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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learn more about the NSF RETI Engine.

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

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

A Joint Effort 

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

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

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

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

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

Clearing the Way for Understanding Pain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Panelists include:

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

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

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

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

View the Annual Industry Meeting agenda.

About the AMPED Consortium

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

An ideal case study

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

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

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

A living model

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The GRFP is a highly competitive award, and we are extremely proud of our winners and honorable mentions this year,” said Michele V. Manuel, U. S. Steel Dean of Engineering at Pitt. “This funding will provide critical financial support for these students to expand their research that benefits all of us.”

The NSF also recognized two members of the Swanson School community with honorable mentions: Jack Hall, a graduate student in Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Sead Nikšić (BS ECE ’23). Four alumni, Dalia Fantini (BS BIOE '23), Kelly Larson (BS IE ‘18), Frederick Laudati (BS ECE '25), and Paul Walter (BE MEMS ’20) also received fellowships this year. 

This year’s Swanson School awardees are:

Casey Cargill

Cargill is a first-year PhD student in the Department of Bioengineering, where she specializes in the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine (TERM) track. Advised by Jonathan Vande Geest in the Soft Tissue Biomechanics Laboratory, Cargill’s research focuses on addressing vision loss caused by conditions such as age-related macular degeneration.

Cargill collaborates with vision scientists and clinicians to develop patient-specific, 3D bioengineered models of the eye’s vascular system. By replicating the complex blood vessel networks and fluid dynamics within the eye, her work seeks to better understand how vascular disruptions contribute to blindness and to support the development of more personalized therapeutic strategies. Cargill is also a member of the Graduate Women in Engineering Network, the Black Graduate Student Alliance, and the Graduate Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) chapter. 

“My Jamaican heritage instilled in me, ‘Labor for learning before you grow old; for learning is better than silver or gold. Silver and gold will vanish away, but a good education will never decay.’ Cargill said. This fellowship supports my research as well as my personal values, allowing me to keep investing in academic growth and using it to benefit others.”

Sophia Freemyer

Freemyer is a senior undergraduate student in the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering pursuing a minor in geology and a certificate in public communication of science and technology through the Frederick Honors College. Freemyer began research in Sarah Haig’s INHALE Lab, followed by a summer internship at Oak Ridge National Laboratory through the Department of Energy’s Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship program, where she worked on a materials science crystallization project. Freemyer later served as an ORISE Fellow at the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL). 

“My research interests are centered around critical mineral extraction from unconventional sources, specifically waste streams such as acid mine drainage, coal refuse, and produced water from oil production.” Freemyer said. “This area of research not only strengthens our domestic supply of these important materials but also utilizes streams that would end up as pollution in our environment.”

Freemyer is also an active member of the Pitt Band, where she served as a squad leader during her sophomore and junior years and as piccolo section leader her senior year. She also held leadership roles within the Varsity Marching Band Council and Kappa Kappa Psi, the national honorary band fraternity, and is a member of the Society of Women Engineers and Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society. After graduation, Freemyer’s NSF fellowship will fund her PhD studies at Columbia University's Earth and Environmental Engineering Department in the lab of Ngai Yin Yip. 

“I am beyond excited to win this award.” Freemyer said. “Having my application accepted is extremely validating for my future goals of becoming a researcher, with expert reviewers agreeing that I have enough promise as a future scientist to fund my graduate studies.”

Aragya Goyal

Goyal is a senior undergraduate student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, focusing on autonomous systems. His research centers on field robotics, with a particular interest in underwater and space exploration technologies. Since his freshman year, Goyal has collaborated with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University under the guidance of Howie Choset and David Wettergreen, contributing to projects such as the underwater snake robot “HUMRS” and the “Zoë 2” rover, which investigates passive steering mechanisms for planetary exploration. Looking ahead, he is interested in advancing multi-robot collaboration in complex field environments, including coordinated swarms of autonomous underwater vehicles.

Goyal has also been actively involved in the Robotics and Automation Society, where he has developed both technical and professional skills while contributing to a strong engineering community. Goyal applied for the NSF GRFP with the goal of strengthening his research proposal on multi-robot coordination, initially viewing the process as a learning opportunity. With guidance from mentor Geordan Gutow and strong recommendations from his research advisors, however, he successfully refined his application and was awarded the fellowship. This award removes a significant financial barrier to pursuing graduate studies, enabling him to focus fully on advancing robotics research.

“I feel extremely excited and grateful to have been granted this opportunity. My parents and I moved to the United States in 2013 and became citizens in 2021. It was likely one of the best opportunities for my family and had allowed me to apply for this fellowship and receive it.” Goyal said. “Not only that, but my decision to come to Pitt has been equally valuable, and I am glad I made that decision as it provided me with a hub and network of highly technical people who are always ready to help and teach you. The Pitt ECE faculty is excellent, and my peers are brilliant, and it is because of the community surrounding me that I was able to win this award.”

Ritesh Shrivastav

Shrivastav is a first-year PhD student in the Department of Bioengineering, on the neural engineering track under the mentorship of Helen Schwerdt. In the Schwerdt lab, his work centers on developing minimally invasive tools to measure dopamine in the human brain with high spatial and temporal resolution.

Shrivastav's research aims to elucidate how pathological dopamine fluctuations in the brain manifest as motor dysfunction in Parkinson’s patients. According to Shrivastav, this is essential foundational science for the future development of adaptive treatment technologies that could be personalized to each patient’s unique brain state. 

“Post-graduation, I would love to continue to build upon my research by developing treatments for Parkinson’s disease such as using dopamine as a biomarker for adaptive deep brain stimulation." Shrivastav said. "In the long term, I hope to translate this work into a startup focused on bringing these technologies from the lab to the clinic. This fellowship would provide critical support for the validation research that I will conduct during my PhD, laying a foundation for future commercialization and real-world impact.”

Vanshika Singh

Vanshika Singh is a first-year PhD student in the Department of Bioengineering pursuing the neural engineering track. They conduct their research in the B.I.O.N.I.C. Lab under the mentorship of Takashi (TK) Kozai. 

Singh’s research explores how non-neuronal cells in the brain, specifically microglia, contribute to inflammation and metabolic stress across neurological disease states. Their recent work has focused on how microglial calcium dynamics change in response to electrode-induced injury, and I’m interested in extending this work to explore how these signaling changes manifest in the context of Alzheimer’s disease. Singh is also interested in investigating ultrasound as a neuromodulatory tool, particularly its mechanistic targets and how it may influence microglial activity and calcium signaling.

Beyond the lab, Singh is actively engaged in mentorship and scholarly service, spending the past two summers mentoring high school students through the Hillman Academy and recently as a reviewer for Ingenium, an undergraduate research journal at the Swanson School of Engineering. Singh also presented their research on microglial responses to electrode insertion injury at the Society for Neuroscience Conference 2025.

“It is an incredible honor to be an NSF GRFP Fellow.” Singh said. “The three years of support will give me the freedom to pursue curiosity-driven research and take intellectual risks that might otherwise be difficult. Beyond funding, this fellowship marks a meaningful milestone in my path toward a career in academic research."

“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.

“Bamboo is an incredibly strong, abundant material that can serve as a sustainable alternative in building structures,” said Harries, a professor of civil and environmental engineering in the Swanson School of Engineering. “It’s also fascinating. Every time you look at it, you see something new.”

Harries recently co-authored the first structural engineering manual for bamboo, which offers detailed guidance and commentary to the 2021 International Organization for Standardization (ISO) bamboo standards for which he also led the writing team. His work is advancing a path to safer, more affordable, and sustainable construction while inspiring a new generation of engineers.

From aspiring architect to structural engineer

Growing up in Canada, Harries didn’t have a bamboo-themed LEGO set because they didn’t exist. He enjoyed playing with LEGO all the same and with Meccano construction sets; both fueled his desire to design and create. So did his parents. “They’d hand me paper and encourage me to design my ideal cabin,” Harries recalled. He’d set to work developing intricate plans, and, as he said, “It went from there.”

Harries earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in Engineering and Applied Mechanics at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec.

“I’m a true failed architect,” he said. “All through elementary school, through high school, I was going into architecture. In university, I started in architecture and realized that what I thought was architecture was structural engineering.”

Discovering bamboo’s promise

For much of his career, Harries has researched wood, steel, and concrete. He is an expert in the use of materials and in structures like the bridges and buildings they are used to create. He has written international building codes and standards and authored countless papers exploring their use, and he is often sought out for his expertise by journalists around the globe.

In 2006, however, Harries recruited Bhavna Sharma (CEE PhD ’10) to Pitt. Now an associate professor at the University of Southern California and a leader in engineered bamboo research, Sharma joined the Swanson School as a PhD student to study bamboo structures in India and their ability to withstand earthquakes.

The two would later edit a book about nonconventional and vernacular construction materials. For Harries, the research set in motion what has turned Pitt into an international hub of bamboo research.

Pursuing something “unfundable”

“I had a plan to do something that I perceived as being ‘unfundable,’” Harries said of his research into bamboo. Unexpectedly, his plan took root.

In 2014, he received US Department of State funding to organize three international bamboo symposia, in Winnipeg, Pittsburgh, and Jakarta, which would foster a growing community to advance bamboo research. At the Pittsburgh symposium in 2016, researchers made the case for bamboo in the Pittsburgh Declaration.

In 2016, Harries received a $300,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to investigate and model bamboo with researchers in Puerto Rico.

In 2025, he welcomed Italian researcher Luisa Molari, from the University of Bologna, to spend a semester at Pitt on a Fulbright grant. The two collaborated to model bamboo and standardize how it is tested.

Toward stronger, clearer codes and standards

Although bamboo has been used as a building material for thousands of years, only recently have researchers developed international standards. In 2000, Dutch researcher Jules Janssen’s "Designing and Building with Bamboo" was published, and the first technical standards were adopted by the ISO in 2004.

“It’s important to get those first standards, the ‘version zero,’ published. They provide the jumping-off point to begin developing stronger ones,” Harries said.

With longtime collaborator David Trujillo, an assistant professor of humanitarian engineering at the University of Warwick in England, Harries did just that. The two revised the test method and design standards for bamboo, which were published by ISO in 2019 and 2021, respectively.

While working on them, Harries applied another of his research areas: understanding and mitigating complexity in building codes and standards. “Codes are hugely important,” he said, “but if builders can’t understand them, they start to lose their efficacy.”

Harries used these bamboo standards as a case study to investigate the importance of producing clearer, more concise specifications. The research led him to revise his own work.

In addition to revising the standards, Harries and Trujillo, along with engineers Sebastian Kaminski and Luis Felipe Lopez, set to work developing the first structural engineering manual for bamboo, which was first published in November of 2025. The four experts, all members of the International Bamboo and Rattan Organization (INBAR), provide detailed information about bamboo and guidance for building with it.

“The manual explains where these revised standards come from and how they can be used,” Harries said. “It also provides a roadmap for the next iteration of the standards.”

Rhizomes

Bamboo, which belongs to the grass family, is rhizomic, spreading underground and popping up new shoots. Anyone who has grown bamboo in their backyard, or who has lived next door to someone who has, knows this well. And just as bamboo will spread, Harries’ research has grown and created opportunities for his students.

“There have been about 40 Pitt undergraduate students who have traveled abroad for bamboo-related research projects,” Harries said. “There have been multiple PhDs, and I’ve even had high school students work on bamboo research.”

The projects have built community worldwide, improved international bamboo standards, and created first-of-its-kind guidance. They have shed new light on a sustainable material that has been an essential building block in many countries for centuries.

On January 1, 2025, LEGO launched its first bamboo kit. The set, with its many curved pieces, hardly captures the kind of LEGO Harries grew up with. Yet the existence of such a set speaks to bamboo’s current cultural cachet, one that Harries is excited to help spread.

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.

If the sabbatical happens to be abroad, the complexity only increases. How will it be funded? Is it realistic to uproot a family for months, or an entire year? What about language barriers?

Suddenly, an amazing opportunity of taking a semester or an entire year to recharge, uncover new research, rekindle collaborations, conduct new experiments, write, and learn can feel like a burden. 

Yet for those who do take a sabbatical, the experience is deeply rewarding if not life changing. While overseas sabbaticals are complicated, they offer a unique opportunity to forge lasting relationships, engage across cultures, and reimagine one’s research and teaching.

“You might say I’m resistant to change.” 

Harvey Borovetz, Distinguished Professor of Bioengineering, worked at Pitt for 38 years before he took a sabbatical. But when he did, it created connections that continue to flourish to this day and provide unique opportunities for students at Pitt and at Braude College of Engineering in Karmiel, Israel.

In November 2013, after stepping down as department chair, Borovetz and his wife traveled to Israel and visited the college. The following semester, he took a four-month sabbatical and lived in Karmiel, where he taught a course and developed professional relationships that have endured through a global pandemic and the Israel-Hamas War.

For five years after that first visit, Borovetz returned each year to teach. Since Covid and the war, he’s continued annually teaching remotely. Students in the Swanson School have visited Braude for a summer research experience, and their students have come to Pitt, likewise for a research experience. The exchanges are rooted in the trust and familiarity built during his sabbatical.

“For me, the people and relationships matter most,” said Borovetz. “The sabbatical didn’t advance my research per se, but I’ve grown so much as a teacher. Most of my students in Israel speak English as their second language. They’ve served in the military before attending college, and they come to class with a different set of experiences than students I teach at Pitt.

“I’ve had the opportunity to live like a citizen there,” he added. “I’ve been invited into the homes of families whose students I teach and faculty colleagues who I’ve met and have become good friends with over the years. And the relationship between Pitt and Braude continues today because of these strong connections.”

“It’s easy not to do this,” Borovetz said, “but it’s an amazing experience.”

“It jump-started my work”

Like Borovetz, Bopaya Bidanda, Ernest Roth Professor of Industrial Engineering, had never taken a sabbatical. Between chairing the department, teaching, researching, and traveling abroad to forge transdisciplinary collaborations, the time never seemed right.

In the early 2020s, Bidanda was researching “frugal engineering,” an approach rooted in innovation under constrained resources, and wanted to see it in action. For Bidanda, that meant returning to his old home.

In 2023, he applied for and received a Fulbright-Nehru Award to conduct research and promote industrial engineering excellence in Mumbai, India.

“I spent four months there building networks,” said Bidanda. “I organized a PhD colloquium with about 85 students and faculty from across India and assembled a group of scholars from around the world to help new faculty and PhD students develop global research networks.”

“Working in India involves navigating cultural dynamics alongside research. There are incredibly innovative aspects as well as bureaucratic ones,” he added. “Even though I grew up in India, returning to work there after many years was an adjustment. I felt like I was rediscovering an entirely new India.”

This impact of the sabbatical continues to ripple outward, for faculty and students in India, and for Bidanda. The colloquium was so successful that the Fulbright Commission of Sri Lanka has invited him to conduct a similar program in 2026, extending the work he started while in Mumbai.

“There isn’t just one ‘right’ way.”

When Lance Davidson, William Kepler Whiteford Professor of Bioengineering, began studying epithelial tissues in frogs, he needed new computational models. A colleague overseas, in the Dutch town of Leiden, had developed a model for plant epithelia, and an opportunity to collaborate set in motion a long-overdue sabbatical.

With funding from the Dutch Research Council, Davidson spent January through May 2019 at Leiden University, the oldest surviving university in the Netherlands, embedding himself in a lab of computational biologists.

“I stayed in a house across a canal from one of the oldest botanical gardens in the world,” Davidson said. “I biked everywhere, brought my bike on trains, and connected with colleagues across Europe.”

Davidson participated in PhD committees, exams, and mentoring, gaining a unique window into science and education in the Netherlands. “The Dutch approach differs from ours, but the quality is outstanding,” he said. “It reinforced the idea that there isn’t just one ‘right’ way to train students or conduct research.”

The experience was not without challenges. Davidson’s wife couldn’t join him, and he still ran his lab at Pitt, still advised his PhD students. “It was difficult, and the time difference made for many late nights.”

Yet the experience fueled new research and resulted in a publication with his Dutch collaborator. Today, Davidson is beginning to plan his next sabbatical.

“It was great to have them here.”

From August to December 2025, Nathan Youngblood, associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, lived in Heidelberg, Germany, with his wife and two sons. At Heidelberg University, he collaborated with renowned physicist Wolfram Pernice and researchers from across Europe to advance work in optical computing, an emerging field that uses light to process information faster and more efficiently.

“Advancing this technology requires collaboration across disciplines,” Youngblood said. “Many of my European collaborators work in physics, electronics, or materials science. Being able to connect in person, visit their labs, and meet their collaborators was invaluable.”

Bringing his family overseas was logistically challenging, but meaningful. “It was great to have them here,” he said. His sons, ages four and six, learned some German, and the family traveled throughout Europe.

At the same time, fully disconnecting proved difficult. Youngblood continued to direct his Youngblood Photonics Lab at Pitt and advise his large research group. “I wish I had unplugged a bit more,” he said. “Maintaining contact from overseas took up a lot of time.”

“The plan was to start writing a book.”

Aleksandar Stevanovic, associate professor of civil engineering, taught for 18 years before he took a sabbatical. “I never felt it was the right time,” he said. “I was always too busy.”

Last year, Stevanovic, a traffic engineer who researches ways to improve traffic in urban environments, developed a plan to visit colleagues and lay the groundwork for writing a book. His sabbatical was set. But then he received two awards: a Fulbright to spend ten months at the University of Montenegro and a visiting professor scholarship to visit the Technical University of Munich, in Germany.

Instead of planning a book, Stevanovic flew to Podgorica, Montenegro, a city with about 50 traffic signals total, where he has collaborated with faculty and city officials, delivered lectures, and helped the university develop its traffic engineering studies. He’s also been analyzing the city’s infrastructure and traffic to help improve it. 

In Germany, he has collaborated with researchers and his own PhD students to explore the future of transportation in a vastly different context.

While much busier than he’d anticipated, the experience has been hugely illuminating. “I’m bringing a new perspective to these places,” Stevanovic said, “but I’m also learning things that will be useful for my future research. It’s going to trickle down to my students.”

“We called it Disneyland for academics.”

Anna Balazs, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering and the John A. Swanson Chair of Engineering, traveled to Oxford University in 2001 at the encouragement of a scientist she knew there. Although Balazs didn’t know her that well at the time, the decision would alter the trajectory of her research. 

For Balazs, Oxford was a magical place. Each day at 11:00 a.m., the entire department congregated for teatime. “You were always talking to someone interesting,” Balazs said. “There was just a level of intensity and joy about knowledge.”

During her first sabbatical in England, she brought a postdoctoral researcher. The two would stay in the lab late into the evening. “We were working hard and we’d stop and get kebabs on the way home.”

Balazs investigates polymetric materials and how they interact on surfaces. From her collaborator at Oxford, physicist Julia Yeomans, she learned a new technique that has been invaluable.

“It's called the lattice Boltzmann method, which is used for numerically solving the Navier-Stokes equation. We extended it so that it interacts with soft materials, so you can get the interaction between a soft material and a flowing fluid,” Balazs said. “It's a backbone of what we do today.”

Seven years later, this time with her husband, a computer scientist, she returned. “I think for both of us,” Balazs said, “it changed our lives.”

Beyond the research and opportunities to meet scholars so passionate about their work, she formed a lasting connection. “I made a new friend there, who’s a friend for life, and who gave me a goddaughter.

“Those two years at Oxford were some of the best years of my life,” Balazs added. “They were life changing.”

“Despite the daunting logistics, everything worked out.”

John Keith, associate professor and RK Mellon Faculty Fellow in Chemical & Petroleum Engineering, had been, as he described, “an old-school computational chemist.” Although researchers were increasingly incorporating machine learning into the field, he remained cautiously skeptical.

In 2019, having just received tenure, and with two young sons and a third child on the way, Keith faced a complicated puzzle: funding a sabbatical in Luxembourg with his family for an entire year. In the end, he managed to get the pieces to fit.

Keith joined the research group of Alexandre Tkatchenko at the University of Luxembourg, moving his family abroad just months before Covid upended daily life worldwide. In an unexpected twist, the family even appeared on House Hunters International.

“I joined a top research group,” Keith said. “They had reconciled rigorous computational chemistry with machine learning in a way I respected. It was serious, high-quality science, and I built a strong network there.”

The work culminated in a paper in Chemical Reviews, with Keith as first author.

“I returned supercharged with ideas,” Keith said. “The sabbatical was pivotal. It gave me a foundation for future collaborations, ready to fully embrace machine learning in my research.”

Navigating funding, schooling, housing, and a global pandemic in a foreign country was daunting, but for Keith, like his Pitt colleagues who also ventured overseas on their sabbaticals, the payoff was profound.

“Neuroimaging studies are often limited by recruitment cost and feasibility,” said Tamer Ibrahim, professor of bioengineering at Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering. “Reducing the required sample size shortens study timelines, lowers expenses, and broadens the types of questions that can be investigated.”

A publication in Human Brain Mapping from Ibrahim’s team, “Brain morphometrics correlations with age among 350 participants imaged with both 3T and 7T MRI: 7T improves statistical power and reduces required sample size” (doi.org/10.1002/hbm.70195), provides compelling evidence that ultra-high-field 7-Tesla (7T) MRI can substantially improve the detection of age-related structural changes in the human brain compared to scans with lower magnetic fields. 

Evidence from this publication demonstrating 7T’s improved efficiency has strengthened investigations into menopause-related brain changes, mild cognitive impairment, and other aging-related conditions, allowing researchers like Rebecca Thurston, distinguished professor of psychiatry, clinical and translational science, epidemiology and psychology at the School of Medicine justify the use of 7T MRI in their grant submissions and research.

“7T MRI has been integral to answering the questions that I address in my work, which is focused on the brain changes of the menopause transition.” Thurston said. “For example, it is ideally suited to delineating the subtle brain changes of the early perimenopause that we are studying in our current $7.5M NIH-funded MenoBrain study.”

Building a better scanner 

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) uses strong magnetic fields to create detailed images of the body’s tissues and organs. The magnetic flux density—measured in the unit Tesla (T) —helps determine the level of anatomical detail visible in the scan. While most MRI scanners operate at 1.5T or 3T, Ibrahim has developed specialized radiofrequency coils that allow Pitt’s 7T system to fully leverage this ultra-high magnetic field and deliver exceptional quality images.

“This publication shows that 7T provides more reliable and sensitive morphometric measurements when compared to 3T,” Ibrahim said. “For research questions involving subtle structural differences or longitudinal change in the brain, high performance 7T MRI is definitely the way to go.”

The large-scale, first of its kind study analyzed brain morphometry in 350 healthy adults between the ages of 29 and 68, each of whom completed imaging sessions at both 3T and 7T. The research team evaluated cortical and subcortical volumes, cerebral white matter, and mean cortical thickness. Across all measures, 7T demonstrated stronger correlations with age and revealed a greater number of brain regions, exhibiting more statistically significant age associations compared to 3T.

“Because 7T produces higher-contrast, lower-noise data, researchers need substantially fewer participants to detect meaningful effects with our 7T technology." Ibrahim said. “Studies that would require 350 participants at 3T could achieve statistical significance with approximately 100 participants at 7T.”

While 7T scanners exist at other institutions, their adoption for large-scale human studies has been limited since the magnetic strength can cause distortions and inhomogeneity in the images. Ibrahim and the 7 Tesla Bioengineering Research Program (7TBRP) have been troubleshooting these limitations for over the last 20 years by developing a custom radiofrequency coil system, Tic-Tac-Toe, which enables the 7T scanner to work smoothly and create the sharpest images possible.

“There are significant challenges when scanning at 7T. The interactions between the electromagnetic waves and tissue can lead to regions in the brain where there’s simply no MRI signal to detect.” Ibrahim said. “But our anti-claustrophobia Tac G2 coil system is, to my knowledge, the only one in the world that has successfully and comprehensively solved this problem. We don’t have those voids in our 7T images, and there are no barriers to running all types of MRI studies at 7T.”

Following the successful development of the first generation coil system, Tac G1, which was used on about 2,000 in-vivo human scans, the Tac G2 coil system implemented in 2022 has been used on more than 2,500 in-vivo human scans, exceeding the Tac G1’s usage in less than half of the time. This development has since enabled over 40 NIH-funded studies across aging, psychiatry, neurology, and cognitive neuroscience. 

7T’s impact

With these ongoing studies, many researchers and students at Pitt across medicine, psychology, engineering, and more utilize the 7T for their studies year-round, including bioengineering visiting research assistant professor Tales Santini and bioengineering graduate student Cong Chu, both working in the 7TBRP. 

“As a young faculty member, I feel fortunate to have access to what is likely the largest paired 3T and 7T dataset, which has enabled us to directly characterize differences in brain structure measurements arising from these imaging techniques.” Santini said. 

“And as a student, I'm excited to continue exploring this data to maximize the 7T's potential and to establish cross-platform harmonization methods for my future research.” Chu added. 

For Anna Marsland, professor of psychology, nursing and clinical translational science at the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, the technology has supported her work through visualizing brain regions known to decline with age in the Adult Health and Behavior Cohort project, allowing her team to closely examine factors related to neurocognitive aging. 

“The greater acuity of 7T imaging permits assessment of individual differences in the volume of subcortical brain regions, increasing our ability to identify brain regions that subserve cognitive functions and to identify individuals on accelerated aging trajectories who may be at increased risk for dementia.” Marsland said.

While each generation of coil systems can take about eight years to develop, working with researchers like Thurston, Marsland, and Santini and students like Chu to better understand the brain is exactly the kind of outcome that sustains Ibrahim and his team to keep improving the technology. 

“When our coils are used in human studies, it’s incredibly rewarding, far more rewarding than just publishing this paper.” Ibrahim said. “We’re developing devices that clinicians and scientists use, and the result isn’t just pretty pictures; our engineering innovations are being used in real patient studies. We’re not making something that just could be used some time in the future, we are impacting human life now.”

On Friday, March 27, the University of Pittsburgh

The talk is open to the public and will be held at 104 Thaw Hall, from 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.

Zhang will discuss Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS) as an essential component of China’s strategy to achieve carbon peaking and neutrality. He will explore the current landscape of Geologic CO₂ Storage (GCS) in China, which possesses a theoretical capacity of 2.9 trillion tons.

Established in 2008, the Center for Energy is a transdisciplinary, university-wide initiative that leverages the energy-related expertise of approximately 100 faculty members from the Swanson School of Engineering, the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, the Law School, Business School, and the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.

“The Center for Energy is committed to fostering collaboration across disciplines to advance energy research,” said Paul Ohodnicki, associate professor of mechanical engineering and materials science in Swanson School of Engineering and director of the Center for Energy. “Having the opportunity to welcome Dr. Zhang is a testament to our efforts to foster dialogue that addresses pressing energy challenges facing the U.S. and the world today.”

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.”

The Center for Energy is a university-wide endeavor that leverages the energy-related expertise of approximately 100 faculty members across campus from multiple disciplines and departments among the Swanson School of Engineering, Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, Law School, Business School and the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.

“Energy research and education have been a critical component of Swanson School for more than a century, and is also integral to our new strategic plan. As energy resources, technologies, and markets evolve rapidly, we are positioned to expand our capabilities and grow our portfolio in the decade ahead,” Manuel said. “Paul's experience spanning academia, industry, entrepreneurship, and national laboratories uniquely positions him to advance the Center's impact and visibility.”

Ohodnicki earned his bachelor's degree in economics and B.Phil. in engineering science at Pitt before completing his master's and PhD in materials science and engineering at Carnegie Mellon. His career includes R&D roles at PPG Industries and the U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), where he served as technical portfolio lead for teams developing optical and microwave sensors, magnetic materials, and power electronics for high-frequency transformer-based solar PV and energy storage inverters. 

“Pennsylvania, and the greater Pittsburgh region in particular, has long been a leader in the U.S. energy landscape, and the University of Pittsburgh has played a critical role in that legacy," Ohodnicki said. "By strengthening partnerships across industry, government, and academia, we will build on that foundation to further elevate our region’s position as a national leader in advanced energy research, deployment, and workforce development.”

At the Swanson School, Ohodnicki leads a research group exploring electromagnetic and photonic materials and their applications in practical devices for energy and power applications with a specific focus on sensing and power magnetics. This work includes novel processing methods for high-frequency magnetic materials using applied electromagnetic fields. He also serves as director of the Engineering Science Program and faculty lead for the INfrastructure Sensing for Intelligent Transportation and Energy Systems (INSITES) Consortium, and co-founded the Advanced Magnetics for Power and Energy Development (AMPED) Consortium. 

Ohodnicki holds more than 40 patents and is co-founder and CTO of CorePower Magnetics, a manufacturer of high-performance inductors, transformers, and motors headquartered at the Energy Innovation Center. He received the 2016 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the 2017 Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Promising Innovations Medal, and seven R&D 100 Awards, including four consecutive years as a Pitt faculty member.

Daniel Shiwarski, assistant professor of bioengineering at the Swanson School of Engineering, developed HemoLens, a custom-built, open-source system designed to evaluate the strength and flexibility of both natural blood vessels and tissue-engineered blood vessels. With findings recently published in the December 2025 edition of Device (10.1016/j.device.2025.100996), his team’s work demonstrates that high-quality vascular measurements don’t require expensive hardware, just thoughtful engineering.

“There is a serious need for a customizable, low-cost, biomechanical myography platform that uses affordable manufacturing processes.” Shiwarski said. “We developed HemoLens to address the high cost of these existing systems and to make it easier for researchers to study vascular function across a wide range of cardiovascular applications.”

The most commonly used method to test how blood vessels behave under pressure ex-vivo is pressure myography. With this technique, arteries, veins, or tissue-engineered vascular systems are pressurized to mimic physiological conditions, allowing researchers to measure real-time changes. While widely used, these commercial myography systems rely on highly specialized, precision-engineered components, cost about $40,000, and lack options for customization, according to first author Antonio PereiraTavares, a third-year bioengineering PhD student in the Shiwarski Tissue Engineering Lab. 

“Most existing tools for this type of research require really expensive components, and because some of these systems are old and outdated, doing minor upgrades each year leaves costs for labs high.” PereiraTavares said. “But now, 3D printing has become so advanced that we've figured out how to create systems of the same quality much quicker and much cheaper than ever before.”

To keep costs low, Shiwarski’s team developed HemoLens primarily from 3D printed components and paired the hardware with open-source software, eliminating traditional manufacturing and development expenses to dramatically reduce the system’s overall cost to just $750. 

“Advances in 3D printing have made it easy to reduce costs, but the real shift came from the open-source maker community—components that once cost $50 to $100 are now available for just a few dollars.” Shiwarski said. “When you combine that with low-cost cameras and single-board computers, it becomes possible to build powerful systems like HemoLens at a fraction of the traditional price.”

While inexpensive, HemoLens is a highly advanced research tool. A dedicated module allows the device to regulate pressure under normal physiological conditions or mimic disease states such as hypertension, revealing how chronically elevated blood pressure causes vessels to stiffen and lose their ability to stretch over time. And, as an open-source technology designed to be adopted by the broader research community, the impact of HemoLens will extend far beyond the lab where it was developed.  

“Providing open-source technology has always been a core focus of our lab, and our goal has consistently been to make bioengineering tools more accessible.” Shiwarski said. “We're already integrating HemoLens across our research pipelines, and several other labs are now building their own versions as well. I hope the next step for HemoLens is widespread use.”

The detailed design manual draws on the expertise of four international authors from academia and industry. They are all members of the INBAR Bamboo Construction Task Force (BCTF), one of the leading international bodies on the structural uses of bamboo:

• Dr David Trujillo CEng, Assistant Professor in Humanitarian Engineering, School of Engineering at the University of Warwick;
• Kent Harries PhD, FASCE, FACI, FIIFC, PEng, Professor of Structural Engineering and Mechanics, University of Pittsburgh;
• Sebastian Kaminski CEng, an IStructE Fellow and a structural engineer from consulting firm Arup;
• and Engr. Luis Felipe Lopez CEng, General Manager of the Base Bahay Foundation Inc. (BASE), which is a guide sponsor with the International Bamboo and Rattan Organization (INBAR).

Manual for the design of bamboo structures to ISO 22156:2021 aims to help structural engineers and other architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) professionals understand how this prolific bio-based material can be used safely, with the ISO standard and the manual limited to two-storeys because of fire concerns.

Lead author Dr David Trujillio, University of Warwick says: “This manual marks a significant milestone for the safe use of bamboo for permanent structures. Most structural design codes are developed in higher-income countries to address their own needs. Only later are they adopted or adapted by lower and middle-income countries – but the starting point is never the needs of those regions.

Professor Kent Harries, University of Pittsburgh adds: “There are some 1,600 known species of bamboo. Structurally, it has remarkable mechanical properties. It has also become a very promising bio-based resource, with growing credentials as a sustainable construction material. Nonetheless, this is hugely dependent on designing and building safe and durable structures. Our detailed manual helps to achieve this.”

Sebastian Kaminski, Arup explains: “Bamboo has great potential to contribute to a low-carbon construction sector. Bamboo engineering is a very young field compared to mainstream materials and its unique possibilities are increasingly recognised and supported by growing research and innovation. Our manual is structured to support the design engineer along the journey, from sourcing bamboo to detailed design.”

Luis Felipe Lopez, Base Bahay highlights: “The construction industry contributes nearly 40% of carbon emissions globally, and bamboo, a regenerative and durable material, is redefining how we build our structures. From being an alternative to a reliable building material, bamboo is now gaining global recognition, and the need for a comprehensive framework is essential to support design engineers and ensure the safe and proper use of bamboo in the built environment, maximising its full potential and environmental advantages.

Kewei Liu, Coordinator of the INBAR Global Bamboo Construction Programme, mentions: “The publication of this guide is of great significance in promoting the application of the current ISO 22156:2021 standard, which has been the most widely accepted international bamboo standard since the 2000s. The authors have made a remarkable contribution to the global use of bamboo construction.”

Bamboo is native to all continents apart from Antarctica and Europe, although numerous species successfully thrive across Europe. Its lifecycle makes it an attractive resource in the context of tackling the global climate emergency, as like trees it fixes carbon in its leaves, stem, roots and surrounding soil. Bamboo’s harvest does not disturb the stored carbon in the soil.

Alongside the four leading authors, the manual was also reviewed by eleven expert reviewers. It has ten chapters covering a wide range of topics including the bamboo supply chain; bamboo project management; grading and mechanical characteristics of bamboo; analysis of bamboo structures; seismic and wind hazard design using bamboo; element and connection design; durability; bamboo structural shear walls; and worked examples of bamboo’s structural use in real-life examples.

Dr David Trujillo, University of Warwick concludes: “The guide is published in the wake of the tragic Hong Kong tower block fires. We share condolences for all those impacted, and await the outcome of investigations as we cannot comment until all the facts are in. However general risk management principles advocate a risk assessment and consideration of use of flame-retardant materials on high rise and closely spaced buildings, along with fire detection and suppression.

“Importantly, and given the wide use of bamboo, this guide sets out provisions for its safe use, including for fire, covering permanent buildings and not scaffolding. Our aim is for this to be a must-use resource for the structural engineer already working with bamboo or considering its use. We also hope it will be a trusted resource for colleagues across the built environment globally, whether in industry or academia.”

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.”

For more than 20 years, the University of Pittsburgh’s Jayant Rajgopal has taken a unique approach to addressing healthcare challenges in LMICs. He is applying industrial logistics principles to model and optimize the distribution chain of vaccines and blood. Rajgopal recently delivered the keynote address at the Biennial International Conference on Industrial Logistics (ICIL), held at Ritsumeikan University’s Tokyo Campus, highlighting the promise of a logistics approach to helping save lives.

“When people think about industrial logistics, they tend to think about traditional manufacturing, warehousing, and transportation,” said Rajgopal, Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Swanson School of Engineering’s Department of Industrial Engineering. “But it’s incredibly beneficial in complex healthcare delivery.”

In his keynote address, Rajgopal discussed how industrial logistics can improve vaccine distribution in LCIMs like Chad and Kenya, presenting his research detailed in articles such as “Redesign of Vaccine Distribution Networks” (DOI: 10.1111/itor.12758) and “Optimizing Vaccine Distribution in Low and Middle-Income Countries,” (DOI: 10.1016/j.omega.2020.102197).

“We’ve developed mixed-integer programming models, which consider different variables and constraints,” Rajgopal noted. “Our models separate the vaccine distribution networks from existing healthcare infrastructure, which can be outdated and complex. We’re making these networks more efficient and adaptable so they can reach more people.”

Rajgopal and his team have tested their models using data from LMICs across sub-Saharan Africa, validating their efficacy in reducing costs and increasing distribution.

Rajgopal presented a second case study, in which a transdisciplinary team developed a novel approach to optimizing how blood is collected, stored, and delivered to people in rural settings of LMICs. Since 2017, he has been part of a project called BLOODSAFE – Pathways of Innovation in Blood Transfusion Systems in Kenya.

The researchers used discrete event simulation (DES), a computer-based modeling approach that simulates a complex process, breaking it down to specific events occurring at a particular time.

“DES has traditionally been used in manufacturing, but increasingly healthcare leaders are seeing its value,” Rajgopal said.

In modeling and simulating the ‘vein-to-vein’ process in Kenya, from collection and storage of blood to transport and distribution, the team created a framework that scales and adapts to the unique conditions of a country.

“The ICIL conference focuses more on manufacturing and production,” Rajgopal said. “It was an honor to have this opportunity to deliver the keynote address and share how logistics research is transforming healthcare delivery—how it can do more than just improve assembly lines. It can save lives.”

University of Pittsburgh researchers have made an important step toward providing hospitals and water treatment facilities with a safer, greener alternative to chlorine-based disinfection.

The team, which includes scientists from Drexel University and Brookhaven National Laboratory, uncovered key design principles for catalysts that can generate ozone, a disinfecting agent, on demand.

This breakthrough addresses a critical challenge in water sanitation. Chlorine, commonly used to kill bacteria on surfaces and in water — including most municipal drinking water — is hazardous to transport and store, and its byproducts can be carcinogenic. These risks limit its use and motivate the search for safer disinfectants.

With the right catalyst, water electrolysis can generate the less hazardous and more sustainable ozone, but limited understanding of how ozone-forming catalysts work has hindered progress. By identifying which surface defects accelerate ozone formation and which trigger corrosion that stops ozone formation, the team has revealed the characteristics necessary for active and stable next-generation catalysts.

“Catalysts can make exciting chemistry possible, but catalysts themselves break down over time,” said John Keith, R.K. Mellon Faculty Fellow in Energy at Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering. “Under extreme electrolysis conditions, exciting chemistry can start happening, but catalysts can also start breaking down quicker, too. In the oxide-based catalysts we have studied, what forms ozone is paradoxically also suppressing its formation. Now that we understand that, it becomes a fun puzzle to solve how to design ozone-generating sites that do not also cause corrosion reactions that ruin the catalyst.”

The research team, led by Keith and Drexel Associate Professor Maureen Tang, was supported by the National Science Foundation to study fundamental electrochemical mechanisms of multielectron oxidations. They targeted ozone as a replacement for chlorine because it decomposes into oxygen, eliminating long-term residue concerns. Technologies that generate ozone directly in water wherever disinfection is needed could revolutionize water sanitation practices.

Water electrolysis, a high-energy process where electric currents split water into oxygen and hydrogen gases, can produce ozone instead of oxygen when the right catalyst is used. Among the few known examples, nickel- and antimony-doped tin oxide (NATO) catalysts have been considered the safest and most cost-effective option for electrolysis-based ozone generation. However, they have been observed to degrade too quickly for widespread use.

Solving the catalyst puzzle

Computational work by Lingyan Zhao, then a Pitt chemical engineering PhD student using resources at Brookhaven National Lab’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials, provided clues to why NATO catalysts break down so rapidly. Quantum chemistry models pinpointed that defect sites on the catalyst surface play two distinct but critical roles: They enhance ozone generation by enabling rapid electron transfer, but also make the catalyst susceptible to corrosion when water attaches to the surface. There it forms proton-rich networks of hydroxides and water, which are known to be reactive and corrosive.

The lead author of the work, Rayan Alaufey, an international PhD student at Drexel, performed a wide series of experiments to test and validate these hypotheses, leading to the final conclusions, which were published in the journal ACS Catalysis (doi: 10.1021/acscatal.5c04461).

“This work is a testament to how fundamental science and engineering come together to answer long-standing questions and concoct new routes to improved water sanitation technologies,” Keith said.

It was the fall semester of 2021 and as Ashmar said, “I’d just finished my final co-op rotation with The Sherwin-Williams Company, where I had the chance to do R&D work in a lab. I loved it.”

That all changed after a friend approached Ashmar about the opportunity to work on a project that could help reduce plastics in the ocean.

“My friend Jon [Bingaman] had been doing undergraduate research looking at algae-based bioplastics, and he encouraged me to take it over,” Ashmar said. “I had no idea what it would entail.”

Though reluctant, he worried he might regret not trying it. Ashmar signed up for three credits and figured that would be it for academic research.

New plastics for an old problem 

At the time, Pitt chemical and petroleum engineering professors Eric Beckman and Susan Fullerton were developing sustainable bioplastics to help solve one of the most vexing environmental problems: the growing masses of plastic floating around the oceans, collecting on the seafloor, and finding its way into sea life. 

“A recent report has found that by 2050, there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean on a per-mass basis,” said Fullerton, who also directs the Nanoionics and Electronics Lab. “Findings like these have inspired developments in ‘biodegradable’ plastics, which are a step forward, but early generations require harsh environments to break down. They can last for years in the ocean.” 

The Pitt researchers turned to sodium alginate, which is derived from naturally occurring brown algae. They were exploring its potential as a bioplastic that could be engineered to dissolve in seawater. The research began in 2018 after their idea won them a $200,000 Innovation Prize from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. They were the only university team among five winners.

Since the start of the project, undergraduate researchers have played an essential role. As Fullerton said, “This project reflects the tremendous work of students like Andrew, who have taken ownership and made important contributions.”

Finding his place in the literature and the lab

Although initially hesitant, Ashmar soon did take ownership of the research.

“Most undergraduates require guidance and deadlines,” Fullerton said. “We quickly realized that would be unnecessary for Andrew.”

“I was reading the literature, compiling the previous research, doing experiments,” Ashmar said. “And then I started writing a paper, getting some drafts together.”

As Fullerton said, “Andrew was coming to us with all this new information, things he’d read. I remember having a conversation with Eric [Beckman] about how we needed to make sure he was doing okay in his classes because he was spending so much time on the research!”

Turns out, Ashmar was doing great. “It was my best semester,” he said.

When the semester ended, he signed up for more research credits to continue advancing the project.

Engineering bioplastics that know when to disappear

At heart of the project was the sodium alginate, which is commonly used to produce hydrogels. These solids are soluble and swell with water, but they don’t fall apart, which isn’t great if the goal is to create plastics that dissolve.

Through dehydration and crosslinking—a process that connects polymer strands into a stronger, three-dimensional network—the sodium alginate can be transformed into a rigid, solid-state material that behaves like a conventional bioplastic, holding its shape and resisting breakdown in deionized water.

Their breakthrough came after realizing those strong calcium-based crosslinks can be reversed.

“The calcium ions can be replaced with sodium ions, creating a trigger for the bioplastic films to dissolve in seawater because it has such a high concentration of competing ions,” Fullerton said. “With enough exposure to sodium ions, the films just turn into a benign byproduct.” 

A publication, a patent, and the pursuit of a PhD

As Ashmar immersed himself in the research, conducting experiments and compiling and synthesizing the data from earlier undergraduate research, he realized that what he loved about hands-on industry R&D work, he had also found in academic research. “It’s all about problem solving, which is what first got me interested in engineering.”

By the time he graduated in 2022, Ashmar had made significant contributions to the research and had drafted a manuscript that he continued to work on with Fullerton. In June of 2025, the team submitted the paper, “Uniformly crosslinked algal bioplastic with triggerable decomposition in salt water” (DOI 10.1039/D5GC02866C), and in October it was published in Green Chemistry.

Ashmar, notably, is the paper’s first author.

“It’s rare to have an undergraduate take a project through to publication in a high impact journal, especially as a first author,” said Fullerton. “The first author is the one who made the greatest contributions—from the research hypotheses to data collection and analysis to writing. The first author really drives the work from start to finish. It’s not just about ability; first authorship requires dedication to stick with it. Andrew exemplified both.”

In 2023, as Ashmar started his PhD in chemical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, Pitt filed a patent application on the triggerable bioplastic technology that Ashmar and other remarkable undergraduate students had helped advance.  

It was an unexpected turn for a student once set on moving immediately into industry. 

“As an undergraduate researcher, I was talking with PhD students in the lab, and I became more comfortable with the idea of graduate school,” said Ashmar. “As for the research, it was rewarding to do something that could have such an impact on our environment.”

“This project has been part of my scientific journey for over a decade,” said first author Fariha Mahmood, who began studying the gels as an undergraduate researcher at McMaster and is now pursuing postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge. “To see these materials not only respond to light but also perform a logic operation feels like watching the material ‘think.’ It opens the door to soft systems making decisions on their own.”

Mahmood is joined by authors Anna C. Balazs, distinguished professor of chemical and petroleum engineering, and Victor V. Yashin, research assistant professor at Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering; and corresponding author Kalaichelvi Saravanamuttu, professor of chemistry and chemical biology at McMaster.

The group demonstrated that shining three self-trapped light beams into a specially engineered hydrogel can execute a NAND logic operation, one of the most fundamental building blocks of computing. Because all other digital logic gates can be built from NAND, the achievement establishes soft, photoresponsive materials as a realistic platform for autonomous, computation-capable systems.

A Material that Computes, Not Just Responds

The work builds directly on early theoretical and computational studies by Balazs and her Swanson School collaborator, the late Steven P. Levitan, professor of electrical and computer engineering, who passed away in 2016. Their landmark papers (including a 2016 Science Advances study) introduced the idea that oscillating chemical gels and other responsive materials could act as networks that sense, communicate, and compute. The latter work also involved the efforts of Yan Fang, Levitan’s graduate student at the time (now Assistant Professor at Kennesaw State University ), and Dr. Victor Yashin, a researcher in the Balazs group.

Those studies laid the conceptual groundwork for “materials that compute” – systems in which the material and the computer are the same entity, capable of performing tasks such as pattern recognition, synchronization, or decision-making without traditional circuitry.

“This is what we’ve always imagined – materials that don’t just respond to a stimulus, but process it,” Balazs said. “It’s a beautiful realization of a concept we began exploring more than a decade ago, that soft materials, through their own internal physics and chemistry, can carry out simple operations typically done by electronics.”

Above: A central signal beam is always launched into the sample. Inputs A (M_A) and B (M_B) may be on or off. After the beams equilibrate, the final intensity profile is used to determine the output. False is only obtained when the output signal is affected by interactions with two neighboring beams. For 1 NAND 1, the output signal results from mutual interactions between Beams 1 and 3, and thus, the NAND response is false.

How Light Becomes Logic

The material at the center of the breakthrough is a merocyanine-functionalized hydrogel that contracts when illuminated. When a laser beam enters the gel, the local contraction increases the refractive index, causing the beam to “self-trap” – narrowing and brightening as it travels through the material.

In earlier work, Saravanamuttu and others found that two beams of light in the same gel compete, each inhibiting the other’s ability to self-trap. This tug-of-war behavior becomes richer when additional beams are added.

“With three beams, we began to see consistent patterns of interaction that weren’t visible before,” Mahmood said. “The middle beam is always dimmer because it’s fighting both of its neighbors. That reliable behavior is what lets us map a logic operation onto a soft material.”

Saravanamuttu emphasized the study’s broader significance. “What excites me is the framework this establishes. We’re showing that computer logic – something we usually think of as the domain of electronics – can be carried out by a material through its own chemistry and physics. It’s a very different way of thinking about how materials can function.

“It’s exciting that just three beams of light and a polymer network can map directly onto a Boolean logic operation,” Saravanamuttu added. “You don’t need wires, electrodes, or external circuits. The material processes the inputs and determines the output entirely by its internal dynamics.”

Simple Yet Elegant Decision-Making

While this system cannot compete with semiconductor processors in speed or data density, nor is it intended to, the implications are profound for fields where materials must make decisions independently:

• Soft robotics
• Self-regulating medical devices
• Sensors in inaccessible environments
• Adaptive materials that respond and reconfigure themselves

“These systems don’t aim to replace silicon – they aim to mimic the remarkable autonomy of biological materials,” Balazs said. “A soft material that can sense, compute, and respond on its own opens entirely new design spaces.”

The study also establishes a framework that could allow multiple logic operations to occur simultaneously inside the same gel sample. Because the input and output signals are all beams of light, they can be routed, combined, or cascaded without wiring.

For Balazs, the work is also a personal milestone, bringing full circle the ideas she developed with Levitan. “Steven believed deeply that materials could someday compute,” she said. “To see that vision realized experimentally is incredibly meaningful.”

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. 

On Tuesday, November 11, 2025, industry, academic, and national laboratory leaders will meet at the Wyndham Grand Hotel in Pittsburgh to address complex security challenges in an interconnected world, one that extends thousands of miles into space. The IEEE Workshop on Security and Resiliency of Critical Infrastructure and Space Technologies, part of the four-day Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Conference on Trust, Privacy and Security in Intelligent Systems, and Applications, seeks to build an international ecosystem dedicated to securing critical infrastructure.

“There are unique challenges and cross-domain dependencies between terrestrial and space systems that introduce new vectors of risk, which continue to be overlooked,” said Mai Abdelhakim, associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Pitt, who launched the IEEE SR-CIST workshop last year and is serving as the chair of the workshop’s organizing committee. “A central aim is building a community that is working across domains, on Earth and in space, to address complex risks and keep infrastructure safer.”

Recognizing how critical infrastructure today extends into a space, indeed how they are so aligned and essential to society, the workshop includes a transdisciplinary group of presenters across sectors. Finding solutions to ever-evolving threats that can have increasingly catastrophic results requires a multifaceted approach and a connected community.

“Maintaining critical infrastructure, no matter if it’s a power plant, a satellite, or a space station, is becoming increasingly complex,” said Robert Cunningham, Vice Chancellor for Research Infrastructure at Pitt and general co-chair of the IEEE SR-CIST workshop. “During this workshop, we’re going to look at the technology and training necessary to ensure safer and more resilient systems. We’ll explore the need to design reliability into mobile systems, into everything from e-bikes to trains to space shuttles.”

Cunningham will open the workshop, followed by keynote speaker Greg Shannon, fellow and chief cybersecurity scientist at the Idaho National Laboratory, who will discuss “Foundations for Trust, Privacy, and Security in Proliferated Spaces.”

Shannon will also moderate the panel “Operational Technology (OT) Security.” The expert panelists are:

• Dionosio De Niz, principal researcher and the technical director of the Assuring Cyber-Physical Systems directorate at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.
• Samuel Perl, senior member of the technical staff on the CSIRT development team within the CERT® Program at CMU’s Software Engineering Institute.
• James Gillespie, chief growth officer and vice chairman at GrayMatter, a leading OT-focused company.
• Chad Spensky, founder and CEO of Allthenticate, a cybersecurity company.

Sekar Kulandaivel, research engineer at Bosch, will present an invited talk titled “Fast and Secure Safety-Preserving Hotpatching for Microcontrollers via Static Trampolines.”

The workshop will have three paper presentation sessions with a diverse, international group of industry leaders and academics. Participants will also have opportunities to network and share ideas.

“It’s exciting to hold the workshop in Pittsburgh this year and to have such distinguished experts from across fields sharing their insight,” said Abdelhakim. “Everyone’s experience is vital in developing more secure, resilient systems on Earth and in space.”

See the full program and learn more about the workshop and how you can attend.

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.

Just like jellyfish, some of the simplest organisms do not have a centralized brain or nervous system. Instead, they have a “nerve net” which consists of dispersed nerve cells that are interconnected by active junctions, which emit and receive chemical signals. Even without a central “processor,” the chemical signals spontaneously travel through the net and trigger the autonomous motion needed for organisms’ survival.

In a study published October 16 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Nexus (PNAS Nexus), Oleg E. Shklyaev, research assistant, and Anna C. Balazs, Distinguished Professor of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering and the John A. Swanson Chair of Engineering, developed computer simulations to design a soft material with a “nerve net” that links chemical and mechanical networks in a way that mimics how the earliest and simplest living systems coordinate motion. (“Chemical signaling in reaction networks generates corresponding mechanical impulses,” https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf330.) 

“In living organisms, chemical signals trigger motion all the time, from the beating of heart tissue to a plant bending toward sunlight,” said Balazs. “We asked, what is the simplest possible system that could reproduce this behavior in synthetic materials?”

Left: The propagation of mechanical deformations along the circular network of beads, which are shown as red, blue, green dots. Chemical waves (shown in magenta) travel in the counter-clockwise direction and generate rotating fluid vortices (shown with black arrows) that deform the ring.

From Chemical Waves to Movement

At the heart of the model is a simple feedback loop (the repressilator), which produces rhythmic chemical oscillations. The researchers replicated this system as a series of enzyme-coated microscopic beads connected by flexible links that constitute the body of the material. The beads can be viewed as mechanically-responsive tissue or vertebrae strung together into a soft spine.

When chemical reactions occur on the bead surfaces, they create waves of changing concentration that ripple along the chain. These chemical waves induce fluid motion, which in turn deforms the network, effectively converting chemistry into mechanical movement. The team calls this coupling a chemo-mechanical network (CMN).

On a visual level, Shklyaev likens the behavior to “a centipede or flatworm, where waves of contraction move through the body, propelling it forward.” 

The researchers found that by adjusting the chemical makeup and geometry of the network - such as arranging beads into rings - they could control the wave’s length and speed. Closed loops allow motion to flow continuously around the system.

Left: The chemo-mechanical waves (shown in magenta) produce fluid vortices (black arrows) that move “tentacles” decorating the ring-like elastic network of beads.

A Slinky That Moves Itself

Balazs offered a Slinky toy as another analogy. “If you place a slinky at the top of the stairs and give it a simple nudge, gravity takes over and its potential energy becomes kinetic motion,” she said. “Now imagine painting certain coils with enzymes that trigger specific chemical reactions. Once you start the chemistry, the Slinky moves itself, because the reactions send waves through the coils, bending and flexing them in a specific sequence of directed motion.”

In this analogy, the Slinky represents the mechanical backbone, and the colored enzyme sites act like chemical nerve endings. When one site reacts, it sends a chemical “message” to its neighbors - just as neurons transmit signals - causing parts of the structure to move selectively.

“Our system can ‘instruct’ specific regions to move,” Balazs explained. “For example, one reaction might make a section lift, while another causes a different region to flex. It’s an autonomic system stripped to its simplest form - chemistry guiding mechanics.”

While stimuli-responsive materials can harness external stimuli to produce a given move, the materials are typically receptive to only one or two distinct cues and undergo a limited repertoire of motion. Here, the coated beads produce position-specific and enzyme-specific chemical signals and thus, altering the chemistry and positions of the coated beads can give rise to a broad range of dynamic behavior.

Left: Randomly dispersed particles (spheres of rainbow colors) are swept by the chemically-generated rotating flow (black arrows) and follow propagating chemical waves shown in magenta.

A Chemical Nervous System

The team’s model demonstrates how chemical reaction networks (CRNs) can give rise to mechanical coordination without any electronics or centralized control. “This simple system doesn’t need a brain or an electrical signal,” said Shklyaev. “Once the chemical reaction starts, it generates flows that make the structure move and is completely self-contained.”

The work reveals an inherent connection between CRNs operating in the body fluid and the submerged elastic tissues (beads and links) that leads to the formation of a corresponding chemo-mechanical network (CMN). The human body is 60 percent water and replete with enzymes. Through various mechanisms, enzymatic reactions in aqueous solutions intrinsically generate gradients, which can translate chemical energy into mechanical action. The formation of CMNs and processes describing the interactions between CRNs and elastic tissues are often neglected in biology. The CRN-CMNs creates a closed chemical circuit that sends and receives signals, generates motion, and can even transport microscopic cargo along its structure, like how biological tissues move nutrients or respond to stimuli.

The concept could inform future soft robots, responsive materials, or chemical computing systems that operate autonomously in fluid environments.

Simple Components, Complex Behavior

“Biology shows us that complexity emerges from simplicity,” Balazs said. “By combining only a few key components - chemistry, elasticity, and fluid flow - we see a material move. It converts chemical fuel into motion, coordinates its parts, and performs work without needing wires, circuits, or motors.

“It’s a bit like eating a cheeseburger, and then moving your arm,” she joked. “You add fuel, and it does the rest.”

Ultimately, the research provides a blueprint for building autonomous, adaptive materials - soft systems that think in chemistry instead of electricity.

Researchers from Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering and the Catholic University of Uruguay are working on a series of studies to better understand how people perceive changes in their environment as they walk. The research team, led by Associate Professor of Bioengineering Gelsy Torres-Oviedo, aims to use its results to boost early detection of some conditions and, ultimately, to help people with gait asymmetries walk out into the world confidently and safely.

Their most recent work was published in eNeuro, a journal of the Society for Neuroscience.

For this study, the team sought to determine the smallest change in speed that participants could detect. It turns out, people are more sensitive to change than previously thought.

To figure this out, the researchers used a treadmill with two belts connected to different motors. Research participants — neurologically healthy adults between 19 and 40 years old — walked with one foot on each belt. After a period of normal walking, with both belts going the same speed, researchers increased the speed of one belt and slowed down the other by the same amount.

“When the speed difference was introduced, participants had to quickly identify which leg was moving slower,” Torres-Oviedo said. “We found that people could detect these differences even when they were quite small, much smaller than we previously thought possible during walking.”

When the speed changed on the treadmill, participants indicated which leg they thought was moving slower by clicking a button. It’s this perception of change that the researchers were after.

“We found that people were able to tell when there was a 50 millimeter-per-second difference between their legs with 75% accuracy,” said lead author Marcela Gonzalez-Rubio, a PhD candidate in Torres-Oviedo’s lab. That’s about two inches. Previously, researchers believed people could only sense changes of 5 inches per second.

“This is the first time we’ve asked, ‘How are they sensing?’” said Pablo A. Iturralde, professor of electrical engineering at Catholic University of Uruguay. “This was a big unknown to us”

When Iturralde began studying people on the treadmill as a PhD student in Torres-Oviedo’s lab, he said, “We knew what the muscles were doing, we knew how the legs were moving, but we did not know what people were perceiving when this was happening.”

Their latest finding has real-life implications. “It helps us to be able to accurately measure when someone has a sensory deficit in a way that is relevant to how they respond to changes in their environment,” Iturralde said. It may also help doctors better predict how a patient will be impacted after having a stroke or traumatic injury.

And watching changes in sensory perception could also help when it comes to evaluating how well someone is or isn't responding to rehabilitation, Torres-Oviedo said.

As the team continues to build this body of research, they are developing a framework to better understand the roles people’s senses — and sensory deficits — play in navigating their environments. For example, previous work showed, among other things, people have problems adjusting the way they walk in new environments.

The researchers wondered if people become less steady as they age because they have difficulty sensing their environment and so didn’t trust themselves to make any corrections to their gait.  “Now we can measure people’s sensation as they get older and ask that question,” Torres-Oviedo said.

Once their questions are answered, the research team will be able to take its next step, working toward solutions that keep people steady on their feet. 

This research was supported by a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, No.1847891.

A 2024 gift from Diane P. and Gerald (Jerry) D. Holder established the lecture series at the Swanson School in honor of Dean Emeritus Holder, who served as the U. S. Steel Dean of Engineering from 1996 to 2018. The lecture series rotates annually between the school’s six departments each fall, and this year is hosted by Dr. Robert Enick, Professor and Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering. Dr. John was mentored by Dr. Holder as his first doctoral student.

Dr. John will present “Targeted Delivery through Self Assembly in Environmental Remediation and in Drug Delivery.” His current research deals with the targeted delivery of chemical compounds using carriers that are designed through principles of self-assembly, and he will discuss two specific cases in the environmental and drug delivery areas. In the environmental area, Dr. John works in the mitigation of Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs), which occur during periods of eutrophication and lead to uncontrolled algal growth especially of species that produce toxins that have devastating effects on aquatic life and affect human health. HAB events therefore have significant impacts on the economies of affected communities. Technology to mitigate such blooms incorporate fundamental chemical and biochemical concepts of flocculation and algaecide delivery. Dr. John describes his group's work focusing on technology that integrates algaecide into self-assembled mesh like networks that trap algae so that the algaecide is delivered specifically to algal cells in the resulting flocs, with minimal off target implications. He will address both freshwater HABs and the marine HABs commonly known as the Red Tide. 

In the second case study on drug delivery concepts, the group uses self-assembly in the generation of nanoscale complexes of lipids and peptoids, which are peptide mimetic systems. He will demonstrate that such complexes act through the hydrophobic effect and are able to encapsulate chemotherapeutic agents. These complexes can also be used to generate multilayer vesicles through vesicle fusion. These are novel systems that have potential in drug and vaccine therapy.

For University of Pittsburgh computer engineering students Dikchhya and Nischal Kharel, the compact objects hurtling through space and pelted by radiation are unique challenges.

Through a partnership with the University of Pittsburgh’s NSF Center for Space, High-Performance & Resilient Computing (SHREC) and Lockheed Martin, the two undergraduates had a unique opportunity to develop and deploy applications to a satellite in geosynchronous orbit (GEO), 22,236 miles above the earth. 

Discovering SHREC

As the cousins were nearing graduation from the Swanson School of Engineering last spring, neither had concrete plans to attend graduate school. That changed after a conversation with Samuel Dickerson, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.

“When Professor Dickerson learned that we both loved space and wanted to work at NASA, he asked if we knew about SHREC,” Nischal said. “Somehow, we didn’t.”

Dickerson amended that, introducing them to Alan George, Department Chair, R&H Mickle Endowed Chair, NSF SHREC Space Center Director, and professor of electrical and computer engineering. George provided Dikchhya and Nischal with the opportunity to earn credits conducting space research with Linus Silbernagel, a second-year PhD student, and Evan Gretok, a SHREC postdoctoral researcher.

Solving real-world problems

On November 1, 2022, Lockheed Martin launched an In-space Upgrade Satellite System (LM LINUSS) into GEO, which enables satellites to orbit at the same rate as Earth's rotation, making them appear stationary from the ground. Today, as the mission nears completion, the CubeSat satellite serves as a test bench.

In GEO, more than 20,000 miles farther out than satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO), LINUSS provides an opportunity to test code and applications in more challenging conditions.

“Lockheed Martin approached Dr. George about the possibility of building and running tests in a GEO satellite because of SHREC’s expertise in satellite hardware and software,” said Silbernagel. “We had some problems that Dikchhya and Nischal could help solve.”

The limits of memory

CubeSat satellites are incredibly small—some fewer than four inches—and thus constrained in their computational power, reducing function efficiency. Tiny onboard cameras, for instance, can capture wavelengths that the human eye can’t process but that create enormous files that waste time and energy to transmit back to earth.

“I worked on a project called CNN JPEG, which a graduate student had started and that uses machine learning to compress data in satellite photos,” said Nischal. “I wanted to deploy the technology on LINUSS.”

The LINUSS satellite uses a ZCU102 computing board, and the team replicated Lockheed Martin’s satellite configuration on it.

“Lockheed Martin packages their apps in a certain way,” Nischal said. “We got the technology running on our test board and sent it to them to be transmitted to LINUSS.”

Unfortunately, although the app worked on Earth, it was too large to run in the satellite. “In classes, we’re taught about memory constraint, but it’s different when you actually run into it,” said Nischal, who has been working to optimize CNN JPEG.

Making it work in space

Satellites generate many images, but most are irrelevant. They depict stretches of ocean or forest, or just clouds. “Satellites send back many images of little interest to researchers, wasting memory and bandwidth, which creates delays,” said Dikchhya.

To solve this problem, Dikchhya set out to run a machine-learning model on LINUSS. The model, trained by Gretok, enables autonomous onboard classification on a constrained system. The application reduces massive images to tiles and categorizes them to help eliminate redundant data. “My job was to make it work in space,” Dikchhya said.

She did just that.

Using the ZCU102 board, she programmed and packaged the application and sent it to Lockheed Martin.

“Mine is a smaller model, so it ran without issues,” said Dikchhya. “After our final tests, the Lockheed Martin team sent it up to LINUSS, ran the application, and the model correctly classified the images. Watching something we built operate successfully 22,000 miles above Earth was a major milestone and an exciting opportunity.”

“It would be impossible for students to do something this big without Lockheed Martin’s partnership,” said Silbernagel. “Dikchhya and Nischal got to join the team remotely during the testing and deployment. It’s the first time Pitt undergraduate students have run apps in GEO.”

“This project represents an essential aspect of SHREC,” said George. “Through university and industry partnerships like this one, students get these incredible opportunities that propel them into space research and prepare them for careers in space engineering.”

“When we started,” said Nischal, who like Dikchhya is now a SHREC graduate student, “we were undergraduate students with almost no real-world research experience. We encountered problems that others hadn’t, and we had to figure out how to solve them.” 

“Industry and society are at a pivot point as our energy portfolio adapts to a complex balance of components, whether traditional oil and natural gas to solar, wind, biomass, hydroelectric or geothermal,” explained Robert Enick, professor and vice chair of research who led the program design. “We developed a hands-on program that meets current needs while futureproofing our graduates’ careers, enabling them to move seamlessly between industries.”

A Legacy of Leadership in Energy

The new, unique program will be offered through the Swanson School’s Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, which created the world’s first petroleum engineering program in 1910. Pitt alumni across the energy industry also contributed to its development, highlighting the urgent need to modernize traditional approaches while expanding renewable energy education. GRO is the first undergraduate petroleum engineering degree program in the country to combine traditional natural gas and oil components with an extensive suite of courses related to renewables.

The curriculum combines core courses in geology, chemistry, drilling, and production with eight required renewable energy courses – by far the most of any program worldwide. Topics include solar, wind, hydro, biofuels, energy storage (e.g. batteries), subsurface decarbonization, hydraulic fracturing, and underground CO₂ disposal.

“Students will benefit from Pitt’s 180-year history in energy education while also gaining real-world experience through research, study abroad, and industry internships or co-ops.” said Michele V. Manuel, U. S. Steel Dean of Engineering. “The Swanson School is the only engineering program with a legacy of leadership in energy that is ready to introduce such a novel curriculum. This blend of tradition and innovation will make graduates highly competitive in the global job market.”

Strong Career Outlook

Indeed, engineers with these qualifications continue to enjoy high job demand and earning potential, as well as the ability to make a global difference, especially as developing nations seek new energy resources. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), employment of engineers with these qualifications is projected to grow through 2034, with a median annual wage above $141,000.

Swanson School alumnus Mark Papa BSPetE ’68, founder and former chairman and CEO of EOG Resources, brought his industry experience to advise the program development.

“While oil and natural gas remain central to the global energy mix, low- and zero-emission sources are expanding rapidly,” Papa said. “We also are looking at a fast-approaching demand for new talent as Boomers and GenX retire. It’s an honor to support a program that helps future Pitt Engineers fill that gap and lead the transition to a new energy future.”

Looking Ahead

Recruitment begins in 2026, with the first cohort starting next fall. The program will undergo ABET accreditation review for petroleum engineering in 2029 after the first GRO seniors graduate.

“I am excited that GRO builds on Pitt’s historic strength in energy-related engineering. Not only does the program reflect Pitt’s technical expertise, but also our commitment to innovation and sustainability,” noted Joseph McCarthy, Pitt Provost. “GRO will allow our students to gain a foundation in traditional energy systems while equipping them with forward-looking expertise in renewable technologies. This novel combination leverages and improves the usage of traditional resources while bridging seamlessly to the future, making it one of the few programs to offer that – and it positions Pitt graduates to lead the way in building a sustainable energy future and making an impact on a global scale.”

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The Resilient Energy Technology and Infrastructure Consortium, led by a team at West Virginia University in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh and over 60 regional partners, has been selected as a finalist today (Sept. 18) for a prestigious $160 million National Science Foundation Regional Innovation Engines award.

If chosen, this funding is projected to generate 21,000 jobs, 150 startups and more than $1 billion dollars in economic growth for the region.

Headquartered in the heart of Appalachia at the WVU Innovation Corporation, with a branch office at the Energy Innovation Center in Pittsburgh, Erienne Olesh, executive director of the WVU Office of Innovation and Commercialization and RETI CEO, said that RETI is committed to solving current and emerging issues for resilient energy to fuel industries, and support growing artificial intelligence and data center demand.

These priorities echo those on a national scale as the desire to drive American manufacturing and power data centers continues to rise.

“As the demand for reliable and secure energy reaches unprecedented levels, WVU is proud to lead the RETI Consortium, which is focused on innovation that will ensure reliable energy, securing American industry,” Olesh said. “By bringing together three R1 institutions and partners across research, workforce, capital and the nonprofit sectors, we are hopeful NSF recognizes the impact our work can have on the region and nation.”

Robert K. Cunningham, vice chancellor for research infrastructure at the University of Pittsburgh, said Pitt started the first Department of Petroleum Engineering back in 1910 to help the region lead in energy research and production. 

“More recently, our investments in the Energy GRID Institute, and our Department of Energy and industry collaborations through AMPED and the Cyber Energy Center keep our research relevant and impactful,” Cunningham said.

“Over the years, our faculty, staff and students have led in important areas of energy research, and our graduates have powered the region’s large energy companies and started small ones. But as important as those contributions are, we are also aware of how broad and deep the opportunities are, so we are excited to partner with WVU and CMU as part of RETI be one step closer to an NSF Engines awardee.”

“Pennsylvania and West Virginia have served as a nexus of leadership in energy innovation for more than a century,” CMU Vice President for Research Theresa Mayer said. “RETI brings together the tremendous talent and entrepreneurial spirit of the region’s universities and partners to realize a future-proof, resilient energy system for a prosperous economic future.”

Where energy intersects with technology, the governors of both West Virginia and Pennsylvania present a united front. 

“We have every opportunity to supercharge America’s next energy renaissance and serve as the backbone for energy security with this funding opportunity. We appreciate that NSF recognizes the region’s potential and look forward to continue powering the nation like we’ve done for the past 100 years,” West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey said.

“Pennsylvania is a national energy leader — and with world-class universities like Pitt and Carnegie Mellon, our Commonwealth is a leader in innovation too," said Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. “Working together with our partners in West Virginia, the NSF Engines initiative will help us secure our energy grid, deliver more power to our industrial manufacturing sector, and ensure we have reliable, affordable sources of energy for years to come. Pennsylvania and West Virginia have put together the most competitive and robust application for this award — and we deserve to win so that we can deliver results for communities across America.”

Regional interest to invest in an industrial energy innovation hub has skyrocketed. In less than two years, RETI has gathered over $161 million in support from industry, investors and workforce entities that will be unlocked if awarded the federal funding from NSF.

To support formalizing partnerships and building regional strategies, NSF awarded the Consortium a $1 million development award in February 2024. Eight months later, RETI was selected as one of 71 finalists to move forward to the full proposal stage. By July of this year, the consortium was selected as one of 29 semifinalists. If successful, NSF Engines would provide up to $160 million over 10 years, catalyzing a $320 million investment in the region.

“West Virginia has long been an energy leader for our nation, and this announcement underscores how our region is ready to build on that legacy in bold new ways. By bringing together research institutions and community partners, the RETI Consortium is positioning Appalachia to drive the next generation of energy innovation. I’m so glad to see West Virginia University at the forefront of this effort, which I have proudly supported, and I applaud WVU in their advancement in this competitive process. This effort has the potential to create thousands of jobs and ensure our region continues to power America for decades to come,” U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.) said.

“This is a tremendous opportunity for all West Virginians and for Appalachia. The RETI Consortium’s focus on advancing resilient energy technology and infrastructure is the kind of innovation that will power our region’s future — creating thousands of jobs while driving economic growth and spurring regional industrial growth. This project supports American dominance in high-tech industries such as artificial intelligence and data centers. I am proud to support this important initiative to ensure West Virginia remains a hub of innovation and energy leadership,” said U.S. Rep. Riley Moore (W.Va.).

RETI’s innovation-driven strategy is poised to enhance industrial competitiveness through scalable energy-efficient technologies, strengthen grid resilience to support U.S. manufacturing, accelerate commercialization of energy innovations, build a skilled regional workforce, support a growing community of deep tech entrepreneurs, and expand venture capital focused on hard tech.

Wei Gao, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering, has collaborated with researchers from Peking University to develop analytical metrics to qualitatively evaluate the quality of synthetic wireless data. The researchers have created a novel framework that significantly improves the task-driven training of AI models using synthetic wireless data.

Their work is detailed in “Data Can Speak for Itself: Quality-Guided Utilization of Wireless Synthetic Data” (DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2506.23174), which received the Best Paper Award in June at the MobiSys 2025 International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services.

Assessing affinity and diversity

“Synthetic data is vital for training AI models, but for modalities such as images, video, or sound, and especially wireless signals, generating good data can be difficult,” said Gao, who also directs the Pitt Intelligent Systems Laboratory.

Gao has developed metrics to quantify affinity and diversity, essential qualities for synthetic data to be used for effectively training AI models.

“Generated data shouldn’t be random,” said Gao. “Take human faces. If you’re training an AI model to identify human faces, you need to ensure that the images of faces represent actual faces. They can’t have three eyes or two noses. They must have affinity.”

The images also need diversity. Training an AI model on a million images of an identical face won’t achieve much. While the faces must have affinity, they must also be different, as human faces are. As Gao noted, “AI models learn from variation.”

Different tasks have different requirements for judging affinity and diversity. Recognizing a specific human face is different than distinguishing it from that of a dog or a cat, with each task having unique data requirements. Therefore, in systemically assessing the quality of synthetic data, the team applied a task-specific approach.

“We applied our method to downstream tasks and evaluated the existing work of synthesizing data,” said Gao. “We found that most synthetic data achieved good diversity, but some had problems satisfying affinity, especially wireless signals.”

The challenge of synthetic wireless data

Today, wireless signals are used in technologies such as home and sleep monitoring, interactive gaming, and virtual reality. Cell phone and Wi-Fi signals, as radio waves, hit objects and bounce back toward their source. These signals can be interpreted to indicate everything from sleep patterns to the shape of a person sitting on a couch.

To advance this technology, researchers need more wireless data to train models to recognize human behaviors in the signal patterns. However, as a waveform, the signals are difficult for humans to evaluate.

It’s not like human faces, which can be clearly defined. “Our research found that current synthetic wireless data is limited in its affinity,” said Gao. “This leads to mislabeled data and degraded task performance.”

To improve affinity in wireless signals, the researchers took a semi-supervised learning approach. “We used a small amount of labeled synthetic data, which was verified as legitimate,” Gao said. “We used this data to teach the model what is and isn’t legitimate.”

Gao and his collaborators developed SynCheck, a framework that filters out synthetic wireless samples with low affinity and labels the remaining samples during iterative training of a model.

“We found that our system improves performance by 4.3% whereas a nonselective use of synthetic wireless data degrades performance by 13.4%,” Gao noted.

This research makes an important first step toward ensuring not just an endless stream of data, but of quality data that scientists can use to train more sophisticated AI models.

With more than 8,000 satellites currently in low Earth orbit and little to no standardization of these sophisticated machines, the potential for bad actors to compromise one is not the stuff of campy action films. Indeed, a recent attack made headlines.

The University of Pittsburgh engineering professors and scholars at the NSF Center for Space, High-Performance, and Resilient Computing (SHREC) are collaborating with MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the Naval Nuclear Laboratory to improve satellite security. Mai Abdelhakim, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Robert Cunningham, Vice Chancellor for Research Infrastructure at Pitt, and their PhD students Quincy Bayer and Robert Esswein, and have helped develop a novel algorithm to more efficiently and effectively assess the trustworthiness of satellites.

Their research, “TAU: Trust via Asynchronous Updates for Satellite Network Resiliency” (DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-95761-1_15), is published in Applied Cryptography and Network Security. It advances understanding of network behavior and provides a powerful tool to keep satellites more secure and resilient. 

Fast, cheap, and potentially out of control

“Satellites today cost much less to produce and send into low Earth orbit, meaning more are being launched,” said Abdelhakim, who is also a SHREC faculty member. “But there are supply chain vulnerabilities and little oversight, so you don’t know who’s putting in what components. These satellites are already vulnerable because they’re connected to networks.

“The attack surface is huge.”

“The satellites being sent into low Earth orbit are built to last approximately five years,” added Cunningham, himself part of the SHREC faculty. “They provide essential communication, sensing, and navigation services worldwide. They connect people in remote areas to the internet, power the GPS in people’s vehicles, and increasingly interact with our phones. Keeping these satellites secure and resilient is of utmost importance.”

Satellites are susceptible to various attacks such as kinetic and black hole attacks. The former involves a physical attack on the system, while the latter is a software attack that can cause a satellite to accept packets (units of data) that arrive via a network but then drop or discard some or all of them, disrupting functionality.

“We modeled attack scenarios and evaluated the current trust assessment tools,” said Bayer, first author of the paper. “We found that these tools are complex to scale up and require extensive computation and communication. In some of our models, compromised devices could even circumvent trust assessment packets by acting benignly.”

Added Abdelhakim, “There is currently no unified approach to trust assessment.” 

Ensuring trust, asynchronously

Satellites are powered by batteries and solar panels and need efficient systems and algorithms. Pitt, MIT, and Naval Nuclear Laboratory researchers developed TAU: Trust via Asynchronous Updates to secure satellite constellations by taking advantage of the unique aspects of low Earth orbit satellites.

TAU relies on a series of finite state machines, a model based on predetermined states; in this case, satellites are identified as trusted, questionable, or untrusted. Network interaction and satellite behavior determine the trust level.

“We evaluate trust based on the events reflecting networking behavior,” said Abdelhakim. “Did a satellite move the packets as expected? Are there more positive events than negative? If there are more negative events, the status would move to questionable and ultimately to untrusted.”

The system is also asynchronous. Satellites are connected to ground control, but they only communicate with nearby satellites. A satellite in a constellation will directly evaluate the trust of the three nearest ones and indirectly evaluate a few others on a separate orbital.

A satellite will alert others after it detects a satellite is behaving questionably. The decentralized model decreases the energy budget while more effectively identifying compromised systems, which can then be isolated and repaired or taken offline.

Abdelhakim, who is organizing an IEEE Workshop on Security and Resiliency of Critical Infrastructure and Space Technologies in November of 2025, in Pittsburgh, said, “It’s like a neighborhood watch. When someone sees something suspicious in their immediate area, they alert others nearby, who alert a few others farther out.

“The system can keep the ever-increasing constellations of satellites in low Earth orbit more secure, ensuring that the people who benefit from satellite technology can access it reliably.”

This forward transfer of energy in three-dimensional bodies such as oceans or the air has been a foundational theory for decades, but that is changing. The University of Pittsburgh Professor Lei Fang and his PhD student Xinyu Si, with Filippo De Lillo and Guido Boffetta from the University of Turin, have challenged the assumption. Using a geometric framework, they have shown, via experiments and simulations, that energy flux direction is in fact mutable.

Their research, which can have far-reaching effects in fields such as medicine, coastal waterway management, and climate modeling, is detailed in the article “Manipulating the direction of turbulent energy flux via tensor geometry in a two-dimensional flow” (DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adv0956), published in Science Advances.

Challenging a long-held assumption

“Since 1941, with Andrey Kolmogorov’s research, energy flux has been predicted. In 3D flows like in bodies of water, energy moves from larger to smaller scales. For 2D flows, which occur in thin layers of water, that flux is reversed, from smaller to larger,” said Fang, assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering.

“To understand this abstract concept at different scales,” Fang added, “I recast the energy flux process into a mechanical process based on Navier-Stokes equations. And since this is a mechanical process, I could try to reverse it by changing the geometry between displacement and force.”

Fang developed a geometric framework using tensors (objects mathematicians use to explore, for example, the direction of stress and deformation, which create turbulence). He found that depending on how the tensors aligned, they could flux energy in different ways depending on how the forces come into contact.

“We showed that we could produce turbulent flows that either exhibit forward or inverse energy flux,” Fang said. “Our framework extends to the 3D scale as well.”

In previous research, Fang showed how tiny swimmers can disrupt strong ocean flows. Now, by focusing on the background flow and its interaction with other forces, like a group of tiny swimmers, he found that if correctly aligned, they can flux energy in different ways depending on how the forces come into contact.

Fang and Si validated their framework using a thin-layer, electromagnetically driven flow apparatus. In a tank with shallow water depth, they generated a horizontal magnetic field that drives a 2D flow. To perturb the flow, they used a rod array. In a thin layer of electrolytes, tracer particles produced images of the flow’s movement.

Harnessing energy flux

“Through this theoretical framework, we found that we can use small physical boundaries up to ten meters to perturb ocean transport barriers that spans kilometers,” said Fang. “It is possible to change the direction of the energy flux, which can improve how wastewater or other contaminants along a coastline are dispersed.”

Beyond coastal transport barrier management, the research can be used in medicine. “In microfluidic flows of less than one millimeter, where the viscosity of a liquid makes mixing difficult because there is little to no turbulence,” added Fang, “we could align the forces and displacement to generate weak ‘low Reynolds number turbulence,’ which could speed up mixing of agents.” 

The research also has the potential to advance how scientists model ocean currents and temperatures in a changing climate.

“While it’s hypothetical at this point, the research could improve climate modeling,” said Fang. “As climate change alters wind patterns and ocean flows, wind stress and currents could change the direction of energy flux. Understanding the forces that create this change can lead to more accurate models.”

Through a Fulbright Visiting Scholar Award, Molari, an associate professor of structural mechanics, has been on the Pitt campus collaborating with Harries, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The researchers are sharing extensive experience and insight to advance and standardize a material that can help provide sustainable, affordable housing worldwide. 

Shared interest in the potential of bamboo

“There are a billion people on the planet in informal housing, and as many as a quarter of a billion to a billion people who will likely be displaced due to rising sea levels in the next ten to fifty years,” said Harries.

“On island nations that can’t produce their own concrete, or in places like India, where deforestation has led to a ban on timber construction,” he added, “bamboo could be a potential homegrown opportunity to supplement the construction.”

Phyllostachys edulis (moso) and Guadua angustifolia, bamboo varieties with thicker culms (or stalks), are especially well suited for construction and indeed have been used as such for thousands of years.

“There’s a large fiber content at the outside of the skin, which is high in silica, making it robust and hard to cut through,” Harries said. “Nature got it right. You couldn’t do better.”

These strong bamboo varieties grow fast and can be harvested within three to five years. They also effectively sequester carbon dioxide, helping reduce greenhouse gasses.

“It’s very optimized,” said Molari of the plant she has been studying for the past seven years. She focuses on a different species of Phyllostachys, which grows in Italy and has a smaller diameter than its subtropical counterparts.

In addition to her many articles about the plant, including about its promise in Europe, Molari has helped write the Italian standards on bamboo. 

Harries’ interest in bamboo dates to 2006, when he recruited Bhavna Sharma (CEE PhD ’10) to the Swanson School’s PhD program. Sharma, a professor at USC’s School of Architecture and a leader in engineered bamboo and seismic research, wanted to study the performance of bamboo structures in Northeast India. 

In 2016, Harries received a $300,000 National Science Foundation grant to research bamboo’s potential as a building material in Puerto Rico. He has also written and helped revise the international standards for determining the physical and mechanical properties of bamboo culms.

Harries has made the case for bamboo right here in Pittsburgh and has written extensively about it, including the 2025 article “Adoption of full-culm bamboo as a structural material” (DOI: 10.1038/s44296-025-00050-2).

A transatlantic collaboration comes to Pittsburgh

Molari and Harries were invited to attend the July 2023 International Union of Laboratories and Experts in Construction Materials, Systems, and Structures (RILEM) conference in Rio de Janeiro and began a collaboration that has crossed time zones and continents.

“We’re both structural engineers with a materials science focus, applying fundamental mechanics to a neat product,” Harries said. “We know it works, but we need to translate it to something the engineering community can hang its hat on.”

Together, they helped form a RILEM Technical Committee to improve bamboo characterization and to promote the common language for its research and standardization.

In December 2024, their paper “Mechanical characterisation of bamboo for construction: the state-of-practice and future prospects” (DOI: 10.21809/rilemtechlett.2023.188) was published in RILEM Technical Letters. They assess the current state of bamboo standardization and methods for testing it. They also chart the RILEM Technical Committee’s path forward.

The energy around their collaborative work and shared interests inspired Molari to reach out to Harries and then apply for the Fulbright Visiting Scholar. The award, which recognizes the unique power of collaboration across cultures, was founded in 1946 by the U.S. Congress in the aftermath of World War II.

Molari received the Fulbright and at the end of May, with her family, flew to Pittsburgh, where they are staying with a host family through September. While her children use Snapchat to organize soccer matches with kids in the neighborhood, Molari collaborates with Harries. 

“We’re modeling the behavior of beams made from multiple bamboo culms,” said Molari. “In Italy, with the thinner bamboo, we need to bundle culms to make them stronger. It’s important to show what’s possible.”

In addition to modeling the full-culm bamboo, Harries and Molari are developing a RILEM report and working to improve test methods, an effort that will, as Harries noted, “impact the next version of the ISO [International Organization for Standardization] standards. There is real impact in collaborations like this one.”

Harries added, “By appreciating the engineering cultures in different countries, learning about the different codes… and engaging across academic cultures, we can see our work more clearly.”

Beyond modeling and writing about bamboo, Harries and Molari are building more connections. They are collaborating with Virginia Technical University on a project that could lead to research opportunities for students in Ecuador.

With Molari’s family, the two researchers traveled to Blacksburg to visit the Virginia Tech campus and meet with colleagues who share their interest in bamboo. “To kick off projects and establish relationships,” said Harries, “in a post-Covid world, nothing beats personal interaction”

“When you can meet someone in person, it changes how you approach your research,” Molari said. “It makes things easier.” 

Save the date: Luisa Molari will present her research “Structural Potential of Bamboo: Challenges and Opportunities” on Friday, September 19,  at 10:00 - 10:50 a.m. in 319 Benedum Hall.