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.”

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.

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.

“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.

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.”

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.”

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.”

The technology, originally developed through a Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) collaboration between Sensible Photonics and the University of Pittsburgh, provides advanced monitoring capabilities for used nuclear fuel storage systems. The project represents a significant milestone in the transition of federally funded research from the laboratory to deployment in support of the nation's nuclear energy infrastructure.

Used nuclear fuel storage systems require reliable, long-term monitoring solutions to support safety, operational efficiency, and informed asset management. The selected sensing platform utilizes advanced passive fiber optic technology capable of providing continuous monitoring in challenging environments while delivering valuable operational data.

"This selection by the Department of Energy and the Center for Used Fuel Research is an important validation of both the technology and the strong collaboration between Sensible Photonics and the University of Pittsburgh," said Rob A. Rutenbar, Senior Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of Pittsburgh. “We are pleased to have the opportunity to demonstrate how advanced sensing technologies can contribute to the safe and reliable management of used nuclear fuel storage systems while strengthening America's energy security.”

The technology was developed under the leadership of Paul Ohodnicki, PhD, co-founder of Sensible Photonics and associate professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering, whose research has focused on advanced optical sensing technologies for energy, industrial, and nuclear applications. 

"This project highlights the critical role that university-industry partnerships play in advancing innovative technologies from research to real-world deployment," said Ohodnicki, who is also is director of Pitt's Center for Energy. "We are excited to work with Idaho National Laboratory and DOE partners to demonstrate the value of advanced fiber optic sensing technologies for nuclear energy applications."

The demonstration will be conducted through the Center for Used Fuel Research, a Department of Energy initiative focused on advancing technologies that improve the safety, security, and management of used nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste.

The selection further demonstrates the growing importance of advanced sensing technologies in supporting the future of nuclear energy, grid reliability, and critical infrastructure resilience.

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.

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.”

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."

Registration for the workshop is now open; the preliminary agenda and workshop updates are available here. Registrants for the Aug. 18 satellite workshop will receive complimentary access to the AMPED annual industry workshop on Wednesday, Aug. 19, also at the EIC.

The Pittsburgh event builds on the reputation and single-track format of PSMA’s annual pre-APEC Power Magnetics at High Frequency Workshop, a fixture of the international power electronics calendar for more than a decade. It marks the first time the workshop will be held in Pittsburgh, a region with deep roots in electric power dating to the founding of the Westinghouse Electric Corporation and a present-day concentration of magnetic materials suppliers, power transformer manufacturers, utilities, and university research programs.

“Pittsburgh is a natural home for this workshop,” said Matt Wilkowski, workshop chair, design consultant at Würth Elektronik, and co-chair of the PSMA Magnetics Committee. “The region’s heritage in electric power is matched today by an unusual concentration of magnetics expertise, from materials suppliers and component manufacturers to the utilities and end users that put the technology to work. Pitt’s research community, through the AMPED Consortium, gives us a partner that can bring all of that together in one room. Bringing the workshop here lets us reach a community that has shaped power magnetics for more than a century and is shaping it again now.”

The Aug. 18 program runs from 8 a.m. to 6:15 p.m. and follows a single-track format. A morning technical session focuses on advanced magnetic materials and their applications, and an afternoon session turns to electromagnetic interference and compatibility (EMI/EMC) – the engineering work that keeps power electronics from interfering with one another or with surrounding equipment. Throughout the day, technology demonstrations and posters from industry and research organizations will be open during breaks, lunch, and a closing networking hour, giving attendees direct access to the engineers and scientists behind the work.

“The satellite workshop format lets PSMA take this conversation directly into the regions where the work is happening,” said John Horzepa, technical director of PSMA. “Our annual pre-APEC workshop has built a strong international following, and the model translates well when we partner with a university and an industry consortium with the depth that Pitt and AMPED bring. The combination of technical presentations, demonstrations, and posters under one roof is what attendees consistently tell us they value most, and Pittsburgh gives us the right audience and the right setting to deliver it.”

Keynote presentations are scheduled by Sam Kernion of Core Power and Andy Lemmon of the University of Alabama. Additional confirmed speakers include Scott Sudhoff of Purdue University, Jake Perez of Vacuumschmelze, Narayanan Rajagopal of GE Vernova, and JC Sun of Bs&T.

“This workshop is exactly what the AMPED Consortium was built to do – connect Pittsburgh’s manufacturers, utilities, and university researchers with the wider power magnetics field,” said Paul Ohodnicki, RK Mellon Faculty Fellow in Energy and director of the University of Pittsburgh Center for Energy. “Partnering with PSMA, and hosting at the Energy Innovation Center, lets us pair a national workshop with our own annual AMPED industry day. Attendees get two full days of technical exchange in a region that is helping decide what the next generation of power magnetics will look like.”

How2Power, a leading online resource for the power electronics industry, is serving as media partner for the workshop.

As part of the program, Chakraborty will be paired with a mentor and conduct research at the U.S. Navy’s Naval Service Warfare Center (NSWC) Carderock Division. Located in West Bethesda, Maryland, the center is a hub of engineering and research into ships and ship technology. Chakraborty, who will visit NSWC Carderock this summer, will work in their submarine and boating divisions.

A member of the American Society of Naval Engineers, Chakraborty credits his interest in mechanical engineering to his grandfather, a mechanical engineer who served with the U.S. Air Force. “He would always tell me these great stories about working on planes, and when I got to high school, I started taking engineering classes,” Chakraborty said.

“This is a dream come true. I’ve been interested in boats for years, and since coming to Pitt, I’ve been involved in Pittsburgh Electric Propulsion [PEP],” added Chakraborty, who serves as the vice president of PEP, a Pitt club dedicated to electric boats and EV and battery technology. The club designs, fabricates, and races electric boats.

“Carderock was my top preference,” Chakraborty said. “I’m excited to have this amazing opportunity to work there after graduation and apply what I’ve learned at Pitt to support the Navy.”

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.”

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.”

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. 

“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

“Since the first UPISC Workshop in 2022, collective energy around advanced sensing and related digital technologies across our region continues to build,” said Paul Ohodnicki, RK Mellon Faculty Fellow in Energy, director of Pitt’s Center for Energy, and associate professor of mechanical engineering and materials science. “In fact, in response to the 2024 Workshop co‑organized with the National Academy of Engineering, the INSITES Consortium was established. The consortium brings together industry and government stakeholders to transform monitoring technology and to prepare the next generation of innovators.”

This year’s workshop will open with high‑profile speakers and two plenary panels. Leaders from NETL, the U.S. Department of Energy, the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy, and the City of Pittsburgh will discuss “Emerging Priorities and Initiatives.” There will also be a session on national imperatives at the intersection of quantum technologies, artificial intelligence, the electric power grid, and the nexus between energy and water. The afternoon will conclude with a facilitated discussion about how the infrastructure sensing community can advance national objectives.

The second day will explore applied innovation and industry partnerships. Topics include:

• Condition-based monitoring across infrastructure segments.
• Distributed fiber optics and infrastructure, featuring experts from GoogleX, LUNA, Lightera, and the Fiber Optic Sensing Association.
• Optical neural networks and distributed sensing for on‑chip photonics as well as sensing and instrumentation for nuclear applications.
• Infrastructure connectivity and cross‑sector sensing needs, with participants from Duquesne Light Company, the University of Pittsburgh, and the Pittsburgh Water Collaboratory.

In addition to panels and keynote speakers, attendees will network, tour the Energy Innovation Center, and attend a technical poster session during the social hour.

Central to the UPISC Workshop and the INSITES Consortium are four goals:

• Developing novel sensor technologies.
• Advancing regional workforce development to meet near‑term research-and-development and future deployment needs.
• Strengthening industry and stakeholder engagement for technology transfer.
• Forming teams capable of responding to agency and industry calls.

“Improving reliability and efficiency of energy infrastructure is one core mission at NETL. Through the UPISC Workshop, we’ve built a productive space for experts across sectors to share insights and spark new collaborations,” said Ruishu Wright, Research Physical Scientist and Technical Portfolio Lead at NETL who also serves as co-host of the UPISC Workshop.

“By linking advances in infrastructure sensing with AI, digital twins, and workforce development, we can accelerate reliability, safety, and efficiency across the grid, transportation, and water systems in our region and beyond,” Ohodnicki said. “Pittsburgh, with its industrial history, its universities, and its growing innovation ecosystem, is primed to serve as a national leader in how we create and deploy new sensing technology. We’re excited to fuel collaboration and innovation at the UPISC 2026 Workshop.”  

Event details:

• Dates: June 2 – 3, 2026
• Location: Energy Innovation Center, 1435 Bedford Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15219

Learn more and register to attend the 2026 Workshop.

Levenson, a Pittsburgh native who continued a family tradition of attending Pitt, became interested in materials science during her first year in the Swanson School after she was introduced to the different engineering fields. “When I learned more about materials science, there was no question. There’s so much you can do with it,” she said.  

Last year, she completed an internship with Ellwood and loved it. She had the opportunity to calculate grain sizes for a copper-nickel alloy and to verify if aluminum met forging standards. “Ellwood was a great place to intern,” she said. “I’ve never seen a company provide so much for their interns and give them such opportunities to problem-solve and learn.”

Levenson, who will receive a $25,000 scholarship, is excited to return to Ellwood this summer, where she’ll work with a new team and learn more about metallurgy and the company. “I’m honored to receive this scholarship,” Leveson said. “It’s a great opportunity, and the financial support truly helps.”

Like Levenson, Bauman found his passion in materials science. Bauman grew up outside of Philadelphia, and, as he said, “Living in the Steel City, there’s such a focus on metallurgy, and I got interested in that.”

This summer, Bauman, who will receive a $10,000 scholarship, will intern at Ellwood Aluminum, in Hubbard, Ohio, where he will gain firsthand experience working with aluminum. “My classes have focused more on steel and steel alloys, so I’ll get to expand what I know, seeing up close what’s similar and different. We get the opportunity to work on real projects that we take on ourselves.” 

“We’re grateful for Ellwood’s ongoing, generous support of our students,” said Buddy Clark, professor and interim department chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science. “They provide valuable financial assistance and hands-on experience that can’t be taught in the classroom. Margo and Koh are incredibly deserving students, and I’m excited for the summer opportunities that await them.”

In the overall rankings, the Swanson School moved up one spot to #42 among all engineering programs and held steady at #24 among public universities and #21 among members of the American Association of Universities. The most notable gain was in electrical engineering, which jumped nine places to #52 overall and rose from #36 to #28 among publics. Computer engineering also improved significantly, climbing four spots to #46 (#24 among publics). Industrial engineering held its position at #24 overall while improving to #16 among publics and #13 among AAU institutions.

“Our continued upward movement reflects the sustained commitment of our faculty, students, and staff,” said Michele V. Manuel, U. S. Steel Dean of Engineering. “As we approach our 180th year of engineering at Pitt, ranking among the top 25 public engineering schools speaks to our deep history and an exciting future.”

The rankings reflect a period of sustained growth for the Swanson School. Research expenditures reached a record $63.5 million, and researchers earned 41 patents - 38% of all patents issued to the University of Pittsburgh that year. The school also welcomed its largest first-year class, enrolling approximately 780 students.

Additional highlights include biomedical engineering at #29 overall (#13 publics), mechanical engineering at #54 (#30 publics), and materials engineering at #50 (#31 publics).

Learn more about graduate and professional studies at the Swanson School.

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Photo: Third-year ECE PhD graduate student researcher Sabrina Helbig in the Swanson School Makerspace. (Tom Altany)

The research opens new opportunities for flexible microelectrodes and neurochemical biosensors.

 “Miniaturizing Laser-Induced Graphene for Biosensors by Spatial Control of Initiation and Side-Selective Microfabrication on Commercial Polymers” (DOI: 10.1002/admt.202502433) was selected as a cover feature in Issue 7 of the Advanced Materials Technologies, published in April 2026.

“Graphene is an ultrathin form of carbon that conducts electricity extremely well, which makes it a powerful material for building flexible sensors and bioelectronic devices,” said Mostafa Bedewy, associate professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at the Swanson School and senior author.

Although there are many ways to produce graphene, researchers are increasingly turning to laser technology to carbonize polyimides, a flexible form of polymer, producing the conductive, porous material. Controlling this process at the microscale, however, has been a challenge.

By applying a layer of iron-oxide-based ink to the surface of the polymer prior to near-infrared pulsed laser processing, the Pitt researchers established a tunable tradeoff between electrode thickness and electrical performance. Using computer modeling, they discovered how localized thermal gradients drive graphene growth and thinning, providing predictive insights into the relationships that define LIG functionality.

The researchers revealed how controlling the initial point of carbonization governs graphene electrode line thickness, conductivity, and location. They also fabricated graphene on the top, bottom, or both surfaces of a polymer film, dramatically expanding how it could be used for sensing technology.

“Rather than only focusing on making graphene microelectrodes as thin as possible, this work set out to understand and control how graphene forms during laser processing from a laser-matter interaction perspective,” said Bedewy. “After we understand that process science, we can optimize variables like thickness, conductivity, and device function.”

The resulting graphene microelectrodes combine mechanical flexibility with robust electrical and electrochemical performance, enabling sensitive electrochemical detection of neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin. Importantly, the approach avoids lithography and cleanroom processing, which are more complex and expensive, making it compatible with scalable and low-cost manufacturing.

“Side-selective graphene formation is particularly exciting for bioelectronics,” said Tracy Cui, professor of bioengineering at the Swanson School and a collaborator on the project. “Being able to choose which surface of a soft polymer becomes electrically or electrochemically active expands the design space for neural probes, chemical sensors, and implantable devices.”

The work was led by Soumalya Ghosh, a PhD student in mechanical engineering who developed the experimental workflows and linked processing conditions to material structure, properties, and electrochemical performance.

“What stood out was how graphene properties sensitively respond to the way carbonization is initiated,” said Ghosh. “By tuning that initiation step, we can balance electrode thickness and conductivity to meet the needs of different sensing applications.”

These findings dovetail with another recent study led by Bedewy and Cui, which showed that laser scanning strategy itself is a powerful control parameter for tuning electrochemical performance in laser-induced graphene biosensors. In that work, published in the January 2026 issue of ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, the researchers demonstrated that speed-dependent sequential laser irradiation can significantly lower electrode impedance and boost sensing sensitivity by modifying graphene morphology and electrochemical interfaces.

Together, these studies highlight how laser processing can be deliberately engineered to optimize the fabrication of graphene-based electrodes with tailored properties for next-generation flexible and implantable bioelectronic devices.

“This research reflects the type of collaborative environment that thrives here in the Swanson School,” said William (Buddy) Clark, professor and interim chair of mechanical engineering and materials science. “Flexible electronics have always been a challenge, so I’m excited to see how this important project evolves.”

Beyond neurotransmitter detection, the researchers envision the process being extended to other flexible electronics, wearable sensors, and multifunctional biointerfaces where spatial control of material properties is critical.

The work was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award #2239244 and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke under award number 1R21NS123937.

“Tim is a Pittsburgh native who has never strayed far from his roots, even while building a global career,” said Buddy Clark, Professor and Interim Department Chair of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science. “He earned both his bachelor’s in mechanical engineering and his MBA from the University of Pittsburgh, and today he leads one of the most iconic companies in our city’s history, PPG.”

“What makes Tim’s journey so compelling is that he started on the factory floor,” Clark added. “He joined PPG in 1987 as an engineer in the flat glass business and rose through virtually every part of the enterprise — process engineer, plant manager, supply chain director, general manager, and beyond.”

About Timothy Knavish

Tim Knavish is chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of PPG.

Knavish joined PPG in 1987 in an engineering role in the former flat glass business and was based at the corporate headquarters in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He then advanced through roles including process engineer, supervisor of technical services, manager of operations planning and scheduling, and superintendent of production in PPG’s former flat glass and automotive glass businesses before joining the architectural coatings business in 2000 as plant manager for the East Point, Georgia manufacturing facility.

In 2002, Knavish returned to Pittsburgh as director, supply chain for the former automotive replacement glass business, and in 2004, he became global director, manufacturing and supply chain for the automotive refinish coatings business. He moved to Australia in 2005 as managing director, Australia and New Zealand coatings, and general manager, automotive refinish. In 2007, Knavish assumed responsibility in Troy, Michigan, as general manager, automotive coatings, Americas, and in early 2010, he was elected as a vice president with the same scope of responsibility. He relocated to Pittsburgh in 2012 as global vice president, protective and marine coatings, and returned to Troy in March 2016 when he was appointed as an executive officer as senior vice president, automotive coatings.

Knavish returned to Pittsburgh in October 2017 as senior vice president, industrial coatings, leading PPG’s industrial coatings, packaging coatings, and coatings services businesses, the global supply management function, and PPG’s Asia Pacific region. In January 2019, he was appointed senior vice president, architectural coatings and president, PPG EMEA, and in October 2019, Knavish was promoted to executive vice president with responsibility for the global automotive refinish business, architectural coatings businesses in the U.S., Canada and the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region, PPG’s Latin America region and the digital and information technology functions. Knavish became PPG’s chief operating officer (COO) in March 2022, before being named President and CEO, effective Jan. 1, 2023.

A native of Pittsburgh, Knavish earned a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering and a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of Pittsburgh. Knavish serves on the boards of the American Coatings Association, Allegheny Conference on Community Development as vice chair, and the United Way of Southwestern Pennsylvania. He is also a director on the board of Rockwell Automation and a member of the Business Council. Knavish previously served on the board of Junior Achievement of Western Pennsylvania.

Givi, Distinguished Professor and James T. MacLeod Chair in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science in the Swanson School of Engineering, earned his ME and PhD in mechanical engineering from Carnegie Mellon which recognized him with a CMU Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2022. He received his BE in mechanical engineering from Youngstown State University, which recognized him as the 2012 STEM College Outstanding Alumnus and the 2004 Phi Kappa Phi Distinguished Alumnus.  

Givi is recognized worldwide for his research in turbulence and quantum computing, aerospace engineering, combustion, computational fluid mechanics, and thermal engineering. 

“I am honored to receive this award from Carnegie Tech and be among these amazing engineers. I feel lucky to have attended Carnegie Mellon and Youngstown State, both of which prepared me and sparked the curiosity that continues to guide my research today,” Givi said. “Likewise, I am grateful for my collaborators in our MEMS department and in the high-performance computing group. My colleagues and graduate students also serve as an endless source of inspiration.”

Givi is a Fellow of the American Academy of Mechanics (AAM), the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), the American Physical Society (APS), the Combustion Institute, and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), which also named him Engineer of the Year in Pittsburgh in 2007. He is a Foreign Member of the Royal Academy of Engineering of Spain.

One of the first 15 engineering faculty to receive a White House Faculty Fellowship from President George H.W. Bush, Givi has also been awarded NASA’s Public Service Medal, its highest civilian honor. He received the Office of Naval Research’s Young Investigator Award and the National Science Foundation’s Presidential Young Investigator Award.

Givi delivered the 13th Elsevier Distinguished Lecture in Mechanics, an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Dryden Lecture in Research, and the 11th Pratt and Whitney Distinguished Lecture.

“This recognition speaks to Peyman Givi’s tremendous contributions to the field, which extend far beyond his research,” said William (Buddy) Clark, Professor and Interim Department Chair of mechanical engineering and materials science. “In our department and across the University, Peyman is a tireless champion of his colleagues and graduate students, and he provides vital mentorship that elevates all those who have the opportunity to work with him.”

Peyman and other distinguished alumni will be honored on April 9, 2026, at a celebration event at the Kresge Theatre on the Carnegie Mellon campus.

The breakthrough, detailed in the recent article “Combining Laser-Induced Graphene with Kirigami for Transparent Flexible Electromagnetic Interference Shielding” (DOI: 10.1021/acsaenm.5c00861) and featured on the cover of ACS Applied Engineering Materials, could protect the next generation of connected electronics and medical sensors from the invisible electromagnetic noise and harmful radiation that increasingly fill our wireless world.

“Our work shows how laser processing of materials and nanocarbon synthesis can intersect beautifully,” said Mostafa Bedewy, associate professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and principal investigator of the NanoProduct Lab at Pitt.

“We use precise laser energy to convert everyday polymer films into porous networks of conductive graphene right where we want them, without  additional chemicals or complex vacuum systems,” Bedewy added. “This research opens doors for scalable manufacturing of next-generation polymer-based shielding materials.” 

The research demonstrated that the patterned graphene films could maintain over 80 percent transparency while still achieving adequate shielding efficiency. These EMI shielding capabilities are typically seen in opaque metallic coatings.  

Importantly, the team shows that when folded into multilayer configurations, the polymer-graphene films exceeded 50 decibels of EMI shielding efficiency, which is comparable to dense metal foils but with a fraction of the weight.

“It’s exciting to see that a simple, one-step laser process can make something both elegant and functional,” said Mirza Sahaluddin, a PhD student in Pitt’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, and first author of the paper. “Our kirigami patterns let us tune transparency and shielding by design, almost like engineering origami for electromagnetic waves.”

This project represents an interdisciplinary collaboration at Pitt, with researchers from three engineering departments in the Swanson School working together to design, manufacture, and characterize these novel materials.

“Electromagnetic interference is becoming a hidden but serious issue as electronics multiply in our daily lives,” said Paul Leu, professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and co-author of the study. “Transparent shielding materials like these could be critical for protecting sensors, medical devices, and communication systems from cross-talk or radiation exposure.”

“This study, featured on the cover of a high-impact journal, reflects the interdisciplinary strength of our department, combining advanced manufacturing, materials science, and design innovation,” said William Clark, professor and interim chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science. “It’s an excellent example of how fundamental research can lead to practical impact.”

In the spring of 2024, amid increasing threats to operational technology in energy and water systems, the DOE awarded the University of Pittsburgh $2.2 million to launch the Center, which brings together leaders in industry, government, and academia to ensure more secure and resilient systems.

“Since launching the Center, we’ve developed viable, lab-tested cybersecurity solutions as well as a model that highlights the barriers to the adoption of safety measures,” said Daniel Cole, associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Director of the Cyber Energy Center.

“We’ve built a growing ecosystem of industry, government, and academic partners dedicated to protecting critical infrastructure,” added Erica Owen, associate professor in Pitt’s School of Public and International Affairs. “We’re excited to build upon the momentum and position Pittsburgh and our region as leaders in cybersecurity.”

Through the initial DOE funding, the Cyber Energy Center, in partnership with Pitt Cyber, launched the first in a series of interdisciplinary workshops that brought together government, industry, and academia from across disciplines to explore the fast-changing security landscape and weigh technology and policy solutions. 

The Center also expanded cybersecurity education at the university, community-college, and workforce level, integrating information technology (IT) with operational technology (OT) to address their growing interconnectedness.

“We’ve created a new course on Data Science for Security,” said Cole. “We provided research opportunities for undergraduates and helped fuel hands-on training to those who work in critical infrastructure. We’ve also begun working with community colleges to incorporate IT and OT security into curriculum.”

With the new funding, in addition to advancing these initiatives and growing its ecosystem of partners, the Cyber Energy Center will demonstrate technological solutions that can make critical infrastructure safer and more resilient.  

“We’re moving into the next phase of testing and demonstrating solutions such as digital twin technology, which mirror OT infrastructure to test for vulnerabilities,” said Cole. “We’ll move from theoretical into real-world scenarios.”

“As technology advances, the threats to critical infrastructure evolve just as quickly,” said Owen. “Yet barriers to adopting cybersecurity measures persist. We plan to collect more data and develop evidence-based policy that guides critical sector stakeholders and keeps our region safer and more resilient.”

Albert To, William Kepler Whiteford Professor, along with Wei Xiong, associate professor & William Kepler Faculty Fellow, in the Department of Materials Science and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering, have received a $400,000 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) award to develop novel interlocking design and fabrication technology for complex defense, aerospace, transportation, energy, and medical systems.

Their project, “Enabling Design and Fabrication of Multi-Functional, Multi-Material Structures with Interlocking Interfaces,” seeks to transform how dissimilar surfaces connect, leading to stronger, more resilient systems that can withstand heat, stress, and other demanding conditions.

“Traditionally, we have welded, bolted, or used adhesives to connect surfaces,” said To. “However, with new technology like hypersonic vehicles, those approaches can be insufficient. We need to rethink how we form stronger bonds.”

Instead of relying on the adhesion where materials meet, To’s group has developed a novel process that harnesses the inherent strength of each material. They are using advanced computational design that focuses on the topology, or the way geometric objects function as they are transformed, to develop structures that lock together, no matter how incompatible their surfaces. 

“We want to make a handshake between two materials,” To said. “The materials will lock into each other geometrically, so when you try to pull them apart, the joint remains firm.”

These structures are fabricated using additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, ensuring rapid and custom production.

“Our computer simulations show that optimized interlocking interfaces can double the strength at the point of connection relative to human-designed baselines,” said Myung Kyun Sung, a postdoctoral associate in mechanical engineering at the Swanson School, who has helped To research this new technology. “We found a significant increase in effective stiffness and tensile strength.”

Ultimately, the research could expand the types of materials that can be connected, opening a range of design possibilities across industries.

“This project seeks to transform how we join materials,” To said. “By making it easier and less expensive to join different surfaces, we can develop everything from stronger aerospace structures to more advanced medical devices.”

Advection-diffusion equations, however, might require immense computing power that can strain even the most powerful classical computers. Running simulations, especially in fine detail and repeatedly, can be prohibitively time consuming and costly. Yet these simulations can dramatically improve how engineers design everything from airplanes to energy systems.

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering and Pitt’s School of Computing and Information have teamed up with scientists from Ames National Laboratory / Iowa State University, Boeing Research & Technology, and the Naval Nuclear Laboratory to take a new approach. They have tested whether powerful quantum computers, which process information differently than classical systems, can solve these equations.

Led by the Swanson School’s Juan Jose Mendoza Arenas, Peyman Givi, and Hirad Alipanah, the researchers developed and evaluated three algorithms, demonstrating the potential of quantum computers to solve real-world engineering problems.

The research, which shed important new light on the emerging field of quantum computing, is detailed in the paper, “Quantum dynamics simulation of the advection-diffusion equation,” published on December 19, 2025, in Physical Review Research (DOI: 10.1103/ndc3-bdwt).

Testing a new kind of computing

“Classical computers operate with a binary logic of ones and zeros, which limits their ability to simulate complex systems,” said Mendoza Arenas, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science. “Quantum computers function under the laws of quantum physics and have the potential to run complex equations more quickly, using less computational power. The challenge is to reformulate classical equations to run on these newer quantum systems.”

Indeed, to run advection-diffusion equations on a quantum computer, the team had to translate a physical process into something the new computational language could understand—what is known as a Hamiltonian. The Hamiltonian serves as an engine governing how the system evolves quantum states.

The intensive work involved breaking physical space into small points and encoding the value at each point to a quantum state. Then, the team developed new algorithms that quantum systems could process.

To test the potential of simulating a one-dimensional model using a quantum computer, the researchers formulated and assessed three approaches:

1. Trotterization, a strategy that accurately approximates the mathematical time evolution dictated by the Hamiltonian. This approach, while providing the most accurate results, was the most resource intensive and impractical on current quantum hardware.
2. Variational Quantum Time Evolution (VarQTE), a hybrid quantum-classical computing approach that proved more practical than Trotterization but less precise.
3. Adaptive Variational Quantum Dynamics Simulation (AVQDS), an extension of the VarQTE strategy that starts simple and adds components as needed. This approach was most adaptable and was the only one used to simulate a two-dimensional flow.

The researchers ran each approach on quantum simulators and real systems and then compared their results to direct numerical simulation (DNS), a high-accuracy classical benchmark.

“We found that in an idealized, noise-free simulation, the quantum methods reproduced the same solution as the gold-standard classical simulation,” said Alipanah, a PhD student in Computational Modeling and Simulation and the first author of the paper.

“Through our research, we have developed incredibly promising algorithms,” added Givi, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science. “We’ve demonstrated the potential of quantum computing to solve some of the most complex, vexing problems in engineering.”

Co-taught by  William (Buddy) Clark, Professor and Interim Department Chair of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, and Breelyn Styler, Adjunct Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Swanson School of Engineering and Robotics Scientist at PickNik, the course provides students with the opportunity to develop coding, wireless networking, and robotics skills vital to mechanical engineering. For some students, the course has illuminated new pathways to pursue after graduation.

“Given the wide interest of students in our department and the growing robotics industry here in Pittsburgh, we realized that we needed to give students an opportunity to get hands-on experience in this field,” said Clark, who developed and taught the course last year with Professor Mark Miller.

This fall, Clark collaborated with Styler, who has extensive expertise in software and robotics. The two expanded the breadth of the course to involve two types of robots—the playfully nicknamed pinchers and burgers (the former an articulated arm with a gripper, the latter a mobile circular unit).

The students, in pairs, built their burger robots from kits and set to work programming both the arm and the mover. In their lab space, they applied the concepts that they learned in lectures.

“My biggest takeaway was learning all the fundamentals and then actually implementing them—getting that hands-on experience working with inverse kinematics and motion planning, and learning more about the world of robots,” said Sam Kester, a fourth-year mechanical engineering student.

All semester, the teams worked toward their final project. They programmed the pinchers to retrieve a highlighter pen and place it in a storage bin connected to the burger. The burger would then maneuver through the maze and drop the pen at the other end. 

While all teams completed the same basic tasks, they did so differently, applying various navigation and sensing techniques. Students also developed different capabilities. Some pincher robots could sense the color of the pens, collecting only certain ones. One burger pushed the pen while others held it in a bin. Another even shot the pen out of its storage tube when it reached its destination.

“The students had freedom to show their creativity and grasp of robotics. With two robots, there are so many ways for them to demonstrate what they’ve learned,” said Styler. “And of course, since it’s robotics, there are many ways for it to go wrong.”

Indeed, during the final projects, as robots hit snags, students problem-solved in real time and soon had their creations on track. As one student, poring over the code on his laptop, said, “There’s so much to this.”

“A big part of this class has been error checking and perseverance. It's never going to work right the first time,” said Kester. “In the future, I hope to have a job where I can create and problem solve.”  

“To code for myself and work through these problems was a great experience,” added fellow fourth-year mechanical engineering student Angus Nicholson. “This course made me realize I’d like to move toward a design-based engineering career after graduation.”

See more pictures of the students and their robots in action.

That’s the challenge of turbulence. While it shows up everywhere and affects everything from air travel to blood flow, it is extremely difficult to calculate. Indeed, as the physicist Richard Feynman once said, “Turbulence is the most important unsolved problem of classical physics.”

The University of Pittsburgh’s Juan Jose Mendoza Arenas and Pennsylvania State University’s Xiang Yang hope a new form of computing might change that.

Professors Mendoza Arenas and Yang have received a highly competitive New Initiative Grant from the Charles E. Kaufman Foundation to design algorithms and model turbulence using quantum computers. The collaborative, two-year project titled “Small-Scale Turbulence as a Quantum System” seeks to advance understanding of turbulence and the potential of quantum computers to model complex systems. 

The challenge of modeling turbulence

Consider the smoke billowing from an extinguished candle. It starts in a smooth upward flow but soon breaks into eddies, which break into smaller eddies until each one dissipates. As they break apart, the eddies interact with other eddies, producing a random mix of length scales, where even a small change can alter flows.

Fully considering all these length scales leads to the vast complexity of dealing with turbulence. For instance, “to simulate the turbulent flow of air around an airplane wing under standard flight conditions could take a classical computer millions of years,” said Mendoza Arenas, an assistant professor in the Swanson School of Engineering’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science.

Traditional models focus on the largest motions while approximating the smaller ones. That saves computational power, but it doesn’t tell the full story, which matters for fields like engineering and medicine.

Turning to quantum computing

Increasingly, researchers are turning to quantum computers to help solve complex problems. Unlike classical computer systems, which are constrained by the binary logic of ones and zeros, quantum systems use quantum bits, or qubits. A qubit can represent any normalized combination (or superposition) of one and zero.

“Quantum computers function under the laws of quantum mechanics and can represent many possibilities simultaneously,” said Mendoza Arenas. “That opens the door to modeling complex systems like turbulence more naturally.”

Rather than treating turbulent flows as a single, fixed outcome, their project will use quantum mechanics to represent the random nature of turbulence.

The team will design new algorithms to run on quantum computers. They will test these algorithms on a quantum simulator, which mimics an actual quantum computer. “When we’re confident with our algorithm, we’ll run it on the actual system,” Mendoza Arenas said of the expensive, sensitive computers.

By combining expertise in fluid dynamics and quantum computing, Mendoza Arenas and Yang hope to develop more accurate and efficient models of turbulence and other multiscale systems, where behavior at small scales can have a big impact.

As the committee awarding this New Initiative Grant noted, “this research opens a high-risk, high-reward pathway towards scalable, physically grounded models for multiscale systems.” Such models could profoundly improve how engineers design vehicles, predict environmental flows, and understand the dynamics of the human body.

“The Design Expo is a unique opportunity for our students to gain real-world experience solving industry problems,” said Mary Besterfield-Sacre, Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Nickolas A. DeCecco Professor in Industrial Engineering. “Students are learning important skills that extend beyond developing their technical abilities. They’re working as a team and thinking creatively. They’re using their hands and innovating. I’m grateful for everyone—from faculty and staff to industry partners and volunteer judges, and of course our students—who make this amazing event happen.”

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 government agencies, nonprofits, and industry sponsored teams as well, providing valuable insight while students developed their projects.

Winners below. Visit Flickr for the Expo Photo Album.

Best Overall Project
GaN Motor Controller 
Fredrick Laudati, Connor Watson, and Joseph Zaradzki

People’s Choice Award
Adaptive Assist Robotic Joint 
Elizabeth Novikova, Julia Koma, and Jillian Zitcovich

DEPARTMENT AWARDS

Bioengineering

1^st 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

2^nd Place High Frequency Oscillatory Ventilation Chest Wiggle Detection Device
Isabella Hsia, Isabelle Lisi, Connor Rees, and Jaiden Steele

3^rd Place Streamlining Transabdominal Ultrasound-Guided Oocyte Extraction Process
Sydney Barber, Ashlyn Odenwald, Ishan Patel, Arshia Shams, Colby Shores, Astrid Yerardi, and Lyric Zimmermann

Civil and Environmental Engineering

1^st Place (tie)
Oakdale Pump Station
Anna Abelev, Owen Gaskill, Patrick Lovenguth, and David Nisula

Clearwell Replacement
Marie Flinchbaugh, Lily Leh, Jack Schlegel, and Julianna Sergi

2^nd Place ALCOSAN Primary Sedimentation Basin
Quincey Kilbridge, Julia Resch, and Sameer Ul Haque M Sayed

Electrical and Computer Engineering

1^st Place GaN Motor Controller
Fredrick Laudati, Connor Watson, and Joseph Zaradzki

2^nd Place VR Tremor Assessment System During MRgFUS
Colton Tamburri, Aidan Uher, and Noble Woodall

3^rd Place Paint the Canvas
Connor Marsh, William Muckelroy, Connor Murray, and Greg Soltys

Industrial Engineering

1^st Place Enhancing Productivity with 5S Solutions for Tooling and Calibration Management
Alison Bergkoetter, Christos Mavrogeorgis, Maiah Ruby, and Rylee Shaffer

2^nd Place Steel Coil Transfer Optimization Using SIMIO
Jake Johnson, Alison Ngau, Morgan Powers, and Henry Veltum

3^rd Place Project Centargo: Enhancing Bayer’s Injector Line Production for Optimum Efficiency 
Cameron Case, Tara Nguyen, Ethan Snyder, and Jason Wiedmann

Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science

1^st Place Remote Control Vehicle for Use in Contaminated Environments
Sebastian Carre Jordan, Jacob Korus, Caelin Langton, Angus Nicholson, and John Profozich

2^nd Place Advanced Head and Neck Support System for Patients with Disorders of Consciousness (DoC)
Owen Bishop, Jared Kartschoke, Aishani Ramoju, Randy Saintjean, and Rachel Thomas

3^rd Place Functional Requirements for Thermal Fatigue and Additive Manufacturing
Tanay Agrawal, Ethan Kinyon, Dylan Noker, and Gabriel Warriner

Medical Product Prototyping

1^st Place Perfect Pessary
Francesca Chioda, Karla Frank, Kyla Frenja, Angelina Pribozie, and Jace Statam

2^nd Place MicroTymp
Saif Abbas, Mateen Atassi, Bharath Ramineni, and Peter Wood

Product Realization 

1^st Place Canales Cleaning Device
Josh Lee, Mike Lee, Kyla Frenja, Adam Price, and Sophia Roa

Pitt launched the Infrastructure Sensing Collaboration (UPISC) Workshops in 2022 to harness the collective knowledge and creative problem-solving of researchers and industry and government partners across the region. Building on the tremendous energy of these annual workshops, in June of 2025, INSITES was born. The new consortium of industry and government partners collaborates with researchers to prepare the next generation of infrastructure leaders and to transform predictive monitoring.

“With advances in machine learning, artificial intelligence, digital twin modeling, and sensing technology, we have the potential to profoundly change how we monitor aging critical infrastructure. But developing and implementing new solutions requires a sustained, collaborative, transdisciplinary approach—which is at the heart of INSITES,” said Paul Ohodnicki, RK Mellon Faculty Fellow in Energy and associate professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at the Swanson School of Engineering. 

Each year, Pitt Research awards five types of Momentum Grants to promote innovative projects that involve transdisciplinary teams of Pitt researchers. These grants fuel exceptional research and creative projects. Scaling Grants specifically help “multi-disciplinary teams to competitively scale their research efforts in targeted pursuit of large-scale external funding.”

The transdisciplinary team leading the project includes:

• Paul Ohodnick, RK Mellon Faculty Fellow in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science
• Piervincenzo Rizzo, professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
• Zachary Harris, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science
• William Harbert, ORISE Research Associate and professor of Geophysics
• Amy Babay, assistant professor in the School of Computing and Information
• Ruishu Wright, technical portfolio lead at the National Energy Technology Laboratory
• Chase Klingensmith, Civic Technology & Policy Analyst at City of Pittsburgh

With the Momentum Funds award, INSITES will pursue three overarching objectives:

1. Build and strengthen community across the Pitt campus by collaborative research.
2. Engage stakeholders to build relationships and promote external research in critical infrastructure sensing.
3. Pursue collaborative external funding among faculty and project participants with regional and national stakeholders. 

INSITES will also use the seed funding to launch three important initiatives:

1. Demonstrating critical infrastructure sensing integrated with digital twin modeling. Principal investigators will demonstrate 24/7 structural health monitoring (SHM) by using sensing and digital twin technology on one or more bridges in Pittsburgh.
2. Collaborating with the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) and City of Pittsburgh to monitor areas at high risk of hazards such as landslides using acoustic and traditional sensing technology, including a linear dark fiber array.
3. Enhancing and formalizing national leadership on the topic of infrastructure sensing, leveraging relationships, collaborations, and partnerships while soliciting funding from federal agencies to support wider adoption of new sensing technology. 

“We’re honored to receive this support from Pitt Research,” Ohodnicki said. “We’re excited to usher in the next generation of sensing technology and propel what we started in 2022 at the first UPISC workshop and what has grown into INSITES.”

Luckily for the fields of urology and biomechanics, that hasn’t stopped Robertson and her team from trying to understand it — a commitment that’s led to a collaboration between the University of Pittsburgh and University of Sheffield to develop the first digital twin of the bladder — and a new publication revealing that bladders don’t fill up like a simple balloon as previously thought, but instead have large inner folds that expand and retract to accommodate changes in volume and pressure.

“The bladder remains one of the most underexplored organs in the biomechanics community,” said mechanical engineering and materials science (MEMS) PhD candidate Fatemeh Azari, “and this publication decisively bridges a gap in knowledge that has persisted for over three decades.”

Led by Azari and Robertson, distinguished service professor of mechanical engineering and materials science (MEMS) at the Swanson School of Engineering, the team’s findings, “Elucidating the high compliance mechanism by which the urinary bladder fills under low pressures,” were published in the July 2025 edition of Scientific Reports.

The group’s main objective was to uncover how the bladder fills with urine at low pressure by examining both its structure and function. While previous studies proposed that small folds (rugae) in the bladder wall allow it to expand, the team found that much larger folds, about ten times bigger than once thought, are the key to its flexibility. Using high-resolution micro-CT and multiphoton imaging, the team analyzed how the bladder wall changed shape as it filled in a rat model.

“When we looked at the bladder’s geometry, we realized it was so much more complex than what had been previously thought.” Azari said. “The bladder wall thickness isn’t uniform, and what used to look like empty spaces on earlier CT scans were actually full of collagen and elastin structures that we could finally see by using multiphoton imaging.”

A complementary experiment then linked these changes to pressure–volume behavior during filling, using a customized imaging-inflation system to visualize the mechanisms behind how bladders fill. The team discovered that the large-scale folds that formed during voiding drove over 95% of the urine out of the bladder. These folds then flattened during filling, enabling the bladder to fill with very little increase in pressure — a critical component for protecting the kidneys and avoiding leakage.

“We observed that bladder filling occurs in two distinct phases, rather than behaving like a simple expanding balloon.” Azari said. “The first phase involves a large increase in volume with minimal pressure change, followed by a high-pressure phase where pressure rises sharply as the bladder continues to fill.”

The team’s study marks the first full-organ mechanical test to capture how a healthy bladder fills, providing critical insight into urological conditions like bladder outlet obstruction (BOO). A common disorder in aging men, the flow of urine from the bladder into the urethra is blocked, causing the bladder to enlarge, thicken, and lose efficiency. Looking ahead, Robertson hopes to continually adapt this model to understand better treatment methods for conditions like BOO and bladder cancer.

“A common treatment for BOO is to surgically reduce the obstruction by removing part of the prostrate with the goal of regaining healthy function.” Robertson said. “Even this invasive treatment fails in about one third of the cases. We're creating a digital twin model for the BOO bladder so that we can determine which patient factors affect outcome and identify more effective personalized treatment strategies.” 

This work was supported by National Institutes of Health National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) grants R01 AG056944 and R01 DK133434. Along with Azari and Robertson, authors include Simon Watkins, Yasutaka Tobe, Lori A. Birder, Naoki Yoshimura and Kanako Matsuoka at the University of Pittsburgh, Christopher Hardin, University of Missouri School of Medicine, and Paul N. Watton, University of Sheffield, UK. 

Through the Plus3 Transfer Plus Program, students explore the intersections of engineering, technology, and society in the Czech Republic. Thanks to renewed scholarship support from the Maiorana Trust of the Nationality Rooms & Intercultural Exchange Programs, 15 scholarships, each worth up to $3,500, will be available for 2026 participants in the two-week, three-credit program. 

“Even though we design our programs to be as cost-effective as possible, airfare and travel costs can still be barriers,” said Alicia Olalde, director of Global Experiences and Engagement at the Swanson School. “Having dedicated scholarship funding for this program helps us ensure that more of our students have access to global learning opportunities.”

The program immerses students in the engineering, cultural, and historical context of Prague, and highlights industrial ties between the Czech Republic and Pittsburgh. Led by Mary Besterfield-Sacre, senior associate dean for academic affairs and director of the Engineering Education Research Center, the program features a mix of company and university visits along with cultural excursions, including stops at the Bohemian Innovation Center, automobile manufacturer Škoda, historic sites such as Terezín and Kutná Hora, and visits to silver mines, cathedrals, power plants, and more. 

“Sometimes you can’t see how engineering impacts societies unless you’re looking at it from a perspective that’s not usual to you.” Besterfield-Sacre said. “When you’re born and raised in Pennsylvania, you can get used to certain things, but when you look at engineering as an outsider, you can pick up on insights you might have missed before, which is fundamentally why we bring these students abroad.” 

14 Swanson School students were awarded Nationality Room scholarships from the Maiorana Foundation for the summer 2025 program. For third-year bioengineering student Amaris Mbuagbaw, who traveled to Prague with the program last summer, the experience deepened her understanding of global research and collaboration. Even with visits to the International Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry and learning about cancer research in the Czech Republic, Mbuagbaw found that one of the strengths of the program was its interdisciplinary nature. 

“Initially, I thought I would learn more about bioengineering, but my final paper was actually more focused on civil and environmental engineering.” Mbuagbaw said. “Going on this trip, you can really think outside the box and invest your time into learning different things that are technically not in your field of study.” 

Unlike other SSOE Plus3 programs for first-year students, this program is open to SSOE sophomores, juniors, and seniors, and priority acceptance is given to students who have transferred into the school. Scholarship applications are open until December 1, 2025, and the complete program application is due January 28th, 2026. 

“I think being a responsible engineer today means developing a global perspective,” Olalde said. “Engineering solutions aren’t one-size-fits-all—the right answer in Pittsburgh may look very different in West Virginia, South Africa, or the Czech Republic. You have to design with context in mind, and there’s no better way to learn that than through experiential opportunities like Plus3.

Don’t have a passport? The Swanson School’s Global Experiences and Engagement Office is offering a passport raffle to support first-time U.S. passport applicants, funded through generous alumni donations. Eligible students must be U.S. citizens who have never held a passport and are graduating after 2027. Winners will receive reimbursement of application and execution fees (up to $165) upon submitting proof of application by January 31, 2026. The raffle closes on Wednesday, November 19 at midnight, with winners announced the following day. Apply now!

That year, fighting cabin fever, Raul Casas and his college roommate began building wooden skateboarding structures and transporting them to an abandoned lot in Oakland’s Panther Hollow. Soon, skaters from around Pittsburgh, equally starved for community, began showing up, and with them came sounds that had grown foreign: laughter, encouragement, the whir of wheels on pavement, the click of a skater landing a trick.

Casas, then a mechanical engineering student at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering (BS MEMS ’22), established what today is the Oakland DIY, an officially recognized skatepark filled with concrete structures. In 2024, before Casas left Pittsburgh, he passed the project to another Pitt mechanical engineering student, Andrew (AJ) Haddon. Together, with tremendous support from the community, the two have engineered a thriving community place.  

Wood

Growing up outside of Philadelphia, Casas was introduced to engineering by his dad, an electrical engineer. “He would show me what he was working on,” Casas said. “His work is more computer based, but I’ve always been hands on and went into mechanical engineering.”

At 15, he started skateboarding and fell in love with the sport, which since the 1950s has connected fellow skaters from across towns and even the world. 

As skateboarding evolved, so did structures like half-pipes, ramps, rails, boxes, even stairs, which drew skaters to congregate to test their skills and find creative ways to land tricks. These structures would eventually form the crux of the Oakland DIY skatepark.

In 2018, Casas came to Pitt to study engineering. There weren’t many places to skate around Oakland, and after the pandemic hit, he decided to help change that. He built the first wooden structure and kept going. “As an engineer, I’ve always loved to build stuff.” 

As an engineer, Casas also knew that the wooden structures wouldn’t last long in the Pittsburgh weather. By 2021, he realized it was time to build something more permanent. And fortuitously, he was about to meet someone who shared his passion for building a skatepark.

Concrete

AJ Haddon’s interest in engineering started in Sandpoint, Idaho, where each summer the Chicago native would visit relatives who own a logging operation. As a boy, the huge trucks and excavators fascinated him, and his interest hasn’t waned.  

In 2022, Haddon enrolled in the Swanson School of Engineering after visiting Pittsburgh and realizing, as he said, “how cool the city was.” The day he moved into his dorm, he saw an Instagram post from a skateboarder. “They were pouring concrete and needed help.”

“AJ helped on every pour that we did,” Casas said. “Concrete pour days are exciting, and many people come to help, but the days leading up to them aren’t as fun. Fewer people show. AJ, however, was always there.”

Haddon, who started skating in fifth grade, loved it. He enjoyed constructing the forms and laying rebar and mixing concrete. He was meeting new skateboarders, learning more about the scene in Pittsburgh, and applying what he was learning in school.

Feature by feature, Casas, Haddon, and a team of dedicated skateboarders, rollerbladers, and BMX and scooter riders began transforming the abandoned lot into a connected series of concrete structures.

In the process, the two mechanical engineers became close friends. As Haddon said of Casas, “He mentored me through my first years of college. We had the same classes and professors. He taught me everything he knew about building the skatepark, and he left me with this huge project to finish.”

Community

“At first I had zero idea what I was doing,” Casas said, “but other skateboarders were coming here, old heads from Pittsburgh who had experience. I’m still so grateful for them.”

Casas also found that the skills he was learning in school would benefit the skatepark. He began designing new structures using computer aided design (CAD) software.

As Haddon became more involved and then took over the project, his engineering education was equally useful. In addition to using CAD, he investigated Pennsylvania building codes and city safety standards and load-bearing structures. He modeled complicated features using simulation software to uphold the standards.

“I was doing all the calculations,” he said. “I knew that we needed to overbuild it.”

Engineering a skatepark went far beyond modeling structures and mixing concrete. Casas and Haddon maintained GoFundMe and Venmo accounts, where they have raised more than $20,000 to build new structures. They’ve tracked down donations of concrete, railings, and even astroturf. They’ve managed builds. They’ve even begun hosting events with food trucks and bands.

Outreach

This fall, Haddon learned a new skill: advocacy.

During the summer, a Panther Hollow homeowner launched an effort to shut down the skatepark. For two months, construction was halted.

Before he knew it, Haddon was creating presentations to share with the Pittsburgh City Council. He organized fellow supporters to testify at a City Hall hearing to decide the fate of the park. Eighty supporters attended and forty, including Haddon, spoke.    

Their efforts worked, and the Oakland DIY is now a recognized park. It continues to grow and has even begun to attract pro skating teams who have visited while touring parks around the country.

“It’s extraordinary,” Haddon said. “I get to build something that I love to do. I get to skate it and see other people skate it and appreciate it.”

Although Casas now lives in Norfolk, Virginia, where he repairs nuclear powered submarines and aircraft carriers at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, he still returns to Pittsburgh to skate the park that he helped build.

“We’re expanding, one corner at a time,” Haddon said. “There are still so many projects, but when we complete a new one, everyone comes and checks it out.”

He added, “Having a third place, a place that people love, is so important. Everyone needs their community.”

Increasingly common stories like these underscore the importance of building and sustaining a diverse ecosystem dedicated to developing resilient, secure systems that protect critical infrastructure.

The University of Pittsburgh has launched an effort to build such an ecosystem. Pitt’s Cyber Energy Center and Pitt Cyber will host a luncheon titled “Cyber Risk in Context” on November 7, from 12:00 - 2:00 p.m., in Benedum Hall as part of its ongoing mission to keep critical infrastructure safe from cyberattacks. 

This past August, the Cyber Energy Center and Pitt Cyber hosted a kick-off workshop to assess the state of cybersecurity through a transdisciplinary lens. The event attracted nearly 50 leaders in government, academia, and industry to explore the current state of cybersecurity and the challenges and opportunities of keeping infrastructure more resilient and safer from attack.

The “Cyber Risk in Context” luncheon builds upon this momentum. Leaders from across the region will convene to discuss developments, share new research and insights, and plan next steps. 

“A theme from our August workshop was the pace at which technology is enabling bad actors to find new ways to attack critical infrastructure,” said Erica Owen, associate professor in Pitt’s School of Public and International Affairs. “These evolving threats require a sustained, collaborative, and urgent effort.”

“We’re excited to continue this initiative that we kicked off this past summer,” said Daniel Cole, associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Director of the Cyber Energy Center. “Through events like this one, we hope to build and strengthen connections across government, industry, and academia to meet this challenge.”

The “Cyber Risk in Context” luncheon is free but limited to the first 40 registrants. To ensure a spot, RSVP today.

While countless hours in the lab have honed Gleeson’s ability to assess and develop robust materials, his leadership roles have revealed a unique capacity to bring out the best in engineering faculty, staff, and students.

For the past 12 years, Gleeson, who is the Harry S. Tack Chaired Professor of  Materials Science, has served as the Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science (MEMS) department chair. This past summer he stepped down to return to the faculty, but his passion for research and for supporting the program continues to leave an indelible imprint on the Swanson School of Engineering. 

A career that has crossed continents

Born and raised in London, Ontario, Canada, Gleeson excelled at math and science and was drawn to engineering. He earned his BS and MS in Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) at the University of Western Ontario in his hometown of London before receiving his PhD in MSE from UCLA.

“It was there,” Gleeson said, “that I got my first taste of California living and figured I’d keep heading south.”

Head south he did, all the way to Australia, where from 1990 to 1998 he served as a postdoctoral researcher and then a faculty member at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

Although he loved Australia and became a citizen, he was far from home. While on sabbatical in the US, Gleeson applied for and then accepted a faculty position at Iowa State University.

Two years later, he was appointed Director of the Materials and Engineering Physics Program at the Ames National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy lab focused on materials innovation.

“It was a large program,” Gleeson remembered. “It gave me my first experience in administration, working with a diverse group of individuals.”  

Serving the department

In 2007, Pitt recruited Gleeson to serve as the Harry S. Tack Chaired Professor, where he would continue to lead through his research into the high temperature oxidation and corrosion and degradation of materials. Pitt had a longstanding reputation as a leader in the study of high-temperature corrosion, with eminent faculty like Fred Pettit, Gerald Meier, and Neil Birks.

A year later, Gleeson was again pulled toward administration as the inaugural director of Pitt’s Center for Energy, a transdisciplinary initiative to advance energy research. A top accomplishment was helping the Center secure a $22 million grant from the RK Mellon Foundation.

In 2014, he was offered a new administrative position, as the MEMS chair. “It was an honor to be selected. I've always believed in the importance of faculty serving the department.”

Said Ed Eckert, BS MSE ’76, President of Apogee Technology, Inc. and who sits on the MEMS Visiting Committee, “I’ve worked with many people with strong academic acumen and then with others who have strong leadership skills. You don’t always find people who exemplify both qualities like Brian. For Brian, finances and research are a means to facilitate teaching, not the converse.”

Brendan Connolly, PhD MEMS ’16, Vice President of Steelmaking Technology at ELLWOOD Quality Steels and also a Visiting Committee member, added, “Brian has been an incredible advocate of the MEMS department, the students, the Swanson School, and Pitt.”

Under Gleeson’s leadership, the MEMS Department experienced significant and sustained growth across all major metrics. Today, MEMS is the largest Swanson School department, with approximately 650 undergraduate students and over 200 graduate students in mechanical engineering, materials science, and engineering science.

Through strategic faculty recruitment, Gleeson expanded and strengthened the department’s research portfolio, establishing recognized expertise in emerging and high-impact areas such as energy, quantum computing, computational engineering, and functional materials, while continuing to support and enhance existing research strengths. Notably, the department’s annual research expenditures—an indicator of external funding from government and industry—have increased by 413% since he was appointed department chair, reflecting both the department’s rising national prominence and the success of its faculty.

Leading with integrity and heart

“One of the most exciting and important responsibilities as chair is hiring and developing young faculty,” Gleeson said. “You have to facilitate, and you have to cheerlead.”

In 2022, Zachary Harris, assistant professor of materials science, came to Pitt from the University of Virginia in part because of Gleeson. “There are two things I value most about Brian: his honesty and his overall character. I accepted this job because I felt like Brian had my success at heart. His actions have proved true since I’ve started here.”

As Michele Manuel, the U. S. Steel Dean of the Swanson School, said, “Brian has imbued a deep sense of trust throughout the department, which is reflected in the continuous, upward trajectory of productivity at every level.”

“Our department covers three distinct fields,” said Harris. “Brian has done a great job managing such a diverse group of people.”

Gleeson’s approach, his ability to find consensus and to help others thrive, extended beyond MEMS faculty.

“Brian always took care of the staff and recognized them,” said Michael McConegly, the department administrator for MEMS. “He always provided time for us and kept his office open, even at the expense of his own research.”

McConegly, with his unique window into the department, has been especially impressed with Gleeson’s steadying influence. “Brian guided us through Covid and through leadership changes, providing strong leadership and support that kept the department together.”

Focusing on what matters most

Before the start of each school year, Gleeson would show the MEMS faculty what the students pay in tuition. “It’s important that we never lose sight of what matters most at Pitt: the students.”

Gleeson’s commitment to students and their ability to thrive at Pitt is reflected in his leadership in establishing the Student Advisory Board, formed in 2020 to give voice to underrepresented students in MEMS.

“It started with me and the student representatives meeting regularly, but then it grew,” said Gleeson. “It had faculty participation and became very productive. Through the dialogue you can start to appreciate how there are barriers.”  

“It’s important to engage with students and ensure that they're being looked after,” he added. “Student organizations and clubs build community.”

In addition to these groups, Gleeson was always willing to help individual students reach their potential, as Scott McElhinny, BS MEMS ’23, discovered during his senior design capstone with two fellow students.

“For the project,” McElhinny said, “we were helping develop an efficient, inexpensive combustor for home heating and power generation systems. It was like a jet engine.”

After graduation, Gleeson helped the three students set up in the subbasement of Benedum Hall to test the system. “This was after graduation, when he had no obligation to help us. But he understood the value of letting us run the system and learn through the testing process,” McElhinny added. “We had an afterburner going, with flames shooting out the back, and he made sure we had everything we needed to safely test and troubleshoot it.”

For McElhinny, who now works at Aerotech, a precision automation and control company, the experience has had a profound impact: “Getting to test and prove the device worked changed how I approach problems and has shaped how I take on large projects, which I do all the time now.”

Returning to research

Since stepping down, Gleeson has been, in his own words, “Decompressing.”

That doesn’t mean slowing down. The research he started in Ontario fascinates him as much today as it did then. “It’s quieter here in my new office on the eighth floor. I can give more of my attention to the literature, and there are new papers to be written.”

And service to his research community to be done. Gleeson directs the High-Temperature Corrosion Testing Laboratory at Pitt and serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the journal “High Temperature Corrosion of Materials.”

For his contributions, a 2024 Material Science and Technology conference held a special international symposium in his name.

Gleeson’s passion for discovery has taken him around the world and back and has garnered him numerous accolades. Whether developing resilient alloys or guiding a thriving department, he has a rare ability to uncover the right elements for success.

Surface Design Solutions, which launched in 2023, uses a novel physics-informed AI platform to improve surface design and evaluation across a range of industries, from medical devices to flooring to metal working. The company helps manufacturers create optimal surfaces to make better products at lower cost.

For Jacobs, who took an entrepreneurial leave this past summer from the Swanson School of Engineering, the recognition was an honor—and a reflection of his commitment to the science of surfaces.

The pure science

“I didn’t plan to be an entrepreneur,” said Jacobs, the William Kepler Whiteford Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science. “I thought my colleagues and I would do the science, and companies would read the journals and implement it themselves.”

Before earning his PhD in Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and coming to Pitt, Jacobs was an engineer at a medical device company where he had many tools to test the shape and dimensions of parts.

“That wasn’t the case when it came to defining and characterizing surfaces,” Jacobs remembered. “Yet surface roughness is essential to performance of so many tools and devices.”

The challenge to accurately characterize surface roughness inspired Jacobs. “I’ve spent the last decade devoted to the pure science of surfaces.”

In 2022, he launched the international Surface-Topography Challenge with his long-time collaborator and a co-founder of the startup, Lars Pastewka, as well as Martin Müser and Arushi Pradhan. The research produced the most comprehensive statistical description of a surface yet.

While proud of the work he and other researchers were doing, Jacobs “didn't feel like the science of surface performance was breaking through to manufacturing.”

A reluctant entrepreneur

In 2016, Jacobs and Pastewka launched contact.engineering, a free website that helps companies implement the science of surface performance. While some manufacturers used the valuable resource, Jacobs was steadfast in his desire to make the science more accessible.

He began to engage directly with companies, asking how they measured surfaces and characterized roughness. His research team worked with manufacturers directly, but, as he said, “It was a slow process.”

His eureka moment came in 2021. “We realized that we could combine the scientific advancements made by our group and other great groups in the field with the concept of physics-informed machine learning to solve the problem,” Jacobs said.

Unlike many traditional AI systems, which are trained on vast amounts of data, the model that Jacobs and his team developed is based on physics, which predicts how surfaces will function. With their new technology, they can model and evaluate surface performance in hours instead of years.

“I wanted the technology to get out into the world,” he said, “but I had this view that someone else would just run with it.”

Paul Petrovich from Pitt’s Innovation Institute, where Jacobs submitted an invention disclosure, helped him embrace the new role of entrepreneur. As Jacobs said, “He reminded me that it was our team that knew the technology the best and that cared about it the most.”

The goal remains the same

This past summer, Jacobs took an entrepreneurial leave of absence from Pitt, while still supervising graduate students and his lab. He also remains engaged with the Surface-Topography Challenge. “I am staying actively involved in the community of scientists and researchers that are advancing the science of what is possible to control and predict.”

Jacobs sees his life’s work as advancing the science of surface performance. Having the time to scale up his company and see how far it can go is “just an extension of that.”

“I'm becoming a better scientist by learning what manufacturers are doing in the real world and what they're struggling with and how to help them. I’m becoming a better entrepreneur by keeping up with the bleeding-edge science of surface performance,” Jacobs said. “The goal, my goal, is the same.”

R&D World has recognized Ohodnicki and his team of collaborators with 2025 R&D 100 Awards, this year for two emerging technologies: VulcanAlloy and eMission Critical Sensor. The worldwide science and innovation competition celebrates “novelty, impact, and practical applications in fields like materials science, biotechnology, energy, and more.”

“We work on problems that matter as opposed to ones that just interest us,” said Ohodnicki, RK Mellon Faculty Fellow in Energy and associate professor of mechanical engineering and materials science (MEMS). “We also work on problems that fuel relationships and facilitate technology transfer.”

Forging VulcanAlloy

To advance inductor technology that could power lander and rover systems for as long as 60 days on Venus’ harsh surface, the Pitt team collaborated with NASA Glenn Research Center, CorePower Magnetics, and Raytheon to create VulcanAlloy.

The collaboration has yielded a new class of high-temperature soft magnetic nanocomposite alloys that can withstand high temperatures continuously approaching 500 degrees Celsius. Alternative materials previously developed for extreme environments were only demonstrated for temperatures in the 200- to 250-degree Celsius range.

“We had previously developed a class of novel soft magnetic nanocomposite alloys,” said Ohodnicki. “We modified the chemistry of those alloys to stabilize the structure of the materials and expand their capabilities, allowing them to handle long-term operations in highly corrosive conditions that are unprecedented.”

The technology was developed under a Pitt-led project funded by NASA HOTTech. Pitt has partnered with NASA Glenn Research Center to develop the alloy and scale the technology; CorePower Magnetics to further scale the technology and design, fabricate, and demonstrate an inductor using these alloys; and Raytheon to validate the inductor in conditions relevant to aviation and aerospace.

“This is one of those projects where having all the right organizations at the table has been so important in creating the potential for commercial and real-world impact,” said Ohodnicki.

Illuminating rare earth elements

Rare earth elements (REEs), vital in new technologies, are more common than their name suggests. In fact, research has found that coal waste streams could potentially contain enough REE to cover U.S. domestic demand.

Extracting these elements, however, poses a significant and costly challenge. Just identifying if enough REE are found in a waste stream or feedstock to merit possible extraction has historically involved taking samples and sending them to a lab for analysis, an expensive and slow process that limits the economic and technological potential for recovery.

In 2016, while working at NETL, Ohodnicki began developing field sensor technology using fiber-optic-based probes that could identify REE right at the source. In 2019, he brought on Pitt PhD student Scott Crawford as an NETL post-doctoral fellow, beginning a collaboration that continues to date and has resulted in eMission Critical Sensing, a lightweight system that can be transported to waste streams or other sites with waste liquid or leachate, for example.

“When Paul brought me over to NETL for this exciting project, he asked me to develop a new sensing material that would work well in streams,” said Crawford, who now works at NETL as a staff scientist leading numerous projects in optical sensing and material characterization.

“Nathaniel Rosi's group at the University of Pittsburgh had pioneered a bio metal-organic framework (bio-MOF), an exciting class of materials that can induce luminescence from rare earth ions through photosensitization,” added Crawford. “I started working with the bio-MOF and explored how they could be used in this sensing.”

The technology they have created with other NETL inventors such as John Ahern, John Baltrus, Ward Burgess, and Ki-Joong Kim detects the presence of REEs and distinguishes which elements are present in an aqueous solution, often a waste stream but also adaptable to other applications. The system currently consists of a fiber-optic sensor probe connected to an LED light source and a detection unit, with a laptop used to monitor results. The commercialized product would integrate the entire system into a compact and optimized enclosure with custom-developed software, the natural next stage in the technology’s evolution.

“Scott has expanded the capabilities beyond rare earth elements, to identify additional critical metals including battery materials such as cobalt and possibly lithium in the future,” said Ohodnicki. “This system is about an order of magnitude lower in cost than lab-based systems, it operates in real-time to maximize value, and in principle it has a higher sensitivity level than other existing portable systems.”

“Having a long-time affiliation with the University of Pittsburgh and NETL, it’s exciting to have this opportunity to bring an award to both institutions and to the city of Pittsburgh, which has been my backyard for my whole life,” added Crawford.

R&D World is an organization dedicated to promoting and highlighting projects like these across industry, government, and universities through print journalism, their website, awards, and other media. They have hosted the R&D 100 Awards for 63 years. 

Last year, R&D World recognized Pitt for Ultrasonic Photonics, sensing technology developed in collaboration with NETL. The awards bring Dr. Ohodnicki’s total R&D 100 Awards to seven over his career and distinguishes him as a recipient for the last four years in a row while a Pitt faculty member.

The awards also highlights the strong and productive partnership between the University of Pittsburgh and NETL in major initiatives such as the University of Pittsburgh Infrastructure Sensing Collaboration (UPISC) workshop.

VulcanAlloy and eMissionCritical will be recognized at an R&D World awards ceremony held in Scottsdale, Arizona, on November 20, 2025. The event seeks to celebrate 100 leaders in innovation while fueling networking across industries and academic institutions.

On Tuesday, August 12, 2025, the University of Pittsburgh Cyber Energy Center and Pitt Cyber hosted “Transforming Cybersecurity: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Risk, Technology, and Policy.” The in-person, day-long workshop brought together experts from across industries and disciplines to assess the current state of cybersecurity through a multidisciplinary lens.

More than 40 participants attended the workshop held at Pitt’s University Club in Oakland. During keynote addresses, panels, and an interactive discussion, they explored emerging technologies and the intersection of technology and policy.

“As the current cybersecurity landscape evolves and grows increasingly complex and costly, the need to bring together experts and stakeholders from across fields could not be greater,” said Erica Owen, Associate Professor in Pitt’s School of Public and International Affairs. “This workshop underscored the value of bringing those perspectives together.”

Cheri Caddy, Senior Cybersecurity Fellow at the McCrary Institute for Cyber and Critical Infrastructure Security, and Greg Shannon, Chief Cybersecurity Scientist at the Idaho National Laboratory, provided the keynote addresses.

Caddy, who has also served in governmental roles such as Senior Advisor for Cybersecurity for the U.S. Department of Energy and as Director of Cybersecurity Policy on the National Security Council, opened the event with her talk “Transforming Cybersecurity.” She highlighted the persistent challenges of a siloed approach to cybersecurity and espoused a more unified ecosystem that brings together parties in and outside of government. She discussed the importance of shifting cybersecurity efforts to “left of boom” (acting proactively, before an attack happens) and the need to adopt a joint private-public model for risk reallocation.

Shannon, in his talk “New Horizons in Cybersecurity and Risk,” discussed current attitudes toward risk and the potential and the challenges of certified software and formal methods (a mathematical approach to verifying software) to help build more secure systems. In addressing the emerging role of artificial intelligence (AI) in developing software, he stressed its potential and risk as well as the need for both slow and fast thinking.

“At the Cyber Energy Center, our work is guided by the question, ‘What if we change cybersecurity by a tall order?’” said Daniel Cole, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Director of the Cyber Energy Center. “Finding that answer won’t happen overnight and, as Cheri and Greg both expressed in their keynotes, it won’t happen in a silo. That’s why this multidisciplinary approach is so essential.”

In addition to the keynote addresses, the workshop included two panel discussions. The first, “Perspectives on Risk,” featured Derek Brown, Director of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure at EQT; Jim Gillespie, Co-founder and Chief Growth Officer of GrayMatter; Mark Hairston, General Industries Practice Leader at Seubert & Associates; and moderator Sarah Scheffler, Assistant Professor of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. The panelists from across the energy, technology, and insurance industries shared their unique perspectives on risk and how companies and organizations approach cyberattack prevention. 

The second panel, “Certification and Policy,” was chaired by Cheri Caddy and featured panelists Chad Heitzenrater, Senior Information Scientist at RAND Pittsburgh; Zia Hydari, Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Pitt; and Samuel Perl, Senior Member at Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute. They explored the intersection between public policy and technology, discussing the complexity of certifying software, the challenges of developing policy as technology rapidly evolves, and role of regulation in the U.S. and worldwide.

The workshop concluded with an interactive discussion titled “Designing the Future of Cybersecurity.” Robert Cunningham, Vice Chancellor for Research Instructure at Pitt, led the session, in which participants identified and discussed key themes from the workshop and charted a path forward for future multidisciplinary collaboration.

“We are grateful for Pitt Cyber’s generous funding and for all the people who helped organize and who participated in this amazing event,” said Owen. “This workshop is the beginning of a long-term effort to bring together many voices to build a stronger, safer cyber infrastructure.”

After enrolling in Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering, a program called STEMnetX would lead them to that doorway in Schenley Place, home of Pitt Space. They’d taken different routes to the Swanson School, but both shared a passion for space exploration.

“All this time,” Samiya said, “I didn’t realize my biggest interest had been right down the street from our engineering classes.”

All their roads led to the Swanson School

Samiya, a Philadelphia native, has always loved space. “In fourth grade, when we reached the space unit, my teacher got 100 percent of my attention,” she said.

Her family later moved to Harrisburg, where her high school algebra instructor screened Hidden Figures. The movie, about three Black women who worked at NASA during the Space Race, gave her new insight into her future.  

“I know it might sound cliché,” she said, “but that was the moment I realized there was a place for me in physics and space engineering too.”

Samiya would go on to earn a BA in physics from Duquesne as part of a three-plus-two dual-degree major program. After her third year, she came to Pitt to pursue a BS in mechanical engineering and a certificate in Innovation, Product Design, and Entrepreneurship.

Akriti’s journey began on the other side of the globe. In 2016, during her freshman year in high school, she and her family emigrated from Janakpur, Nepal, to Pittsburgh.

Akriti loved astronomy, but at Pitt she followed in her older sister’s footsteps, studying pre-med. “I was all set on becoming a doctor, but after my first year, I felt lost. My friends told me about engineering, and I was intrigued because I already liked physics.”

Launching to Pitt Space

In the spring of 2024, Associate Professor Matthew Barry, with a reputation for seeing the potential in his students, told them about summer fellowship opportunities through STEMnetX. The nonprofit initiative was developed by Rama Bala, a faculty member in the Pitt Space program, to promote STEM education and careers in underserved communities.

Akriti and Samiya applied, were accepted, and in June traveled to Washington, PA, for a weeklong STEM boot camp at William & Jefferson College.

It was, Samiya recalled, “an intense week,” with daily Python coding courses, seminars, and networking. However, one day the participants in STEMnetX’s Space Engineering Pathways pilot program left for a tour of Pitt, which was when Akriti and Samiya discovered the Pitt Space program in Schenley Place. Their experience was a revelation.

“It was inspiring to meet graduate students and professors involved in projects that were on the International Space Station,” Akriti said.

Schenley Place also houses the NSF Center for Space, High-Performance & Resilient Computing (SHREC), the nation's leading academic research center in the field of computer and electrical engineering for mission-critical systems, from spacecraft to supercomputers. SHREC is “mission control” for experiments currently in orbit on the ISS.

“I thought, ‘This is crazy.’ NASA is my dream job—even if I just work there one summer as an intern,” Samiya said. “The trip was part two of my Hidden Figures moment because I realized how many people around me have similar interests and how the school fuels those interests.”

Another window into the real world

For Akriti and Samiya, STEMnetX has offered an out-of-this-world experience, while the opportunities they’ve had at the Swanson School have made engineering more tangible.  

Samiya for example was a MEMS Facilitating Inclusive Research Experiences (FIRE) Summer Research Intern, working with Associate Professor Patrick Smolinski. She studied quadricep tendons in ACL reconstruction surgery, testing their ultimate strengths, and applying different forces to simulate how the tendons would react in a body.

“My passion is with space, but my interests in engineering are wide ranging,” said Samiya, who will resume the research this fall. “In the lab, we’re working with cadavers and collaborating with orthopedic surgeons to advance understanding of quadricep grafts.”

In 2024, Akriti began working with Barry, who is developing a next-generation radioisotope thermoelectric generator. Akriti models and analyzes thermal insulators under different conditions and is helping construct a numerical model of plate fins on the thermoelectric generator. “I want to understand every aspect of what I’m doing,” she said.

Stepping confidently into the future

In the spring, Akriti’s and Samiya’s paths will again diverge. Samiya, who wants to be a design engineer in the aerospace and aviation industry, is taking a quick detour to law school.   

“I want to study intellectual property, which will go hand in hand with my engineering design career.”

Akriti plans to continue her research in grad school. “The STEMnetX program and my work with Dr. Barry have combined my two main interests: space and research.

“Research is such an important aspect of a student’s experience. I’m so glad I’ve had this opportunity to understand why I’m doing this—why I want to do it. I know I’m on the right path, and in my graduate school interviews, I can show that this is what I’ve wanted,” Akriti said.

“And I love it.”

The University of Pittsburgh’s Tevis Jacobs and the University of Freiburg’s Lars Pastewka have teamed up with Saarland University’s Martin Müser and Jacobs’ graduate student Arushi Pradhan to conduct a worldwide challenge to increase awareness of how surface topography is measured and described. The results of their research are published in the article “The Surface-Topography Challenge: A multi-laboratory benchmark study to advance the characterization of topography” (DOI: 10.1007/s11249-025-02014-y) in Tribology Letters.

Jacobs, William Kepler Whiteford Professor in mechanical engineering and materials science, studies surface performance, particularly adhesion, friction, and wear with applications from slip-and-fall accidents, to the function of medical devices, to the manufacturing of computer chips. These applications depend on the roughness of surfaces, or their topography, and variations in topography profoundly impact how objects interact with the world.

“Roughness matters down to the nanometer scale,” Jacobs said. In robotics, for example, the ability of a gripper to retrieve fragile items in a warehouse depends on topography across many different size scales. However, as he noted, “any individual measurement can’t fully describe a surface.”

“The industry-standard methods for measuring and characterizing roughness work well in certain cases, but they are limited in the information they contain and the predictive power they can provide,” added Pastewka, a professor in the Department of Microsystems Engineering and a long-time collaborator with Jacobs.

When scientific researchers measure surfaces, they often don’t use the industry-standard metrics, in favor of more precise measurements and more complex surface descriptors. But the problem is that there are a wide array of tools, techniques, and mathematical models that can be applied by different researchers.

“You might think of it like the parable of the blind men and the elephant,” said Jacobs. “To try to understand the large animal, each blind man puts a hand on a different part of its body and reaches a completely different conclusion about it. 

“Each scientific researcher measures an aspect of the surface, but different techniques and different size scales create remarkably different pictures of a single object.”

Challenging the scientific community to get a more complete picture

In 2015, Martin Müser, a professor of materials solutions, launched his Contact-Mechanics Challenge by creating a computer-based topographical surface, which he sent out to researchers. These scholars applied whatever theories, calculations, and models they wanted to compute its properties and solve an adhesion-related problem. Their methods were compared and assessed for their efficacy.

Müser’s challenge represented a high point in modeling roughness, and Jacobs and Pastewka were impressed. They wondered: what if we did that with a real-world surface?

At a 2022 Gordon Research Conference, Jacobs, Pastewka, Müser, and University of Pittsburgh postdoctoral scholar Nathaniel Miller announced the Surface-Topography Challenge. Using the same technology used to create microchips, the team created two different surfaces, one smooth, the other rougher, both coated in chromium nitride. Samples were mass produced for uniformity.

The team then sent samples of both surfaces to anyone who requested to participate. Participants were asked to measure the surfaces using whichever tools and techniques they preferred, and then to upload their raw data to a central repository.

Although the team worried that only a few researchers would participate, they were surprised and grateful that more than 150 people participated, from universities, national labs, and companies. Altogether, there were participants from 64 groups across 20 countries; participants submitted a total of 2,088 individual measurements.

Said Müser, “Seeing such a large number of participants in the Surface-Topography Challenge reflects the widespread interest in advancing our understanding of topography and how we can best measure it.”

“The simulation community has made tremendous advances in predicting the performance of rough surfaces, but these advances have had limited applicability because of a lack of comprehensive measurement of topography for real-world surfaces,” said Pastewka. “Now to get so many measurements of these two surfaces, we are gaining practical insights about how best to apply the theory in real-world manufacturing. The community participation has been inspiring.”

Finding a truer topography

Essential to the project, as Jacobs said, was his graduate student Arushi Pradhan. “She processed all the data in ways that illuminated the insights that came from this project. When the four of us met, she contributed vital analysis of the results. We couldn’t have completed this research without her.”

The data reflected the dramatic difference in results across the techniques scientists employed. Indeed, by one measure of roughness (the root mean square [RMS] height) the different measurements across different groups varied by a factor of 1,000,000!

As Pradhan said, “The data revealed just how difficult it is to reach consensus about a surface topography. We had to correct for inconsistencies, artifacts, and resolution limits as well as determine which techniques to include or exclude in describing the surfaces. But with all these measurements, we could reach a truer topography.”   

While Jacobs understands that it is impractical for manufacturers to employ the many techniques used during the challenge, he does hope they will consider a central conclusion: measuring the same surface with different scales and techniques, even just two or three, produces more accurate results.

“This surface-topography challenge wasn’t just for a few researchers; it’s for anyone who cares about surface performance,” said Jacobs. “Our ultimate goal is to find the right topography metrics—which can be used across research, product development, and quality assurance—to measure, control, and improve surface performance.”

Although the challenge has closed, the team continues to engage with and send samples to interested researchers. These samples can act like a benchmark for anyone who measures surfaces in their work.

“We don’t see this as the end,” said Jacobs. “Surface topography is critical to performance, but it’s not solved yet. This challenge is just the beginning.”

For the second year in a row, Pitt has been the most-awarded university across the Commonwealth. Since the launch of the program in 2018, Pitt has received $2,293,188.00 in total award funding. Associate Professor Markus Chmielus has received nine awards totaling $487,665 alone, making him the most-awarded researcher in the program.

Administered through Carnegie Mellon University, these awards are part of a program that fosters collaboration between Pennsylvania businesses and universities and colleges across the Commonwealth. Researchers and their students can receive up to $70,000, which is used for student research and related expenses.

“The Manufacturing PA Innovation program gives real-world workplace experience to undergraduate and graduate students while assisting Pennsylvania manufacturers in conducting research that they may not have the means or expertise currently to address,” said David Vorp, Senior Associate Dean for Research & Facilities and John A. Swanson Professor of bioengineering. “Faculty in the Swanson School have been successful with this program, which has led to important and meaningful new industry partnerships. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.”

The six recipients and their projects are:

• Markus Chmielus, Mechanical and Materials Science, “Developing High Entropy Carbides (HECs) for Industrial Applications” (General Carbide Corporation).
• Zachary Harris, Mechanical and Materials Science, “Additive Manufacturing of Nickel-Aluminum-Bronze Using Pennsylvania-Manufactured, Low-Cost Powder” (Metal Powder Works, Inc.).
• Jung-Kun Lee, Mechanical and Materials Science, “Development of Corrosion-Resistant Coating by Cold Spray Method” (Westinghouse Electric Company).
• Zhi-Hong Mao, Electrical and Computer Engineering, “Additive Laser Manufacturing of Micro-Optical Fluidic Chips” (AiMiLight Sensors and Intelligent Systems Inc.).
• Albert To, Mechanical and Materials Science, “Development of a Fracture Test Artifact for Early Process Anomaly Detection during Laser Powder Bed Fusion Additive Manufacturing” (Cumberland Additive).
• Wei Xiong, Mechanical and Materials Science, “Synergistic Design of Heat Treatment and Surface Finishing for Superior Functionally Graded Alloys” (Extrude Hone LLC). 

Varied projects like these prepare students to enter the workforce while ensuring Pennsylvania companies maintain their competitive edge in a fast-changing economy.

To address emerging and persistent cybersecurity challenges, the University of Pittsburgh’s Cyber Energy Center and Pitt Cyber will host “Transforming Cybersecurity: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Risk, Policy, and the Future of Cybersecurity” on August 12, 2025, in Oakland. The one-day, in-person workshop will bring together leaders across disciplines in industry, academia, and government to explore risks in cybersecurity and how policy can help ensure improved security. 

“Through our work in Pitt’s Cyber Energy Center,” said Erica Owen, associate professor in the School of Public and International Affairs, “we’re asking questions like, how do you protect critical energy infrastructure from increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks? And if you have a new technology that reduces risk, how do you get people to adopt it?”

Understanding that complex questions like these cannot be answered in a silo, the Cyber Energy Center was created in 2024 through a $2.5 million Department of Energy grant as a convergent, multidisciplinary ecosystem, where engineers, computer scientists, lawyers, and public policy analysts work together to solve problems. The workshop, supported by grant funding from Pitt Cyber, will promote this approach by bringing together diverse leaders from across Pittsburgh and the country.

“When most people think about cybersecurity, they think about firewalls, passwords, cryptography—things like that,” said Daniel Cole, associate professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and Director of the Cyber Energy Center. “But the problems we have around cybersecurity aren’t just technical ones. And they aren’t just policy issues. We’re tackling a problem that requires technology and policy experts to find solutions.”

The workshop will feature a keynote from Cheri Caddy, a Senior Cybersecurity Fellow at the McCrary Institute for Cyber & Critical Infrastructure Security, who will discuss current challenges and emerging threats. Among her many roles, Caddy has served as Senior Advisor for Cybersecurity for the U.S. Department of Energy and as Director of Cybersecurity Policy on the National Security Council.

Greg Shannon, Chief Cybersecurity Scientist at the Idaho National Laboratory, will also speak, examining new technology that can transform the cybersecurity landscape.

In addition to these speakers, panels of experts from across disciplines will explore risk and policy. The interactive event will conclude with an open discussion that seeks to chart a path forward.

“We cannot solve the problem of cybersecurity risk in critical infrastructure without a multidisciplinary approach,” said Owen. “Through this workshop, we’re hoping to lay the foundation for future conversations about this important topic. Our goal is to build momentum here in Pittsburgh to ensure a safer energy infrastructure.”

Learn more and register for the workshop.

When Matthew Barry took a vacation to Iceland in 2023, he had no intention of developing coursework for his students. But “there’s no such thing as turning off being an engineer,” said the Swanson School of Engineering associate professor. 

“Everything I saw on this island was an example of engineering applications,” Barry said. 

He was inspired to create a new worksheet for his Introduction to Thermodynamics course based on a visit to a geothermal power plant, and he developed new material for his Statics and Mechanics of Materials course based on Iceland’s innovative building techniques.  

Barry took his love of the country even further and became the first Pitt faculty member to lead a student global experience to Iceland in the spring of 2025. Their weeklong excursion was the culmination of his course Sustainable Engineering in Iceland: Culture, History and Innovation. Students gained meaningful insights into Iceland’s ingenuity and the extent to which Icelanders care for the Earth in all aspects of their lives. 

Exploring possibilities 

This openness to possibilities has defined Barry’s career at Pitt. 

 Since 2017, Barry’s research group has collaborated with the Radioisotope Power Systems group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on supporting the development of radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs). These devices have provided reliable power on NASA missions for decades, including the Mars rovers and Voyagers 1 and 2. RTGs are extremely versatile power sources and their mission environments can vary wildly from the coldness of deep space to the blazing heat of Mars. 

His lab develops physics-based models to predict how RTGs perform under these varying conditions, which will enable scientists and engineers to create designs that can satisfy all future mission objectives, regardless of operating conditions 

Holistic learning 

As successful as he is now, viewing Barry’s undergraduate transcript wouldn’t lead you to think he was on a path to becoming an award-winning mechanical engineering and materials science professor and contributor to NASA. 

“Students sometimes enter college thinking they need a 4.0 GPA to achieve their life goals, but I teach them that struggle and failure are a part of life that they can overcome with composure and grace. You have to make mistakes to learn.”  

Admitting to his students that he didn’t earn straight A’s in undergrad humanizes him, Barry said. 

His academic experience also informs his second research path: engineering education, through which he tries to uncover education strategies that meaningfully bolster student learning. 

“I understood the mechanisms as to why I was a poor student and tried to change the classes I teach to provide those necessary modalities and resources, so that students in my situation have what they need to succeed,” he said. 

Sam Wismer, a Swanson School graduate, said Barry brings passion and real-world experience to the classroom. 

“He instills foundational knowledge and teaches students to think like engineers,” she said. 

Wismer, who served as Barry’s teaching assistant and undergraduate research assistant, co-wrote with him an online statics and mechanics textbook based on Barry’s undergraduate experiences. 

“Students learn through a variety of methods, and I try to provide them educational and structural opportunities that resonate with their mode of learning,” Barry said. 

Wismer described the textbook, “Statics and Mechanics of Materials: An Example-Based Approach” as interactive.  

“Our textbook provides real-time feedback on questions. Lessons are strategically tiered in a way that is optimal for progressive learning,” she said. 

Barry was one of this year’s recipients of the 2025 Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award based on his deep understanding of students’ struggles and his unwavering dedication to supporting students’ careers in engineering. 

His teaching success is a result of his creativity and commitment, said Brian Gleeson, department chair of the Swanson Schools’ mechanical and materials science program. 

“Students see the time and effort he puts into teaching. He has their respect,” he said. 

Lincoln Baker and Jake Clark, third-year students in mechanical engineering, will study in Germany. Stacy Bediako, a fifth-year chemical engineering student, will intern in the Netherlands. These students, along with 13 others from Pitt, will receive up to $5,000 to support their time overseas. 

For Baker, the scholarship enables him to earn a Certificate in Aviation at the Munich University of Applied Sciences. Baker, who is double majoring in physics, intends to pursue a career in aviation engineering, and his interest in Germany stems in part from visiting a friend living in Heidelberg. He was fascinated with everything from the castles to the automotive and aviation museums to the public transportation.

Baker leaves in September and will complete his certificate in July. “Along with the unique educational opportunity I will receive, I look forward to being a tourist and seeing the surrounding area—and having the opportunity to learn German,” he said.

Added Baker, who after high school went straight into the workforce until his late 20s, when he could afford to attend college, “I don’t think I could have followed through on the application without the help from the Gilman Scholarship. I can’t overstate how much this will help me.”

For Stacy Bediako, the scholarship has helped make her dream of gaining research experience in a foreign country a reality. Bediako learned about internship opportunities in Europe through her advisor in Global Experiences and Engagement.

After securing a research position at Nouryon, a company that develops specialty chemicals, she applied for the Gilman Scholarship to cover expenses while living abroad. Bediako leaves for Deventer, in the Netherlands, at the end of May and will spend the summer learning firsthand about product chemistry research and development.

“I’m excited to live on my own abroad and experience the Dutch culture—everything from working in a different setting to riding bicycles all over,” said Bediako. “The Gilman Scholarship has helped make this opportunity possible and will make it so much more rewarding.”

Informed by the important collaborative efforts and engagement of the University of Pittsburgh Infrastructure Sensing Collaboration (UPISC) Workshop over the last few years, INSITES will comprise a diverse group of industry and government leaders who directly support research in infrastructure monitoring as well as training and education opportunities for students across disciplines to prepare for careers in the field. Pitt researchers and other academic partners will collaborate with INSITES members to develop and deploy sensing technology that harnesses advances in ML, AI, and modeling. 

Since launching in 2022, the UPISC has connected industry, government, and academia at annual workshops. At these workshops, real-world problems are presented and solutions explored. Keynote speakers and panelists from organizations including the National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the U.S. Department of Transportation provide expert insight on infrastructure and sensing. Researchers present their work. Students—the next generation of leaders in infrastructure monitoring—share their research in poster sessions and network with businesses and governmental leaders.  

Since the first workshop, interest and activity has grown tremendously. Through these stakeholder engagements and interactions, the UPISC steering committee recommended developing a formalized collaboration, and the concept for the INSITES consortium was born. 

“The energy, research, and opportunities that have come out of the annual workshops have been inspiring,” said Paul Ohodnicki, PhD, RK Mellon Faculty Fellow in Energy and associate professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Pitt. “Based on stakeholder input from the workshops, we’ve identified an opportunity to formalize this new consortium as a high-priority action item to achieve impact. As the need to advance infrastructure sensing technology grows more pressing, we’re excited about the potential of INSITES.”     

Through research, papers, and patents, the INSITES consortium seeks to provide direct support to industry while developing and deploying new, more intelligent technology like predictive monitoring that detects failures and contamination before disasters happen. Faculty engagement with students and early-career researchers will also enable next generation workforce development to support this important area.

“A thriving country and economy depend upon robust, resilient, modern infrastructure,” said Ohodnicki. “And I can’t think of a better time, with technological advances creating so much transformative potential, to launch this industry consortium and guide innovation that can make a difference for generations to come.”    

To learn more, visit the INSITES consortium website or contact the INSITES team.   

For their project this past semester, Chemaitilly (mechanical engineering) and Ufer (chemical engineering), with fellow students Siva Surulivel (civil engineering graduate student) and Fiorente Pampena (urban planning), entered the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Solar District Cup. The competition challenged 81 interdisciplinary teams across six divisions to design a solar project from scratch. In its first year competing, the Pitt team placed first in its division and were runners-up for the entire competition.

So you want to be a solar developer

“To earn a Sustainability Certificate at Pitt, students must successfully complete ENGR 1907,” said Tony Kerzmann, associate professor of mechanical engineering and materials science. “At the beginning of the semester, we group students by interest and assign them a project. This spring, one of those projects was the Solar District Cup.”

NREL’s Solar District Cup is an annual competition that provides college students with hands-on experience developing solar infrastructure. Teams create a comprehensive plan to introduce solar power to an actual site.

For Pitt and 13 other teams in the MidAtlantic region, that site was the Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center in Hershey, Pa. Teams were tasked with developing a system that would power most of the hospital while respecting the community and environment. 

To create a development plan, conceptual design, distribution approach, and financial analysis, the Pitt team had to research zoning laws, solar ordinances, permitting, and National Electric Code regulations. They had to learn new software and conduct soil, topography, and even a hail-risk analysis.

“Most students don’t get these experiences in class,” said Chemaitilly.

“None of us had too much experience on the financial side,” said Ufer. “I had to do a lot of research about tax credits and depreciation—I had to model net present value and break-even time.”

As they worked all semester, Pitt’s team developed a 90-page executive summary with reports and images, along with a presentation.

“The team was fantastic,” said Kerzmann. “From an educational perspective, there’s no way I could teach a class where they would ever learn this much.”

Thinking big, and creatively

Essential to successful deployment of solar is community engagement—keeping people involved in the solar array. That idea guided Pitt’s team.

“They did a great job incorporating solar into the environment,” said Kerzmann. “They developed agrivoltaics to promote dual-use land space and included solar picnic tables and park benches, and solar parking canopies.”

They also used as much space as possible to produce more energy. Whereas most teams proposed systems that could generate a half megawatt, Pitt’s team designed one that could generate 26.3 megawatts.

“We thought, why not go as creative as possible, while keeping it reasonable,” said Chemaitilly. She noted how, initially, team members each designed their own systems. “We presented our ideas and rationale. Together, we picked the best aspects of each design and synthesized them into our final plan.”

“We learned how to focus on our individual strengths and interests,” added Ufer, “and I think that’s why we won our division.”

Fueling a solar-powered future

For Chemaitilly and Ufer, the Solar District Cup has fueled their interest in renewable energy.

Through the Swanson School of Engineering’s co-op program, Chemaitilly has already worked three semesters with Oriden, a Pittsburgh-based company that develops renewable energy projects.

“The co-op program at Pitt is truly one of a kind,” said Chemaitilly. “With this competition, I got to apply what I’ve learned at the co-op. It’s really solidified my interest in a career in solar power."

Ufer has also pursued internship opportunities, including Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) through the National Science Foundation. He researched wind and solar modeling, testing how accurately modeling software could predict real-time energy generation, and he presented his research at a conference. 

“I’ve always been interested in renewable energy broadly,” Ufer said, “but after this competition, I have so much more experience with solar. I gained valuable skills that I will use after I graduate and begin looking for jobs.”

While essential for many emerging devices, manufacturing things in the nanoscale can be unpredictable and difficult to simulate and predict. Researchers Mostafa Bedewy, at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering, and Ahmed Aziz Ezzat, at Rutgers University, are seeking to advance understanding of these particles to improve nanomanufacturing. The researchers have received a $549,947 collaborative National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to study new ways of controlling the formation of alumina-supported iron nanoparticles by using machine learning (ML) to efficiently model, characterize, simulate, and predict their growth.

“By using a special type of microscope called the environmental transmission electron microscope, we can watch the process of creating nanocatalysts that act like seeds for growing ‘turfs’ of tiny structures called carbon nanotubes that are a million times smaller than grass blades,” said Bedewy, principal investigator and associate professor and Graduate Program Coordinator for materials science.

Bedewy likens the process to growing grass, or a tiny forest. “We’re putting 100 billion nanoparticles on a plot that’s one centimeter by one centimeter,” he said. “Our previous work indicates that not all of those will grow nanotubes, and our new project aims at revealing this mystery of which ones act as seeds—and why.” 

Carbon nanotubes—web-like tube structures—have impressive properties. They can be stronger than steel and more conducting that copper. Also, they can dissipate heat in small devices packed with components, making them excellent for interfaces in three-dimensional electronics.

Creating ideal high-density nanotube structures, however, can be difficult.

“It’s sort of like cooking,” Bedewy said. “Controlling the chemical vapor deposition process we use to grow carbon nanotubes requires finding the right ingredients, temperatures, and conditions. But we’re talking about highly coupled physical and chemical processes at the atomic scale.”

Because these particles are so small, researchers must use in-situ environmental transmission electron microscopy (E-TEM) to observe their work. Even with advanced electron microscopes, which use beams of electrons to capture images of nanomaterials, obtaining and processing the data has traditionally been inefficient.

“Ten years ago, we used to process images manually, but it took so long to analyze a few images,” said Bedewy. “Today, with machine learning, we can collect hundreds of images per second, automate the processing, and, importantly, predict the behavior of nanoparticles at unprecedented resolutions.”

Bedewy will collaborate with Aziz Ezzat, assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering at Rutgers University and an expert in ML and spatio-temporal data science. Aziz Ezzat will develop a machine-learning-based system to automate the processing of E-TEM images and further predict the complex nanoparticle dynamics during the fabrication of nanotubes.  

“Revealing the spatio-temporal dynamics of nanoparticles from large E-TEM data is a complex challenge which requires a rigorous data science treatment,” said Aziz Ezzat. “This project aims to extract scientific insights from E-TEM data through a data science lens, and to develop a powerful predictive simulation tool. It resonates well with the growing momentum to harness AI and data sciences for advancing materials research and accelerating scientific discovery.”