under normal day-to-day responsibilities.”

While Cole wishes he could have spent his sabbatical in Idaho, he was glad he took a full year. “The separation is valuable. Ideally, you go somewhere, have an experience, and bring it back to Pitt to make it better.”

He may have stayed home, but he still brought something important to Pitt, the Swanson School, and the Cyber Energy Center.

In addition to building connections with a national lab and its researchers, Cole said, “I brought back technologies and approaches related to rigorous digital engineering, which help ensure safety and security for critical infrastructure.”

“It’s easy to lose those connections.”

Julie Vandenbossche, professor of civil and environmental engineering and the department’s Associate Chair of Research, also stayed in Pittsburgh for her recent sabbatical. But this didn’t hinder her ability to connect with collaborators across the country and pursue new research. 

“Balancing teaching, service, and research makes it challenging to expand into new areas, search for new funding opportunities, and build the background and connections needed to move work forward,” said Vandenbossche, who researches concrete pavements and cementitious materials.

During her sabbatical, she explored cement chemistry, particularly in relation to low-carbon concrete. “I explored different materials being used, met with manufacturers that produce alternative materials, and became more familiar with the manufacturing process.”

Vandenbossche is building collaborations as well, connecting with researchers at the University of California Davis and with the National Road Research Alliance. She reconnected with collaborators here in Pittsburgh and visited peers around the country, with a side trip to Alaska.

Remaining in Pittsburgh was not without its drawbacks. She was pulled toward the University and obligations there in a way that distance might have helped limit. Yet the time for reflection proved invaluable. “From a research perspective, I thought about where I want to go over the next five years and how to move forward in that direction.”

“It extended well beyond four months.”

Aaron Batista, professor of bioengineering, waited 17 years before taking his first sabbatical, and when he did, he knew he would stay close to home.

“I have young children and a long-established lab, and leaving town was unrealistic,” said Batista, who researches neuroscience and neural engineering.

As for why he was ready for a sabbatical, Batista added, “I was starting to feel a little too narrowly focused on what I was doing in my own lab, and I wanted to get a sense for what else was happening around me.”

That changed last year after he observed a neurosurgical procedure conducted by his colleague Jorge Gonzalez-Martinez, in the School of Medicine Neurological Surgery.

“The first time I walked into an operating room, I was struck by how complex and coordinated everything was,” Batista said. “Neurosurgery is deeply collaborative.

“That first day clarified my sabbatical plan, and I began spending two days a week observing neurosurgeries. These experiences reshaped how I think about bioengineering and the role it can play in patient care.”

Batista began collaborating closely with Gonzalez-Martinez, exploring how engineering approaches could improve surgical procedures and expand treatments. “Our conversations went far beyond the operating room. We talked about better electrodes, faster procedures, and expanding the diseases a surgeon could treat.”

From the collaboration has come a National Institute of Health T32 grant that, if funded, will train engineers to work alongside clinicians during neurosurgical procedures and identify opportunities to expand treatment options and improve outcomes. The grant will expand the Department of Bioengineering’s scope with the new focus on neuroengineering and neuroscience.

“Sabbaticals don’t have to involve international travel or leaving campus entirely,” Batista said. “Mine was local, structured, and manageable, with minimal disruption to my lab and teaching responsibilities. The return on that investment was enormous: renewed energy, new collaborations, and a clearer sense of purpose.”

Like so many Pitt engineers who have taken sabbaticals, his experience reflects that it doesn’t matter how far one travels, but how significantly one is changed. Echoing many of his colleagues, Batista said, “Looking back now, this was one of the most meaningful periods of my career.”

While researching a cleaner, more efficient way to produce ethylene, Twizerimana had struck the new “black gold,” as graphite is known in high-tech and automotive industries. This graphite is a key ingredient in lithium-ion batteries, which are essential to electric vehicles, modern electronics, and green energy storage. However, current methods for producing the graphite, which require temperatures of 3,000ºC, are far from energy efficient, and today 95 percent of the material comes from China.  

Recognizing the need to produce domestic graphite and hydrogen more efficiently, the Pitt team of Veser and Twizerimana, with Assistant Professor Mohammad Masnadi and PhD student Nader Sawtarie, filed for a provisional patent and launched the startup Graphonos Materials (formerly Grapheon). The company has demonstrated its novel technology in the lab and has caught the attention of venture capitalists, most recently at the Rice Business Plan Competition, where it won a $20,000 Aramco Innovator Prize.

An unexpected discovery

“A holdup in the transition to cleaner energy is the attitude that you're either for or against renewable energy,” said Veser, professor of chemical and petroleum engineering at the Swanson School and the Leonard Peters Faculty Fellow in the Covestro Circular Economy Program. “My research explores ways to connect the processing of fossil fuels to a more sustainable future, supporting this transition.” 

With Masnadi, who also now serves as chief sustainability officer of Graphonos Materials, Veser has been investigating new methods to separate, or “crack,” ethane, a main ingredient in the natural gas found in Western Pennsylvania. Cracking ethane into ethylene requires heat and generates solid carbon from side reactions, and the most common approach involves pumping steam into a reactor to avoid plugging the reactor tubes.

“It's a very energy- and emission-intensive process, where carbon build-up in the reactor requires regular process shut-downs for cleaning,” said Veser, who is also chief technology officer of Graphonos Materials. “In looking for a cleaner alternative, we turned to molten metal catalysis, a technique that isn’t widely used but that has been around for almost a century already.”

Instead of using a solid metal catalyst, the researchers pumped the ethane through molten metal, where it dehydrogenates. “Molten metals have an amazing advantage,” Masnadi said. “Because of the extreme density of the liquid metals, the carbon floats out to rest on the top.”

For his PhD research, Twizerimana, now CEO of Graphonos Materials and a postdoctoral researcher at the Swanson School, was investigating this process. As he said, “It was toward the end of my PhD, and I realized that with some of the metals we used, the carbon that formed came out differently, fluffier. We decided to look more closely at that.”

Twizerimana turned to Sawtarie, a fellow graduate student who was researching the unique properties of 2D metals in Professor Susan Fullerton’s Nanoionics and Electronics Lab. “Part of my PhD research involved graphene, a form of graphite,” said Sawtarie, the chief product officer at Graphonos Materials. “I characterized the byproduct, which turned out to be incredibly valuable.”

A trip to “the Super Bowl”

“While searching for new ways to crack ethane, we found that we could produce battery-quality graphite by heating the ethane to temperatures below 1,000ºC,” Twizerimana said. “We produce graphite in a more sustainable and economically competitive process, with hydrogen generated as a valuable co-product.”

Most of the battery-quality graphite today is produced in China through an extremely energy-intensive process. Crystalline petroleum coke, called needle coke, is heated to 3,000ºC in a very slow batch process, where a single batch can take up to three weeks. Domestic graphite producers exist, using this intensive process, but the graphite is more expensive than in China, which dominates the market. 

The Pitt team developed and validated a process that spanned two Swanson School labs and produced two key ingredients for a cleaner energy future. As they launched Graphonos Materials, they found valuable support at Pitt’s Big Idea Center. The Center helps students and faculty entrepreneurs realize their ideas and develop and deliver their pitches.

This support would help lead Graphonos Materials to what Pitt Professor Christopher Wilmer calls “the Super Bowl of pitch competitions.” Of the more than 550 teams worldwide that applied to compete in the Rice Business Plan Competition, 41 were selected along with Graphonos Materials.

This April at the competition, they were one of 15 teams to reach the semi-finals and one of two teams capturing a $20,000 Aramco Innovator Prize. According to Aramco Ventures, this prize “recognizes the most forward-thinking and high-impact solutions at this year’s competition and celebrates entrepreneurs who embody this spirit of discovery and technical excellence.”

At Pitt, the team also won the $25,000 Big Idea Competition Grand Prize. Together, the prizes validated their work and its potential to transform how graphite and hydrogen are produced. “We have learned that there is a strong need for low-cost, sustainable graphite in the market,” Twizerimana said. “Now is the right time to fill it.”

“We’re raising money to develop our first fully integrated bench-scale system, which will enable us to produce kilograms per day and will give us the engineering basis to design a pilot skid,” Veser said. If successful, it will allow the team to turn Western Pennsylvania’s ethane into two products essential to the transition to cleaner energy, right here in Pittsburgh.  

A student at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering was awarded a prestigious fellowship to support his research on tissue-engineered vascular grafts.

Leon Min, a second-year PhD student in the Department of Bioengineering and the School of Medicine’s Medical Scientist Training Program, has been awarded a Predoctoral Fellowship from the American Heart Association (AHA). This award provides stipend support and research funding to outstanding doctoral students conducting cardiovascular and stroke research, and this two-year fellowship will support both his doctoral research and his development as a physician-scientist in the field.

Min's research addresses an unmet need in vascular surgery: many patients who require bypass procedures lack suitable autologous vessels. While tissue-engineered vascular grafts (TEVGs) are a promising alternative, their development has been hampered by complications including thrombosis, intimal hyperplasia, and unfavorable host responses. Under the mentorship of Professor of Bioengineering Jonathan Vande Geest, Min is investigating a TEVG platform that incorporates urinary bladder matrix (UBM), a natural extracellular matrix material derived from porcine urinary bladder, together with advanced fabrication techniques. 

“UBM has been shown to promote anti-inflammatory macrophage polarization and constructive tissue remodeling in a variety of applications, including clinical use in hernia repair and preclinical studies of cardiac patches,” Min said. “Our work is among the first to investigate whether this immune-modulating effect extends to the vascular graft context, and how it may influence graft remodeling over time.”

Beyond his research, Min is obtaining exposure to treatment of patients with peripheral vascular disease through shadowing Natalie Sridharan, associate professor in the Department of Vascular Surgery. Min is also a trainee in the NIH T32 Cardiovascular Bioengineering Training Program (CBTP), serves as Vice President of the Engineering Graduate Student Organization (EGSO) and Professional Development Chair of the Graduate Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), and is a member of the Eastern Vascular Society.

“This fellowship is about building a research profile recognized in the cardiovascular community, not just within my PhD program,” Min said. “It will allow me to continue conducting rigorous research that can translate into meaningful patient impact.”

The winning paper, “Validation of a Multiscale Hysteresis Mechanics Model in Predicting Oily Shoe-Floor Friction Across Surfaces With Varying Finishes,” tackles a common hazard: floors made slippery by oil. The team, including Henry Ing (BS BioE ‘22, MS ‘24), Professor of Bioengineering Kurt Beschorner, and Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science Tevis Jacobs, validated a model that predicts how much friction exists between a shoe sole and a floor surface when a contaminant is present. The paper was part of Ing's master's thesis, conducted under the direction of Beschorner in the Human Movement & Balance Laboratory (HMBL).

"Our research team has been focused on advancing insights on how shoe-floor friction develops,” Beschorner said. “These insights enable us to develop tools like Henry's model that can aid footwear companies in designing safer products. Henry had an incredible contribution to the overall effort to make shoes safer, and I am very proud that his work was recognized by the journal."

By testing three shoe types across ten different tile surfaces, they confirmed the model works reliably across a range of surface textures and sole materials. Footwear and flooring manufacturers can use this model to more efficiently develop products that improve traction, and workplaces can better understand and reduce slip-and-fall risks, one of the most common causes of workplace injury. 

“The primary benefits of this paper are the increased efficiency of selecting outsole materials or surfaces to maximize friction and an improved understanding of how contaminants affect friction,” Ing said. “This can be helpful for workplaces trying to decrease slip risks, or for footwear or floor companies trying to develop materials or surfaces, respectively, that contribute to increased friction.”

Ing has since completed an additional MS in Sports Product Management at the University of Oregon and will soon begin work as a perception researcher at Brooks Running.

"I did not expect to win best paper and was shocked to hear the news," said Ing. "I am incredibly honored, and more than anything I think this is a reflection of the quality of work that the Human Movement & Balance Laboratory and the Tevis Jacobs Lab do, as well as how amazing Dr. Beschorner is as a mentor and researcher."

Each spring at the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Student Symposia, engineering students from across the country compete in events that capture the essence of civil engineering. They design and build bridges, survey land, solve problems, and create and race concrete canoes. They also have fun.

This year at the 2026 ASCE Mid-Atlantic Student Symposium, the University of Pittsburgh ASCE Student Chapter saw 55 of its members compete, its best participation to date, and the collective effort paid off. In a field of almost thirty university student chapters, Pitt placed first overall.  

The competition was held April 17-19, 2026, at the University of Pittsburgh Johnstown, in Johnstown, PA. The event fostered community across teams and universities and provided students with valuable opportunities to use their hands and apply their learning. 

"Our teams overcame so many obstacles and put in so much hard work this year,” said Mae Cook, a fourth-year civil engineering student and incoming president of Pitt’s ASCE student chapter. “The team captains took last year's judge's feedback and focused on improvement. They enhanced the teams' strengths while also optimizing the needed areas. Their passion for their work could be felt by everyone, which I think contributed to high participation and placement." 

Across events, the Pitt team shined:

• The Concrete Canoe team placed first overall, earning qualification for the national concrete canoe competition June 25 – 27 at Fairmont State University, West Virginia.
• The 3D Printed Bridge team placed first in presentation and design and second place overall.
• The Surveying team placed first in field tasks, third place in the Civil 3D map competition, and second place overall.
• In its first year with an entirely student-led team, Sustainable Solutions received strong feedback from judges on their work related to water cooling, energy use, and stormwater treatment.
• The Steel Bridge team achieved its best build time in more than six years, successfully passed load testing, and improved in all but one category relative to previous years.

“Over the last couple of years, Pitt’s Concrete Canoe has always been one to watch,” said Kate Volna, who graduated this spring with her degree in civil engineering and who served as Project Management Captain for the team. “I love watching the progression and feeling relief once the boat finally gets placed in the water. We design, pour, construct, stain, seal, and transport this boat in just a couple months.”

In a nod to Pittsburgh, the team named their new boat the Andy War-Hull. During competition, they dressed up like the famous artist to cheer on the rowers as they sprinted or competed in the slalom event.

In addition to placing first overall, the team tied for first place in the technical proposal and first in presentation and the men’s sprint and slalom. The team placed second in display and in women’s slalom, and third in women’s sprint.

“Last year, watching the nationals made us extra ambitious, and it’s truly amazing to see how we’ve achieved them,” said Volna. “I am extremely grateful for all our faculty, staff, mentors, and especially alumni who still check in on our team. They are our biggest support and help us succeed.”

On land, the 3D Printed Bridge team had its best showing yet in the symposium’s newest event. “Our team spends the year designing a bridge, creating it in SolidWorks, and then printing it with a 3D printer,” said Chase Ferraro, who is beginning his fourth year in civil engineering and served as the team’s co-captain. The bridge must hold 70 pounds.

Ferraro added, “One of our goals was to improve our presentation skills as a team, and I feel we met that after receiving the best presentation award.

Like its 3D-printed counterpart, the Steel Bridge team also gained momentum this year. Instead of designing and printing a bridge, the competition involves developing a 20-foot model of a bridge capable of holding 2,500 pounds. The team builds the pieces and assembles them at the competition on deadline.

“This year is the second year in a row where we qualified in the competition,” said Jobi Cook, who graduated this spring with a degree in civil engineering. “These last two years, we have improved our build time to meet the 45-minute hard deadline with a build time of 43 minutes last year and 32 minutes this year.”

For Cook, who has completed two internships with a general contractor and has worked as a heavy equipment mechanic, the opportunity to use his hands to design, fabricate, and construct a bridge has been hugely rewarding.

This year’s competition also saw the return of a Pitt Sustainable Solutions team, which hadn’t competed for three years. Sustainable Solutions engages students to solve a real-world problem through the lens of sustainability. Teams develop a proposal and a poster and present their solution.

“We wanted to bring a sustainability-focused team to Pitt and give other students interested in sustainability a chance to find a place within ASCE,” said Rose Genco, a fourth-year civil engineering student and co-captain of the team.

“The challenge this year was to design a sustainable data center,” Genco added. “As this was our first year competing as a team, we did not expect to place well, but we achieved seventh out of fourteen teams!”

Beyond restarting the team and exceeding their expectations, the team built community. “My favorite part about participating in the competition was how close we all became,” Genco said. “We bonded throughout the year and even more at the competition.”

“This achievement would be impossible without the extraordinary efforts of our students and mentors,” said Vikas Khanna, professor and interim chair of civil and environmental engineering. “The outstanding leadership, commitment, and countless hours of work from our student leaders made this success possible.” 

The student leaders hope that the momentum from this year’s success will continue to generate more interest in Pitt’s ASCE student chapter and expand the community that it fuels. As Ferraro said, “ASCE has provided me with so many new friendships and opportunities. The competition teams are an easy way to meet new people and get involved in your major and future career path.”

Now finishing his third year in chemical engineering at the Swanson School of Engineering, Bender can be found, quite literally, all over Benedum Hall. A mentor at Pitt Makerspaces, a vice president of the Hydroponics Club, and an endlessly curious researcher making rubies on the loading dock or transforming a 3D printer on the ninth floor, he has found his place.

The basement

Bender, who grew up outside of Philadelphia, reached the semifinals of the National History Bee in eighth grade. “I was always good at history, but throughout middle school, I wasn’t pushed in science,” he recalled. “It wasn’t until my junior year of high school, when I took AP chemistry from a great teacher, that I realized I could do it.”

Uninterested in passively learning, Bender “dove down a rabbit hole on YouTube.” He found inspiration watching scientists create lasers and make synthetic rubies.

“I started trying to make rubies with a blowtorch and a crucible in my backyard, with my dad. It didn’t work,” Bender said. “The rubies didn’t go anywhere until I came to Pitt.”

As a first-year student at the Swanson School, Bender gravitated toward the Makerspaces in the Benedum Hall basement. Filled with 3D printers, laser cutters, heat presses, sewing machines, and other tools, the Makerspaces became his second home. After his first semester, he became a Makerspaces mentor, helping his peers design and create.

He also joined Pitt Hydroponics, a club that has built a garden where tomatoes and greens thrive outside the Makerspaces. Bender was eager to learn about hydroponics and how to build growing systems.

From the basement to the loading dock

If Benedum’s basement was a refuge, so too was its loading dock. Bender had never lost interest in the idea of making rubies and during his first semester set to work finding the right combination.

With two terracotta flowerpots, an arc welder, a pound of aluminum oxide, some chromium oxide, drill bits, and carbon electrodes, as well as safety protocols, Bender began creating his own gemstones. The arc welder was key, allowing him to produce enough heat to melt the aluminum oxide and chromium oxide, which crystallizes into a ruby.

Three years in, Bender’s pursuit of purer rubies persists. He’s fascinated by the chemistry and by the investigation it has inspired (he’s currently trying to generate hydrogen and oxygen to make a flame, which is how synthetic rubies are produced industrially). He’s also trying to find the best way to polish the gems. Bender wants, as he said, “to democratize the high-energy crystal space.”

Ultimately, he plans to produce a ruby pure enough to make a laser. The first laser, produced in 1960 by Theodore Maiman, used a synthetic ruby to generate the pulse of red light.

Journey to the ninth floor

During Bender’s second semester, he chose to pursue a degree in chemical engineering and minor in electrical engineering. 

Emily Kerr, undergraduate academic advising manager for the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, sensed, upon meeting Bender, that he would thrive with new challenges. As she explained, “I started to reach out to professors in our department who could keep up with his insatiable curiosity.”

Last year, Bender and Kerr connected with James McKone, a professor of chemical engineering whose lab was conducting experimental electrochemistry. Bender joined the team on the ninth floor.

“The research involves developing and testing the reactions of electrochemical catalysts,” Bender said. “We’ve been testing ethanol-based films, which can be as small as two centimeters by two centimeters, and that need to be applied to a surface consistently. It’s a slow and messy process.”

Bender believes that a reconfigured 3D printer might change that. Last year, he received a used 3D printer as a gift recognizing his third semester as a Makerspace mentor. However, he already owned a 3D printer and wondered what to do with this one.

“Last fall, I started thinking about the project I was working on in Dr. McKone’s lab and realized a 3D printer is just a controllable set of axes and motors. You can put anything on it that you want to move,” Bender said.

He began modifying the machine, attaching a spray gun in place of the extruder and securing it with rubber bands. He taught himself how to write G-code, which is used to program 3D printers. He needed to find a way to program the motor to pull the spray gun’s trigger at set intervals.

Bender relished the challenge of working with circuits and devising a way to control the voltage powering the fan and then the motor itself. Through hours of trial and error, he created a machine with an attachment that can move and spray the film precisely and consistently.

“This project has been an excellent foray into all these skills. I’ve created 13 prototypes of the mount itself,” Bender said.

Into Oakland

When Bender isn’t roaming Benedum Hall, he volunteers at the local music venue Haven, running the lights. Bender plays guitar and loves to attend live shows. Watching bands and designing the lights has inspired what may well be his next creation.

“I want to learn more about signals and systems, about music waveforms. And I want to turn that into a project,” Bender said. “I’d like to create a vest that you would wear while you’re playing. It’d take the signal from the guitar and change color as you play based on the frequency.”

While Bender still loves history, he’s never regretted choosing engineering. He’s grateful that his high school teachers and now his professors and his advisor have fueled his desire to experiment and to understand how things work.

“My favorite thing in the world is creating,” he said. “And since getting into chemical engineering, it’s just been an exponential cascade, upwards and out.”

The team has built an interactive virtual twin that blends blueprints and models with sensor data and sustainability analyses. As a counterpart to the physical building, it lets researchers and facility staff “walk” through a 3D version of the building, click on rooms and systems, and see color overlays, pop‑ups, and alerts that reveal in real time where energy use, indoor air quality, or materials require attention.

This research, “Digital Twins for Sustainable Buildings: From Framework to Strategy Guidelines and Application” (DOI: 10.1016/j.enbuild.2026.117332), provides a novel framework combining digital twin technology with sustainability assessment.

“With this framework, we are moving beyond static snapshots, making steps toward a dynamic record of a building’s environmental footprint, from the materials in its structure to the air its occupants breathe,” said Federica Geremicca, a postdoctoral researcher in civil and environmental engineering at the Swanson School and first author of the paper.       

An ideal case study

When it was built in 2009 as a hub of sustainable innovation on Pitt’s Oakland campus, the Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation (MCSI), a LEED Gold building, was equipped with sensors that monitor everything from energy consumption to air quality to Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) flows. The sensing technology and the centralized Building Automation System (BAS) that controls it provide researchers and building managers with data that can help guide sustainable decision making.

“We’re collecting all this important data, but it hasn’t always been easy for researchers to access and can be siloed and inconsistent,” said Melissa Bilec, George M. and Eva M. Bevier Endowed Chair in Civil and Environmental Engineering and co-director of the MCSI. “We set out to develop a digital twin of the Mascaro Center that would transform how the data is processed and visualized, so we could better see how the building is functioning.”

The research began in the fall of 2023, after the team received a $735,872 National Science Foundation grant to develop new tools to enable climate adaptivity in vertical infrastructure.

A living model

Essential to developing a digital twin is the Building Information Model (BIM): a detailed 3D model, or blueprint, of how a structure is built. In buildings, this static BIM provides the backbone of the digital twin. The team connected the BIM to the BAS, which gathers measurements like temperature, humidity, ventilation, and indoor air quality. It also integrated sustainability methods: Material Flow Analysis (MFA), which tracks what materials go into, stay within, and leave a building over time; and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), which estimates environmental impacts across the building life span.

Underpinning the research is the concept of urban metabolism (UM), or the flow of resources through a city. UM represents a city as a living thing, and just as a healthy metabolism is important in humans, so it is with a city or a single structure within it.

Built in Unreal Engine, an immersive 3D visualization platform, the interface of the digital twin offers a third‑person walkthrough of the Mascaro Center. “Instead of reviewing static dashboards, you can walk around the virtual Mascaro Center and click on components in rooms. You can see heat-map overlays that highlight material-intensive components and find out how systems are performing, and when something needs attention,” said Geremicca.

Developing the new framework posed unique challenges. “We encountered gaps in the data and inconsistent labeling and units in the Building Automation System,” said John Brigham, professor of civil and environmental engineering. “There were privacy constraints that complicated validation and automation.”  

The team also had to adapt the modeling detail. “The Mascaro Center has unique shapes and slanting walls, and though it may sound counterintuitive, we had to scale back the level of detail to more effectively integrate the energy analysis software,” Bilec said. The team learned that the visual twin and the analytical twin benefited from different levels of detail.                                                                                             .

They also gained valuable insight into the building itself. The model showed how the floors and columns carried most of the building’s material “weight,” and how the replacements that occur over the life of the building can have a significant environmental impact.

“Moving forward, we’ll continue to explore ways to improve how the data is collected and integrated into the digital twin,” said Alessandro Fascetti, Associate Professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Construction Engineering Department at the University of Central Florida. “We’re excited to take what we’ve learned and expand the framework to buildings around the Mascaro Center.”

“From its inception, the Mascaro Center was designed to embody sustainability in how it was built and how it’s used,” said Bilec. “The digital twin helps fulfill that vision by turning all this data into a visually interesting interface that fuels better decision making. This research lays the groundwork for smarter, more sustainable operations and more advanced automation. Importantly, this work was inspired by and in honor of Jack Mascaro, MCSI’s namesake and founder, who guides us every day to be on the cutting edge of technology, innovation, and sustainability.”

Engineering failures can be devastating, but they’re also instructive. In a new episode of the YouTube series Why Stuff Fails, University of Pittsburgh civil engineering professor Kent Harries joins British TV producer and director Tom Gorham to examine why Pittsburgh’s Fern Hollow Bridge collapsed and what it teaches us about design, inspection, and maintenance.

Gorham first “stumbled into” engineering disasters in 1999 while working on a program about physical geography. He was documenting the Tangiwai disaster, a 1950s volcanic eruption in New Zealand that triggered a dam collapse and mudslide, toppling a rail bridge just as a passenger train crossed it. 

After that, no matter the project he was working on, disasters followed - the Concorde crashed, the Challenger exploded, the Champlain Tower fell - and soon he was trying to make sense of them in shows like Massive Engineering Mistakes or the TV movie Flight 370 – The Missing Link.

Last year, with fellow producer Julian Watson, Gorham launched Why Stuff Fails to give engineering its due, inviting subject matter experts to analyze how and why failures happen. Since then, he’s produced six episodes, each 20–30 minutes, exploring events including the Florida International University pedestrian bridge collapse and the sinkhole that opened beneath the National Corvette Museum in Ohio, swallowing eight vintage Corvettes.

“I’d been producing a show that covered four stories in 44 minutes, and the engineering tended to get short shrift,” Gorham said. Although he studied biology in college, he became increasingly interested in how bridges, buildings, and machines work, and how they can unravel.

For the Fern Hollow Bridge collapse, Gorham turned to Harries, PhD, FASCE, FACI, FIIFC, P.Eng at Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering, who has spent his career in forensic engineering. Harries has investigated structural collapses in many capacities and is regularly consulted by reporters, lawyers, and government officials.

After the Lake View Drive Bridge collapsed onto Interstate 70 in Washington County on December 27, 2005, Harries helped test the remaining girders and identify the source of the failure. He has provided forensic investigation about the Lowe’s Motor Speedway pedestrian bridge collapse following a NASCAR event in May 2000 and has consulted in multiple capacities on the I‑35W Mississippi River bridge collapse in Minneapolis in 2007. This summer, he will be conducting a review survey of glass‑fiber composite bridge decks in the Pittsburgh region.

Harries knows Pittsburgh’s aging infrastructure well, including the Fern Hollow Bridge, which fell into a Frick Park ravine on a cold, snowy morning on January 28, 2022, injuring ten people. He first spoke with Gorham about the collapse that same year, before the official report was released, for Massive Engineering Mistakes. He welcomed the chance to revisit the story in more detail for Why Stuff Fails.

“I appreciate this effort to explain the science and engineering in a responsible manner,” Harries said. In the episode, he explores the bridge’s history, unique design, and failure sequence, and why it’s vital to get both the engineering and the maintenance right.

“These stories underscore how hard engineering can be and how important it is to do it right,” Gorham said. “We tend to take the built world, the built environment, for granted. But I hope that people will appreciate the engineering behind everyday structures and the vital importance of keeping them safe.”

“It’s worth it,” Harries added about this kind of reporting. “You know, it’s worth doing a good job.”

Watch the episode: Miracle in Fern Hollow! The Pittsburgh Bridge Collapse.

“None,” his colleague said. “That's just a piece of tissue I put under the microscope.”

"My jaw dropped," said Vande Geest, professor of bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering. “The ability to image collagen in 3D without fixing it first means I can look at it under mechanical load, and I can also watch it grow and change. As a soft tissue biomechanist, there is really no better thing."

Two-photon microscopy is just one of the many impactful imaging modalities that are put to work across Pitt’s campus. Bioengineering researchers like Vande Geest have built the tools and expertise to ask and answer questions that couldn't have been posed before, from the tiniest cellular movements to the complex architecture of the aging human brain.

Two-Photon Microscopy

Two-photon microscopy fires pulses of infrared light into tissue. Unlike conventional light, infrared travels deep without scattering, but it only produces fluorescence at the precise focal point where the beam converges. At Pitt’s Center for Biotechnology and Bioengineering, you willl find a few of these microscopes, each customized for a different scientific purpose. One of these devices is helping Takashi (TK) Kozai, Ernest E. Roth professor of bioengineering, peer into the brain to analyze a largely unexplored corner of neuroscience. 

"Brain tissue is like a very foggy, hazy environment, and neurons aren't on the surface level, so we have to image a little deeper to actually see them," said Kozai. “That’s where two-photon comes into play and can help us see very specific areas of the brain.”

Kozai’s team studies what happens when devices like electrodes are implanted, not just to neurons, but to the surrounding community of glial cells. Because glial cells don't generate electrical signals that electrodes can detect, they are effectively invisible to conventional methods. 

"But with 2P, you can label different subtypes of neurons or other cell-types so that you can see which ones are activated under which type of stimulus," Kozai said. "You can decode beyond what an electrode can decode."

Kozai’s microscope is available for researchers of all disciplines to use, which helps him better understand how to improve the long-term performance of implanted devices toward the ultimate goal of restoring motor function in people with spinal cord injuries or treating vision loss in patients who are blind. Vande Geest, on the other hand, uses his scope for different terrain entirely: studying the extracellular matrix of soft tissues found in the eye, blood vessels, peripheral nerves, and more. Collagen, the structural protein that gives these tissues their mechanical character, produces a signal under two-photon illumination that makes it visible without any dye or label. More importantly, it stays visible while the tissue is alive, under load, and changing over time.

"I study how tissues are built and how they change, and this is the system that lets me do it. I can image it, deform it, and image it again," he said. “I can literally watch collagen remodel.”

Vande Geest has also reconfigured his microscope to function as a 3D printer that can fabricate structures at the scale of individual cells. The same instrument that shows the architecture of a tissue sample can now print scaffolds that replicate it, opening a path toward implantable tissues that could treat vascular and ocular disease.

“A majority of the intellectual property (IP) I've developed involves benchtop platforms for mimicking human disease in 3D tissue culture," Vande Geest said. "We can take human stem cells, differentiate them, and assemble them into something that might actually tell a clinician whether a patient should be treated more aggressively for something like glaucoma, and that specialized platform gives you information that clinical measurement alone just can't."

A Picture’s Worth 

For Lance Davidson, William Kepler Whiteford Professor of bioengineering, collecting an image is only the beginning. Using traditional confocal microscopy, which uses focused laser light to build three-dimensional images one optical slice at a time, his lab studies how cells rearrange inside tissues under mechanical stress, using frog embryos as a model system. These embryos are optically transparent and mechanically tractable in ways that make them ideal for stretching, compressing, and perturbing living tissue while imaging what happens inside it.

"We use a lot of microscopy to collect images, and it's all light microscopy, not anything too complex." Davidson said. "But we combine these tools with molecular genetic approaches, so we can install a fluorescent protein within a cell or tissue that indicates where forces are generated, or how material properties adapt to the environment.”

After collecting time-lapse sequences of cells moving through a tissue, Davidson’s team builds custom image processing pipelines that segment individual cells, track which cells are neighbors at each time point, and quantify how frequently and in what direction those relationships change. In a recent study, that analysis revealed something novel in the raw footage: a pair of counter-rotating flows inside a developing tissue, moving in opposite directions.

 "Once we processed it, we could see these really incredible flows.” Davidson said. “They looked like tropical cyclones or vortices on the surface of the sun, and so we turned to quantify the strength of those rotations using tools borrowed from astrophysics."

For Davidson, however, the most important work happens after the microscope turns off. A striking image is still just a picture until it's been broken down, processed, and reduced to something a statistician can work with.

"The adage ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ is actually quite terrible for science," Davidson said. “Numbers are like currency, and we use images to get that currency, so you really want each picture to be worth a single number."

Sound as Sight

Of all the imaging modalities in use, ultrasound may be the easiest to underestimate. It's one of the oldest, the most affordable, the most common, and it doesn't carry the glamour of a two-photon beam. But across the university, researchers are finding new uses for it that go far beyond the routine. 

Kozai's lab, for instance, recently found that low-intensity ultrasound can reduce the glial scarring that builds up around implanted brain electrodes, keeping signals clearer over time and opening new possibilities for modulating non-neuronal brain cells. In addition, Kang Kim, professor of bioengineering and medicine at UPMC’s Heart and Vascular Institute, is also pushing ultrasound far beyond its typical uses.

"Ultrasound has been out there for decades," Kim said. "It's safe, non-invasive, and real-time. But because of how well we understand physics, we can now start to combine it with other modalities and push it in directions people didn't think were possible."

One of Kim’s current projects involves a catheter-based imaging system designed to peer inside blood vessels at the microscopic level. The project addresses plaque vulnerability, assessing which arterial plaques are likely to rupture and send a clot toward the heart or brain. One signature of a dangerous plaque is the presence of tiny microvessels growing within it, and to detect them, Kim's team developed an intravascular probe and signal processing approach that can image those structures at scales previously considered beyond the physical limits of the modality.

"We claim this is one of the first kinds of intravascular super-resolution imaging of microvessels," Kim said. "There are emerging fields even beyond imaging where ultrasound can be used. It is not just a tool for looking; it is becoming a tool for doing."

MRI and the Whole-Brain Picture

While microscopes allow for cellular or tissue analysis and ultrasound can peer inside vessels and soft tissue in real time, there's a hard physical limit to how deep light can travel. When researchers need to see the structure, connectivity, and metabolic activity of the entire brain, they turn to MRI. 

Bistra Iordanova uses a combination of optical imaging techniques in her work, but uses structural and functional MRI (fMRI) in tandem with optical approaches to get a window into brain-wide activity that no light-based  system can match.

"With optics, we can get the cell resolution, but MRI covers the entire brain at once, which makes it indispensable for questions about large-scale connectivity and system-wide disease," said Iordanova, assistant professor of bioengineering. “Structural MRI shows the size and shape of brain regions and how they change with age, while fMRI tracks blood flow oxygenation as a proxy for neural activity in real time.”

Using these techniques, she's currently working on a methodologically unusual project: directly comparing data between mice and humans to help design multiscale models of how brain metabolism can change the risk for dementia. This approach spans three scales: two-photon microscopy to quantify blood cell velocity, neural activity, and metabolite levels at the cellular level; wide-field imaging to capture how mitochondrial activity moves across cortical networks; and whole-brain MRI to explore how energy metabolism shapes functional connectivity across both animal models and human cohorts.

"To make these comparisons work, we transform the imaging data to the same parameters," Iordanova said. "In the human brain, a vessel might be two centimeters long, but in a mouse brain, it’s two millimeters. And a mouse only lives two years while a human lives 80. This kind of cross-species translation can actually be quite difficult, but it's where the real clinical relevance lies.” 

Building the Brain Scan

While many researchers like Iordanova are using the existing MRI scanners in their work, Tamer Ibrahim, professor of bioengineering, has spent more than 20 years engineering the technology itself. 

For MRI, the stronger the magnetic field, the greater the signal-to-noise ratio, and the finer the structural detail that becomes visible. But scanners at a high magnetic field like 7 Tesla come with a serious engineering problem: the interactions between high-frequency electromagnetic waves and human tissue can create dead zones in the image, or regions of the brain that simply produce no signal. 

Ibrahim's lab, the 7 Tesla Bioengineering Research Program (7TBRP), has solved this problem with a custom radiofrequency coil system called Tic-Tac-Toe, and its second-generation successor, the Tac G2, introduced in 2022. The Tac G2 is, by Ibrahim's account, the only system in the world that has comprehensively eliminated the signal void problem, allowing researchers to run any type of MRI study at 7T without imaging barriers.

"There are significant challenges when scanning at 7T," Ibrahim said. "But our anti-claustrophobia Tac G2 coil system is, to my knowledge, the only one in the world that has successfully and comprehensively solved this problem.” 

The practical consequences are substantial. A study published in Human Brain Mapping from Ibrahim's team, comparing 3T and 7T performance across 350 healthy adults, found that 7T produces stronger correlations with age-related brain changes across every measure examined such as cortical volume, subcortical volume, white matter, cortical thickness. More importantly, it found a study that would require 350 participants at 3T could achieve the same statistical significance with approximately 100 participants at 7T.

That efficiency gain means that studies that were previously too expensive, too slow, or too logistically demanding to conduct become feasible. Since the Tac G2's introduction, it has been used in more than 2,500 human scans, already surpassing its predecessor's total in less than half the time. More than 40 NIH-funded studies across aging, psychiatry, neurology, and neuroscience are currently running on the system.

"When our coils are used in human studies, it's incredibly rewarding, far more rewarding than just publishing a paper," he said. "We're developing devices that clinicians and scientists use, and the result isn't just pretty pictures. We're not making something that just could be used some time in the future, we’re impacting human life now."

The Full Picture

These researchers work with different tools, different tissues, and different diseases, yet the opportunity for collaboration between modalities seems to increase by the day. A shared conviction ties all of their work together: there is no perfect imaging modality. Every technique involves tradeoffs between resolution and depth, speed and sensitivity, invasiveness and detail. For Iordanova, those limitations are precisely what makes the field so interesting and allows for such innovation. 

"If you don't have solid image analysis, it doesn't matter if you have a fancy machine," she said. "That's the beauty of bioengineering - you get to reach into any pocket you want. Optics, electrical engineering, image processing, artificial intelligence. The biology department says stick to cells, the electrical engineering department says just do the signal processing, but bioengineering lets you have it all."

Interested in using a 2P microscope for your research project? Contact TK Kozai for more information at tdk18@pitt.edu. 

Kim's research focuses on the development and application of ultrasound-based hybrid imaging systems capable of characterizing the structural, mechanical, and compositional properties of tissues and organs. Drawing on the physical principles governing the interaction of sound and light waves with soft tissues, Kim develops novel multi-physics imaging technologies to advance functional imaging capabilities in biomedical applications.

Kim has been a member of the ASA since 2015, where he has organized special sessions, served as a Technical Program Organizing Committee Member for the Biomedical Acoustics Technical Section, and was recently elected Chair of the Biomedical Acoustics Technical Committee (BATC) for a three-year term beginning in 2026.

"The ASA has shaped my career in meaningful ways from contributing to science and engineering, to building my professional network, to taking on leadership roles within the society," Kim said. "As BATC Chair, I look forward to deeper collaboration with other technical  committees to create more integrated, interdisciplinary workshops and sessions, opening new opportunities across areas like physical acoustics, computational acoustics, and signal processing in acoustics."

Fellowship in the ASA recognizes members who have made significant contributions to the science and applications of acoustics, and the honor reflects both scientific achievement and meaningful service to the acoustics community.

"I am deeply honored and grateful for the recognition and strong support of my colleagues in the society," Kim said. "I aim to continue contributing to the ASA community and to the broader advancement of biomedical acoustics."

Yet for every professor who has boarded a plane and crossed many time zones, there are others who stayed in the United States or who found a way to do both, to travel abroad and conduct research closer to home.

While most of the sabbaticals described in this story didn’t require a passport or a visa, they were no less productive, illuminating, or surprising. Indeed, as all these professors would attest, with careful planning, flexibility, and focus, one’s own research can become as new and exciting as a far-off destination. And the outcomes can be just as inspiring. 

“There are so many directions.”

Richard Debski, professor of bioengineering and co-director of the Orthopaedic Robotics Laboratory, can trace his sabbatical back to his senior design project in mechanical engineering, when he was an undergraduate at Pitt.

Debski worked with the late Pitt orthopaedic surgeon Freddie Fu on a shoulder project that fascinated him.

“After that,” he said, “I never left.”

Flash forward to 2024: Debski had formed many connections with research fellows and collaborators, mainly in Japan and California, and he wanted to strengthen those bonds.

He had never taken a sabbatical and through careful planning realized he could visit both places and see firsthand where his colleagues conducted their research.

That fall, he traveled to Japan for three weeks at three universities. “I gave lectures, worked with students, and conducted experiments,” Debski said. “Most importantly, I deepened relationships with research fellows there.” 

His trip resulted in two grants with two of the institutions as well as a monthly video conference. “This never would’ve happened without getting to meet people, share meals, and discuss ideas that lead in new directions.”

From Japan, Debski traveled to Pasadena, California, where a colleague works at a private orthopaedic research foundation. “I wanted to experience a different environment and see the private research funding model in action.”

The sabbatical illuminated research in Japan and at American foundations. It strengthened connections, which is leading to new study. Today, Debski and his colleague in Pasadena are working together on a book chapter.

“You meet a lot of smart, interesting people.”

Like Debski, Christopher Wilmer wanted “a change of perspective, to see how things work in others’ lives.” So when an opportunity to spend a semester conducting research at the Underwriters Laboratories Materials Discovery Research Institute (ULMDRI) as its inaugural sabbatical researcher, he took his overdue leave.

 Wilmer, associate professor and Wellington C. Carl Faculty Fellow in the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, traveled to the private lab in Chicago, the city where he’d earned his PhD. He launched research into the thermal stability of porous materials.

Along with starting the research and immersing himself in an unfamiliar setting, he met new scientists. “The networking was one of the most valuable aspects, getting to meet potential collaborators,” he said.

Returning to Chicago was bittersweet, though. Wilmer loved the city, but his wife and son stayed in Pittsburgh. “I found it hard to be away from my family.”

He’s still grateful for the sabbatical. “It gave me the time to reflect, which has altered the direction of my research.” For Wilmer, who directs the Wilmer Lab, that direction is smell. “My research group today is almost exclusively focused on developing electric noses.

“Dogs are state of the art technology when it comes to smell. They can detect kinds of cancer and other diseases as well as landmines or even people buried deep under snow. We’re working to develop sensing materials that can replicate this ability.”

Of sabbaticals, he said, “It's disruptive to one's normal routine, but it’s a unique opportunity that can take you in unexpected directions.”

“There’s a whole community you’re still part of.”

In 2023, Anne Robertson returned to the University of California Berkeley, where she earned her MS and PhD and received her postdoctoral training. She was there to deliver the 15th Elsevier Distinguished Lecture in Mechanics, and a visit with her postdoctoral advisor set in motion an opportunity to connect with scholars across disciplines and even attend class… as a student.

“My postdoctoral advisor, Dr. Susan Muller, encouraged me to apply for a Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship,” said Robertson, Distinguished Service Professor of mechanical engineering and materials science.

Robertson did, and she was accepted to the prestigious program. She set out to Cambridge, MA, for a year-long sabbatical.

At Harvard, Robertson, who investigates soft tissue biomechanics, was immersed with diverse scholars. There were historians, physicists, doctors, writers, even a poet laureate.

They regularly ate together, and each week two fellows delivered public lectures. “We shared ideas and experiences,” Robertson said. “It was inspiring and intellectually enriching to be exposed to such a broad range of research by top scholars.”

It was also a unique, illuminating and, ultimately, gratifying challenge to prepare her lecture, about her team’s research into the brain and the bladder, for such a varied audience.

Robertson sat in on a course too, Science and Cooking, which explores physical phenomena through the lens of food and its preparation. It included lectures by Brazilian Chef Alex Atala and James Beard Award winning baker Joanne Chang.

It fascinated her so much that she plans to develop a similar course at the Swanson School. “The professor shared her course materials, and we brainstormed about how to develop a program here. This transfer of knowledge, which happened all year, was amazing.”

Although she had to navigate being away from her son and two daughters and continue to coordinate research and faculty programs at Pitt, the experience was hugely rewarding.

“I had the opportunity to see my research through so many lenses, and I’m still in touch with the fellows. We continue to share ideas and perspectives,” Robertson said. “Just getting away on a sabbatical leave was tremendously stimulating and re-energizing.”

“I really wanted to know.”

When Mark Redfern, professor of bioengineering, was serving as Pitt’s vice provost for research, companies would reach out to ask if the Swanson School had students graduating with experience in human factors engineering for medical devices. They needed help meeting Food and Drug Administration (FDA) medical device submission requirements.

Human factors engineering involves designing devices such as glucose or blood pressure monitors that people can use easily and effectively.

“We had worked with other industries applying human factors principles in design, but I didn’t know how the FDA evaluated devices from a human factors perspective,” Redfern said.

That changed in 2017, after he stepped down from his role as vice provost for research and took a year-long sabbatical. He spent four months working with collaborators at the University of Michigan and then traveled to Maryland, where he spent four months at the FDA.

“I helped them set up a laboratory but also spent time with the human factors people,” he said.

When Redfern returned from sabbatical, he developed a new course, Bioengineering 2175: Human Factors Engineering of Medical Devices. It was different from any other he’d created. It takes a cross-disciplinary approach to the design and evaluation of medical devices. Thanks to connections Redfern made on sabbatical, FDA officials and people from industry have guest-lectured over Zoom.

Without having spent time at the FDA, Redfern believes he would never have created this course. “I wouldn’t have designed it because I wouldn't have known.”

Of sabbaticals, he said, “The key is to do something new, something you've never done before.”

He added: “There are always factors like family and research, but a sabbatical is worth it. That's the bottom line: just do it.”

Mohammadzadeh competed among 12 finalists representing graduate programs from across the university. His presentation, "From Pollution to Clean Water," showcased his thesis research on the development of nanoscale lipid-based carriers for nitrogen fertilizers, a novel technology designed to reduce nutrient runoff and water pollution caused by conventional agricultural practices.

"Modern agriculture depends heavily on nitrogen fertilizers to sustain food production, yet much of that nitrogen is lost to the environment," Mohammadzadeh said. “Through my research, I want to move us toward a future where feeding the world does not have to come at the expense of clean water and environmental health.”

The 3MT® competition challenges graduate students of all disciplines to communicate their research to a general audience in just three minutes, using a single static slide. For Mohammadzadeh, the experience underscored the importance of science communication in his career. 

“The ability to clearly articulate the significance of my work is just as important as the research itself," Mohammadzadeh said. “In many ways, it is an exercise in both scientific storytelling and effective public speaking, and this skill is critical for my career, especially as I near the end of my doctoral studies and pursue a career focused on developing novel engineering technologies with real-world impact.”

This challenge of building and racing an autonomous robotic sailboat has intrigued college and high school students for years and led, in 2006, to the creation of the International Robotic Sailing Regatta (SailBot).  

In 2019, two University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering students who’d grown up sailing on the Chesapeake Bay also felt the allure of this challenge and launched Pitt SailBot. Since then, the club has attracted Pitt students of varying majors, backgrounds, and experience with sailing and robotics. What unifies these members is the chance to collaborate, think creatively, use their hands, and build a winning sailbot from scratch.

From nothing to Dan Marina

Although he had little experience with sailboats, Leo Goldberg, president of Pitt SailBot who recently graduated with a degree in computer engineering, joined the club in his first year at Pitt. In high school, he had built a computer and was on a robotics team. “I was intrigued by the challenge of building a robotic sailboat, with all its moving parts and complex problems to solve,” said Goldberg, who grew up in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood.

Every two years, Pitt’s SailBot builds a new boat from scratch. As Goldberg said, “This past year, from nothing, we just started with the design process. Everything mechanically is done in house. We don't outsource any manufacturing. Anyone, any year, any level, can come in and help build the boat.”

To build a boat, SailBot relies on two teams, the mechanical and the controls. Using 3D modeling software, the mechanical team designs the boat and runs simulations. They pick out all the materials, and they fiberglass, paint, seal, and sand it.

Throughout the process, the team collaborates with Pitt Makerspace in the Benedum Hall basement. For their new boat, the team used a 3D printer to create the shell for the hull.

The controls team, meanwhile, develops the electrical components and code required to program the boat. They design and test circuits, solder components into place, wire the boat, and integrate sensors and microcontrollers. 

The club draws students with little robotics experience to those who have worked on many teams. As Goldberg said, “Whatever their experience, we have space for them.”

He added, “It's a breadth of engineers who make a new boat. You’d expect it to be mechanical and electrical and computer, but our president and our mechanical design lead last year were both bioengineers.”

It’s not all engineers either. The club has had computer science, English, and anthropology majors. Some students have sailed but many haven’t. As Goldberg said, “It gives us a more well-rounded approach.”

Throughout the process, upper-level students provide valuable guidance to newer members of Sailbot. In addition to providing tutorials on everything from soldering to SolidWorks software, the students share insight into classes, internships, and co-ops.  

The result of the collaborative, creative, and collective effort of around 25 members is an autonomous sailboat with sensors atop the mast and an ability to adjust its sail and rudder. Last year, the team christened its newest boat. In a nod to Pitt alumnus and legendary Miami Dolphins quarterback, they named it Dan Marina.

Regattas

Once a year, teams from universities and high schools from across the U.S. and Canada, and from as far away as Brazil and Germany, meet to test their sailbots. The regatta is held at the previous winning team’s institution. This June, Cornell University will host the regatta on Cayuga Lake, in Ithaca, New York.

Pitt’s team rents an Airbnb and carpools. When they arrive, the mechanical and controls teams set to work putting their boat back together, testing their systems, and preparing for each event.

Regattas involve four required and three optional challenges. In addition to a fleet race, the boats must navigate buoys, they must enter a 40-meter by 40-meter square and stay in the box for five minutes before exiting, and they must race one nautical mile in a test of endurance. Optional events include taking on a payload and avoiding a collision with an unexpected boat. 

“Even though it’s a competition, it’s a special, friendly environment,” Goldberg said. “You’re putting electronics in the water, so inherently there’s going to be a struggle. Nobody's afraid to say, ‘Hey, I just fried my Raspberry Pi. Can I borrow one of yours?’ It's cool to see how people are willing to work together. There’s a lot of quick thinking involved.”

Last year, when the Dan Marina’s keel didn’t function properly, the team had to race to a nearby hardware store and improvise. In the end, they placed third.

“There are so many factors that can get in your way when designing the boat,” Goldberg said. “Our number one issue is that we’re in Pittsburgh, so it's not as easy to test the boat.” Rivers aren’t ideal.

The challenge of building and troubleshooting a complex system, though, has rippled far beyond Pitt SailBot’s office. As Goldberg said, “It helped me on my co-op rotation. I could take on a long-form project, comfortable that I would be working on it for a while. It also helped me land a full-time job.” In July, Goldberg will begin working at Near Earth Autonomy, a Pittsburgh-based company advancing autonomous flight.

Pitt Sailbot, which started racing in 2022, has placed third in its first four regattas. This year, the team has taken what it has learned from the previous races to fine tune their boat. They’ve driven north, to Lake Arthur, and endured cold and rain to test the Dan Marina. They hope that the spirit of collaborative, creative, and hands-on problem solving that defines their club can propel them to victory.

“If we can win and bring the regatta to Pittsburgh, I’m not sure where we’d race,” Goldberg said. “But that would be another good problem to solve.”

This year’s honoree is Satyaj Bhargava, a student in Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering and Frederick Honors College. A 2025 Barry M. Goldwater Scholar and author of multiple peer-reviewed papers, his research spans brain vasculature imaging, wet lab work in the MechanoBiology Lab and the development of DavaLo, a medication management system designed for underserved hospitals in India.

During a gap year, Bhargava will work as a clinical research assistant in the Pediatric Spine Department at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City. He is also a lead percussionist in the Pitt Symphony Orchestra, a National Collegiate Honors Council Student of the Year nominee and a Swanson School of Engineering University Scholar.

A member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the American Chemical Society, and the Women’s Chemists Committee, Dolata will graduate from the Swanson School of Engineering next December with an honors degree in chemical engineering.

Dolata has served as an undergraduate teaching assistant in chemical engineering and has conducted research into sodium alginate films with Susan Fullerton, associate professor of chemical engineering and Bicentennial Board of Visitors Faculty Fellow and Vice Chair of Education. She has completed a co-op with the Hershey Company as a process engineer, and she interned at Thermo Fisher Scientific. The co-president and co-founder of Pitt’s Hooks and Books, a club that celebrates reading and fiber arts, she also runs a small baking business, Crumbs of Perfection. In 2024, Dolata received the $10,000 Future of Chemistry Scholarship for Women through the Chemours Women’s Network.

This year’s finalists also include:

• Katie McGuire, a mechanical engineering student who will graduate this spring.

• Garret Phipps, a civil engineering student who will also graduate this spring.

As finalists, McGuire and Phipps will receive a $500 cash prize and a $2,500 Dean’s Fellowship to pursue graduate studies. 

“The George Washington finalists are remarkable students and individuals,” said Mary Besterfield-Sacre, Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Nickolas A. DeCecco Professor in Industrial Engineering. “Cailey, Katie, and Garret have made lasting contributions to the Swanson School and the larger Pitt community, and all three are highly deserving of this recognition.”

Each year, the Engineers’ Society of Western Pennsylvania awards the George Washington Prize to recognize the incredible work of engineering students in Western Pennsylvania and to encourage them to pursue graduate degrees.  

Meet the finalists. 

Held on March 19 at the O’Hara Student Center Ballroom, the forum was organized by the Swanson School’s Impactful Resilient Infrastructure Science and Engineering (IRISE) consortium and the Center for Sustainable Transportation Infrastructure (CSTI), in cooperation with the Pittsburgh chapters of the American Society of Highway Engineers (ASHE) and Women in Transportation (WTS). Now in its 15^th year, the event connected academic and transportation leaders to share ideas and solve problems.

Pennsylvania Secretary of Transportation Mike Carroll delivered the keynote address, “Future Transportation Outlook,” exploring opportunities and challenges in advancing transportation infrastructure statewide. Carroll’s visit to Pitt was his third in the last four years, twice to attend the Transportation Forum and once for the IRISE Annual Meeting. His engagement with the University highlights the strong partnership between PennDOT and the Swanson School.

This year’s forum drew participation from across Pennsylvania, including 112 attendees from private-sector engineering firms, 40 from public-sector organizations, and 20 from academia. Throughout the day, attendees explored how cutting‑edge research, tools, and approaches can create safer, more resilient, and more sustainable transportation systems.

Faculty and graduate students from the Swanson School presented on topics such as “High-Performance and Light-Weight Metamaterial Concrete” and “Structural Optimization of Bridge Decks Against Corrosion,” complemented by a student poster session highlighting emerging research. The forum also brought together leaders from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission for a joint panel discussion, creating space for open dialogue around shared challenges, active projects, and collaborative approaches to advancing transportation innovation.

“As this forum enters its fifteenth year, the growing engagement and the energy around innovative research reflects Pittsburgh’s increasing role as a regional and national leader in transportation,” said Joseph Szczur, research faculty member in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and director of IRISE and CSTI. “I’m excited to see how the exchange of ideas at the forum manifests into real-world solutions.”

Now a premier regional event for civil engineers, public agencies, and academic partners, the Transportation Forum represents the Swanson School’s commitment to bridging research and practice to improve the region and the state.

“The Design Expo represents the kind of sustained partnership that defines engineering at Pitt,” said Mary Besterfield-Sacre, Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Nickolas A. DeCecco Professor in Industrial Engineering. “Our industry partners bring real challenges into the classroom and work alongside our students and faculty throughout the semester, and the projects on display this year are the result of that ongoing collaboration. Bridging the work of our students with the priorities of our partners creates a collective impact that extends well beyond a single course, and we are grateful to the companies, agencies, and alumni who continue to invest in our students this way.”

An integral aspect of the Design Expo is mentoring and collaboration across faculty and disciplines. Pitt alumni, faculty, and industry volunteers judged the event, engaging with the teams and sharing ideas and experience. Faculty and other Pitt schools, as well as government agencies, nonprofits, and industry partners, sponsored teams and provided valuable insight while students developed their projects.

Visit Flickr for the Expo Photo Album.

Best Overall Project 
E-Z CVC: Improving Ultrasound-Guided Central Line Placement 
Tristyn Auth, Alexis DiNapoli, Colin Henchy, Tyler Johnston, Abrahim Kashkoush, Phillip Lavrenyuk, and Trin Murphy

Above from left: Abrahim Kashkoush, Tyler Johnston, Alexis DiNapoli, Phillip Lavrenyuk

People’s Choice Award
Landslide
Drew Cembrinski, Miles Fancher, Ella Lowry, Matthew Macey, and Caroline Vidic
 

DEPARTMENT AWARDS
Bioengineering (Advisor: Mark Gartner)
1st Place E-Z CVC: Improving Ultrasound-Guided Central Line Placement
Tristyn Auth, Alexis DiNapoli, Colin Henchy, Tyler Johnston, Abrahim Kashkoush, Phillip Lavrenyuk, and Trin Murphy

2nd Place Streamlining Transabdominal Ultrasound-Guided Oocyte Extraction Process
Sydney Barber, Ashlyn Odenwald, Ishan Patel, Arshia Shams, Colby Shores, and Lyric Zimmermann

3rd Place (tie) Attachable Motorized Walker Tray Adapted for Independent Kitchen Use
Harrison Burd, Meredith Geno, Gavin Paulhamus, Norah Stivala, Rebecca Swartz, and Danielle Zambetti

3rd Place (tie) Retractable Electrocardiogram Lead Organizer for Streamlining Patient Care
Akshay Balaji, Mya Fulton, Grace Hercik, John Lorence, Soham Mandal, Audrey Transue, and Ella Wolok

Civil and Environmental Engineering (Advisor: Ogul Doygun)
1st Place Culvert Flood Resilience
Liam Byrne, Hannah Charlton, Alexandra Romanchik, and Benamin Ruggles

2nd Place AV Shuttle
Zachary Bobro, Adam Holden, Noah Im, Andrew Jeannot, and Clark Mccord

3rd Place Raw Water Intake
Vaughn Cilea, Campbell Jefferson, Amelia Kuzneski, Cassidy Laffey, Trinity Munsisoumang, and Sean Snyder

Electrical and Computer Engineering (Advisors: Mohamed Bayoumy, Gavin Zhou, and YuAnn Li)
1st Place Haptic Hazard Belt
Ravyn Brown, Rory Cooke, and Aiden Shaffer

2nd Place Pill Buddy
Camila Iglesias, Rachel Krauss, Alexi Mascara, and Connor Paladino

3rd Place Neuromuscular Motion Control Assessment and Rehabilitation (NEMO)
Aidan Beecher, Josh Brositz, Mal Mostafa, and Sebastian Shaffer

Industrial Engineering (Advisor: Scott Streiner)
1st Place (tie) FedEx Intelligent Trailer Path Generation
Anisha Aggarwal, Henry Hoeg, Jason Peters, Pat Simmons, and Siyi Zeng

1st Place (tie) Capacity and Lean Manufacturing Assessment for New Aerospace Program Demand
Logan Biu, Camille Kakoyan, Grant Paladino, Alyssa Stauffer, and Samuel Walsh-Cooke

2nd Place UPMC Oncology Patient Capacity Analysis
Andrea Adamski, Camren Corbett, Ava Hartman, Alexis Hong, and Yuankai Zhang

3rd Place (tie) Assembly Consolidation and Flexible Labor Plan
Braelyn Brozik, Lauren Coffman, Alex Czerkawski, Bryan Landsberg, and Eliza Marcy

3rd Place (tie) Production Area Footprint Optimization
Liam Coughlin, Bradley Gavigan, Blu Trush, Junshan Xie, and Tiffany Zheng

Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science (Advisor: David Schmidt)
1st Place Replicate Air Flow through Air-Cooled Machines using Wind Tunnels
Luke Braverman, Joshua Hamilton, Jeffery Kogan, Kyleigh Motley, and Jonathan Zhang

2nd Place Remote Hydraulic Tension Assembly - B
Alex Fritch, Joshua Marco, Rachel Sollie, and Evan Turner

3rd Place Laundry Folding Robot - B
Liam Gray, Greg Kenning, Thomas Kisiel, Andrew Leech, Michael Lukasik, Bri Schroll Wood, Ben Slaw, and Aidan Sullivan

Product Realization (Advisor: Eric Winter)
1st Place (tie) Automated Tool Management
Purita Ameyaw, Leilani Cruz, Samiya Henry, and R.J. Zik

1st Place (tie) Canales Cleaning Device
Charlie Greco, Ethan Hancock, Keshav Mukherjee, and Sean Savidge

1st Place (tie) Stand-Alone Pet Health Monitor
Emme Blanchard, Emma Geis, and Isaiah Jefferson

1st Place (tie) Technology-Enabled Cane
Ore Adeleye, Kylie Gardner, Yalin Liu, and Daniel McPeek

Shannon Lamb, bioengineering PhD student at the Swanson School of Engineering, has been named a recipient of the Graduate and Professional Student Government (GPSG) Leadership and Service Award, which recognizes outstanding contributions to leadership and service across the University of Pittsburgh and the broader Pittsburgh community.

Since joining Graduate BMES in 2022, Lamb has served as first-year representative, vice president, and president, supporting departmental initiatives and leading efforts such as graduate student surveys, recruitment programming, and student engagement activities. They also stepped into the presidency of the Engineering Graduate Student Organization (EGSO) in 2025, rebuilding its leadership structure, organizing major events, and mentoring a new cohort of student leaders. Also a volunteer with Pittsburgh Action Against Rape as a helpline sexual assault counselor, Lamb emphasized the importance of creating supportive environments for student leaders. 

“There is no event, meeting, email, or outcome that is more important than my officer team’s mental health and well being.” Lamb said. “It is important to me that every officer feels safe to be human and safe to have limits. I want them to be comfortable coming to me if they need help, guidance, or grace without fear of judgement.”

The GPSG Leadership and Service Award honors graduate and professional students who demonstrate exceptional commitment to serving the University of Pittsburgh, the surrounding community, and beyond. Award recipients receive a grant to support academic expenses and were recognized at a university-wide event on April 16, 2026.

“I’m incredibly honored to be receiving this award, but mostly beyond grateful for the letters of recommendation that got me here.” Lamb said. “It is not lost on me that the beautiful words of Sharada Narayanan, our incredible graduate BMES outreach chair, and the eloquent writings of Kurt Beschorner, Bob Parker, Bistra Iordanova, and Aaron Gibson are what got me this award. I am genuinely grateful for everyone who believed in me and pushed me to become the leader I am today.” 

This year, however, PARC and the Swanson School of Engineering’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering had a unique opportunity neither Shaffer nor Wendt could have anticipated when they joined the club. NASA chose Pitt as one of eight academic institutions to track the Orion space capsule during the Artemis II mission. PARC members designed and assembled a system on the roof of Benedum Hall to track a manned craft hurtling through space.

“This has been an amazing opportunity to work with a team to design and build a system that incorporates AI and the analog technology that attracted us to the club,” said Shaffer, president of PARC and a fifth-year computer engineering student.

The first social media

More than a century ago, amateur radio at Pitt launched in 1915, when the University received experimental license 8YJ from the Department of Commerce. Widespread use of AM radio didn’t exist then. In fact, it was Westinghouse, in Pittsburgh, that launched the first commercially licensed AM radio in 1920.

Since its inception, the club has provided Pitt faculty and students the opportunity to work with new technology and connect with people from around the world.

Located on the twelfth floor of Benedum Hall, the PARC office - nicknamed “The Shack” - is chock full of ham radios and electronics. The walls are filled with postcards and awards from competitions where students make the most points of contact with other operators.

“Ham radio is the first social media,” said Juan Manfredi, professor of mathematics and faculty sponsor for the club.

Connecting and creating

“I was always the kid who would run around fixing teachers’ computers,” Shaffer said. In fact, during Covid, his high school hired him to help establish a virtual network and support teachers during remote learning.

At Pitt, Shaffer joined Pitt Digital, where a colleague told him about PARC. Although he had no experience with amateur radio, he attended a meeting and, as he said, “I was fascinated with it. I started studying for my technician’s license.”

Wendt, a fourth-year electrical engineering student, has always liked to fix things too. Growing up, he would take apart and put back together any device he could get his hands on. As a Boy Scout, he learned about ham radio and received his technician class license.

By the time he came to Pitt, Wendt’s interest in radios had waned, but then he attended a PARC meeting. “There were all these radios and electronics, and we just started working on them. I fell back in love with it.”

Today, he’s studying to get his general class license.

Finding community around the world 

Manfredi’s interest in electrical engineering started in Spain, where he grew up. To make ends meet, his father fixed electronics in the evening, and, as Manfredi recalled, “I got to see all these devices and thought, ‘I want to work with that.’”

Although he would study mathematics, Manfredi never lost interest in electronics and radios, and after coming to America for graduate school at Washington University, he visited the radio club. “I saw the antennas and thought, ‘I’m going there.’”

Manfredi came to Pitt in 1989, and in 2010, after the unexpected passing of Glenn Alec Stewart, Dean of the Honors College, he stepped into the role of PARC faculty sponsor. Manfredi had never forgotten the community he found at that first radio club.

Connecting with Orion

PARC meets weekly and members share updates, discuss competitions, and work on projects. Each year, members volunteer with the Pittsburgh Marathon. “We bring hand-held radios and stand with the EMS services in case cell service goes down during an emergency,” Shaffer said.

This year, through the collaboration with NASA, they turned their attention to space.

“NASA is interested in seeing if faculty and students can use amateur equipment to track Orion,” said Samuel Dickerson, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and Vice Chair for Education and Director of Computer Engineering Undergraduate Program. “We were fortunate that they selected Pitt.”

PARC members and Pitt faculty designed the system and with the support of Alan George, Department Chair, R&H Mickle Endowed Chair, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and SHREC and Pitt Space founder, acquired needed equipment.

“For the past few months, we’ve been building the antenna, the dish, and the helical feed. We’ve been getting all the software to work with software-defined radios,” said Wendt. “It's given us a chance to work with new equipment.”

The team has used AI to develop a tool to track Orion in relationship to Pitt and another to interpret any data they receive.  

“The signal could be so low we won’t know if we’ve even received anything,” Shaffer said.

After the mission launched, PARC members and Pitt faculty would meet on the roof of Benedum Hall, sometimes in the early morning hours of 4:00 a.m. They would work to locate Orion and position the dish and antennas to receive a signal.

Beyond connections

“When you have a ham radio and a license, wherever you go in the world, you have friends,” Manfredi said.

When PARC members hear from people visiting Pittsburgh, they reach out. They’ve provided advice about places to stay and sights to see. Sometimes they share a meal.

“We never talk about politics. We never talk about religion. We talk about radios instead,” said Manfredi. “We talk about food.”

The club now has something else to talk about: the remarkable work Pitt students did to connect with Orion during its historic mission.

While Manfredi’s fascination with ham radios first led him to advise the club, it’s the students who keep him there. “I like to be surprised by the students,” he said. “And they are always doing something new and exciting.”