Scientists at The Ohio State University showed that the engineered extracellular vesicles could evade immune cells and target cancer cells, two capabilities that could improve the delivery of future therapies.  

The technology offers exceptional flexibility: By assembling the vesicles from red blood cell lipids using microfluidics, researchers were able to package cargo ranging from genetic material and proteins to whole viruses used in gene therapy.

In mice, the engineered vesicles remained in circulation and were distributed to multiple organs in patterns similar to those of naturally occurring extracellular vesicles, with notable accumulation in the lungs.

Though researchers started with the idea of making delivery devices out of natural extracellular vesicles generated by red blood cells, they encountered limitations in efforts to scale up production and cargo loading flexibility – so they turned to engineering techniques to improve upon what nature had to offer.

“In terms of lipid composition, they basically match very closely with what the natural extracellular vesicles from red blood cells would have,” said senior author Eduardo Reátegui, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Ohio State. “We are keeping some of the great biological advantages that these particles have by themselves because they are very biocompatible.”

The source cells for the lipids are expired red blood cells – or RBCs – obtained from the lab of co-author Andre Palmer, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and an Ohio Eminent Scholar at Ohio State.

“We’re always purifying hemoglobin from expired red blood cells,” said Palmer, whose lab uses the hemoglobin as a building block for making red blood cell substitutes. “The approach here is very sustainable because these expired red blood cells otherwise would be thrown out since they cannot be transfused into patients.”

Reátegui, Palmer and colleagues described the platform in a study published recently in the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials.

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are tiny cargo-containing particles that emerge from cells to transport signals to other cells. EVs are known to contribute to both health and disease, and the Ohio State team has been investigating how engineered EVs can be used in a variety of medical applications.

Beyond the biocompatibility provided by red blood cell lipids, microfluidics enables therapeutic cargo to be incorporated as the vesicles form, eliminating the need for separate cargo-loading steps afterward.

“We’re not saying our process is better. We’re claiming that we have a lot more controllability in terms of what we want the composition of this engineered vesicle to look like,” said Reátegui, also a member of the Cancer Biology Program in The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Experiments showed that attaching a CD47 peptide to the carriers’ outer surface protected them from being mistaken for pathogens and eaten by macrophages.

The team also showed that the vesicles could be engineered for tumor targeting by adding PD-L1-recognition molecules, including anti-PD-L1 nanobodies developed in the lab of co-author Blaise Kimmel, and by demonstrating preferential uptake of anti-PD-L1-tagged vesicles in PD-L1-positive breast cancer tumors that are often targeted by immunotherapy.

In fact, researchers said these engineered EVs could function similarly to cancer CAR T-cell therapies that are made from a patient’s own immune system T cells.

“It could be a unique way of using a person’s own red blood cell lipids to then encapsulate therapeutic materials that could be delivered back to that patient to potentially cure a disease,” Palmer said.

The microfluidics method also enables inclusion of comparatively large molecules, such as whole proteins or even an adeno-associated virus (AAV) – the established delivery system for many gene therapies. Encasing a therapeutic AAV inside an engineered red blood cell extracellular vesicle tagged with the CD47 peptide could reduce the chances of triggering an immune response, Reátegui said.

“Our thought was to take these AAV particles and encapsulate them inside engineered RBC extracellular vesicles. We tested if the gene therapy would still work and be delivered into cells, and we show that it would. And we also demonstrated that the AAVs would be protected from neutralizing antibodies,” he said.

With the platform in place, the researchers aim to narrow their focus to gene therapy and delivery of select therapeutics, particularly those that capitalize on the EVs’ affinity for the lungs.

This research was supported by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, and Ohio State’s William G. Lowrie Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Co-authors include Chiranth Nagaraj, Xilal Rima, Kim Nguyen, Courtney Culkins, Nana Boateng, Jacob Doon-Ralls, Alejandro Bresolin, Xin Huang, Vahedi Amid, Ajeet Pal Singh, Dharti Shantaram, Anastasiia Amari, Nicholas Merriam, Zachary Schultz, Willa Hsueh, Rachel Kopec of Ohio State; and Hong Li, Scott Harper, Nizar Saad and Setty Magaña of Nationwide Children’s Hospital.

By Zak Kassas
Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The Ohio State University

“This is one of my favorite projects,” said Joshua Hagen, faculty director of the HPC and an associate research professor in the Department of Integrated Systems Engineering. “I have a passion for recovery science, and I love working directly with athletes and end users. When you pair controlled studies and real-world context — actually talking with athletes about what works — you get the most meaningful impact.”

At Ohio State, especially within football and soccer, recovery science combines measurement and modalities. Scientists measure workload via heart-rate monitors, GPS and session rating of perceived exertion, alongside physiological markers such as heart rate variability.

“Once we understand how hard their bodies are working and responding, we need to recover them quickly to get ready for the next day,” explained Hagen. “We call these recovery modalities — everything from cold and hot therapy, to sleep and nutrition, to newer tech like red light and flotation therapy.”

The relationship between Ohio State and U.S. Soccer traces back to the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar. At the time, a colleague of Hagen’s who was then head of high performance for the U.S. Men’s National Team approached Ohio State with a bold idea: Design and install a premier recovery facility inside the team hotel. That early collaboration set the stage for a formal partnership.

One of the partnership’s flagship studies examines vibroacoustic therapy, operated within Ohio State’s Shoemaker Complex, a state-of-the-art student athlete hub. Hagen describes the technology as “sensory-enhanced meditation and mindfulness” in which athletes recline in a cocoon-like device with intentionally crafted instrumental music and subwoofer-driven vibrations. Those vibrations mimic structured breathing patterns, like box breathing or 4-7-8 breathing, which are known to nudge the body toward a parasympathetic, recovered state.

“It’s very spiritual and relaxing,” Hagen said. “Athletes might not realize that’s what’s happening — but they feel good, and physiologically their bodies are being pushed into a recovery state. It’s a holistic approach that’s both enjoyable and potentially very effective.”

The collaboration also supports emerging scholars. U.S. Soccer and the university jointly funded Emaly Vatne, a former Ohio State soccer player turned researcher, through her PhD in exercise science and kinesiology. She defended her dissertation this spring and has begun working with Denver Summit FC, a team in the National Women’s Soccer League, while completing her research.

“Elements of this collaboration have informed the design of our Recovery Lab and our broader effort to upgrade how we approach recovery across U.S. Soccer,” said José María Oliva Lozano, the federation’s director of performance innovation. “We see this as an important first step. There is still much to learn about the effects and periodization of different recovery modalities across ages, sexes and competitive contexts.”

Ohio State researchers are approximately two years into the formal scientific program, according to Hagen. The team did a comprehensive literature review, found gaps and then launched targeted studies, including the vibroacoustic chamber study, which is about a year underway. He expects four or five mini studies to wrap up by the end of spring semester, with multiple papers coming out of the work.

Hagen’s academic home is in the College of Engineering, but his role as HPC faculty director brings together engineers, exercise physiologists, medical doctors and physical therapists — reflecting the multidisciplinary nature of modern sports science.

“You have to know exercise physiology, but you also have to know tech, data and math,” he explained. “Our team includes people who’ve lived the sport and can code the tools. That combination — domain knowledge plus technical depth — really matters when you’re building solutions athletes will use.”

The team expects findings to inform recovery access and protocols for athletes heading into major competitions. The collaboration with U.S. Soccer will continue through upcoming cycles of international competition, with an eye to scale, coach education and equitable access to low-cost tools.

“At the end of the day, we’re trying to help athletes perform better, reduce injury risk, sleep better and enjoy longer careers,” Hagen said. “And we want to do it the right way, with controlled studies, transparent reporting and direct conversations with the people we serve.”

The AAAS Fellowship, recognizing scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications, is one of the most prestigious honors a U.S. scientist can receive. Fellows are elected by their academic peers. The 2025 class consists of 449 scientists, engineers and innovators across 24 AAAS disciplinary sections.

“The American Association for the Advancement of Science has a long history of honoring researchers whose exceptional work is expanding the impact of their respective disciplines,” said John M. Horack, vice president for research. “The contributions and achievements of Ohio State’s newly elected Fellows exemplify this standard of excellence and service.”

Ohio State’s newest Fellows represent the colleges of Arts and Sciences and Engineering. This year’s class, joining over 550 Ohio State scholars who have been granted this lifetime recognition since 1874, are:    

Tanya Berger-Wolf, director of the Translational Data Analytics Institute and professor of computer science and engineering; evolution, ecology and organismal biology; and electrical and computer engineering. For distinguished contributions to the field of computer science, particularly for interdisciplinary, cutting-edge research in the area of computational ecology and Artificial Intelligence for science.

Stuart Ludsin, professor of evolution, ecology and organismal biology. For distinguished contributions to interdisciplinary science at the nexus of limnology, fisheries ecology, global change biology and ecosystem management.

Steven MacEachern, professor of statistics. For distinguished contributions in Bayesian methodology and computation, and for outstanding leadership and service in advancing statistical education, research and professional engagement. 

Michael Poirier, professor of physics. For distinguished contributions to the fields of gene regulation and chromatin biology, particularly for biophysical studies of pioneer transcription factors and chromatin dynamics. 

AAAS is one of the world’s largest general scientific societies and publisher of the Science family of journals. Fellows are recognized for their achievements across disciplines, from research, teaching and technology to administration in academia, industry and government, to excellence in communicating and interpreting science to the public. 

The 2025 class of Fellows will be honored at a forum on May 29 in Washington, D.C.

Using a special laser 3D printing method, researchers melted fake lunar soil – a synthetic version of the fine dusty material on the moon surface, called regolith simulant – into layers and fused it with a base surface to manufacture small, heat-resistant objects. 

If utilized on the lunar surface, the material may help build sturdy, nontoxic habitats and tools for future astronauts, capabilities that would be vital to the NASA Artemis missions that aim to establish a long-term human presence on the moon by the end of the decade.

But to assess how well this new construction material may work in space, the team tested their fabrication process under a range of different environmental conditions, revealing that the overall quality of the material depends greatly on the surface onto which the soil is printed.  

“By combining different feedstocks, like metal and ceramics, in the printing process, we found that the final material is really sensitive to the environment,” said Sizhe Xu, lead author of the study and a graduate research associate in industrial systems engineering at The Ohio State University. “Different environments lead to different properties, which directly affect the mechanical strength and the thermal shock resistance of certain components.”

The study was recently published in the journal Acta Astronautica.

There are two types of lunar regolith simulants that scientists use to study the surface of the moon. The one this team used, called LHS-1, is designed to replicate soil found in the lunar highlands, a heavily cratered area rife with dark-colored basaltic rock. 

In this case, researchers discovered that while trying to print LHS-1 on stainless steel and glass surfaces was challenging, it adhered well to alumina-silicate ceramic, likely because the two compounds form crystals that enhance thermal stability and mechanical strength. 

Other environmental factors, such as the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, the strength of the laser and even the speed of the printing process, were also shown to impact the stability of the structure, said Sarah Wolff, senior author of the study and an assistant professor in mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State.

“There are conditions that happen in space that are really hard to emulate in a simulant,” she said. “It may work in the lab, but in a resource-scarce environment, you have to try everything to maximize the flexibility of a machine for different scenarios.”

Unsurprisingly, developing special systems for prolonged space travel is one of the most challenging aspects of successful human exploration, as technologies created for In-Situ Resource Utilization, or the harnessing of local natural resources at mission destinations, must be engineered to survive extreme vacuum, dust and thermal environmental conditions.

To accomplish this, scientists are rapidly evolving additive manufacturing systems, which would help reduce the need to transport large quantities of materials and heavy equipment from Earth and enable astronauts to create an array of structures, tools and habitats. 

The promise of these technologies would not only save essential mission time but also allow for extended independence as crews travel into deep space. 

Still, more data is needed to overcome any potential limitations future travelers might face as they lift off for other worlds. This study, for example, suggests that instead of being powered by electricity as their printing system is on Earth, future designs of the system could likely be scaled up using solar-driven or other hybrid power architectures. 

“There are so many applications that we’re working toward that with new information, the possibilities are endless,” said Xu. 

This team’s work also extends beyond supporting humanity’s push to the stars, as gaining a better sense of how manufacturing might work in space could help researchers discover new ways to address critical material shortages back home, said Wolff. 

“If we can successfully manufacture things in space using very few resources, that means we can also achieve better sustainability on Earth,” she said. “To that end, improving the machine’s flexibility for different scenarios is a goal we’re working really hard toward.”

Other Ohio State co-authors include Marwan Haddad, Aslan Bafahm Alamdari, Annabel Shim and Alan Luo. 

The study was supported by Ohio State’s Institute for Materials and Manufacturing Research and the Center for Electron Microscopy and Analysis. 

Anant Agarwal, a professor in electrical and computer engineering, Alan Luo, a professor in materials science and engineering and integrated systems engineering, and Dehua Pei, a professor in chemistry and biochemistry, are among the 169 fellows named this year. Their addition brings the number of Ohio State Fellows in the academy to 24.

Being elected to the NAI Fellowship is the highest professional distinction awarded solely to inventors. The 2025 class of fellows represents 127 universities, government agencies and research institutions across 40 U.S. states.

“The research done by Ohio State’s newest National Academy of Inventors fellows underscores our researchers’ role as a beacon of collaboration and progress, while also driving discoveries that directly impact people’s lives,” said John M. Horack, vice president for research. “Their recognition highlights the tangible impact of their innovations, from life-saving medical advances to transformative solutions that shape our future, and we are proud to support their groundbreaking work.”

Anant Agarwal 

Agarwal joined Ohio State in 2017. Previously, he served as the technical adviser for the Wide Bandgap Initiative in the U.S. Department of Energy. Agarwal’s research focuses on developing semiconductor technologies to create more efficient power electronics.

Today, wide band-gap semiconductors have the potential to improve efficiency and reduce energy losses consumption in high-power systems, but Agarwal’s lifelong goal has been to commercialize these technologies to resurrect the domestic power electronics industry.

“This technology is very important for high-power applications, like electric vehicles, power supplies, windmills and grid-level connectivity,” said Agarwal. “I’m excited and passionate about this technology because it will make a difference in people’s lives.”

One of Agarwal’s key inventions is the development of SiC-based MOSFET power devices, a type of transistor that is widely used in power electronic circuits. These devices help steer energy in power converters in systems such as in an electric vehicle.

Although Agarwal has worked to advance semiconductor research since the late ’80s, he said that the U.S. is only beginning to catch up to world leaders in the growing sector. Ohio State is currently one of three universities in the country actively teaching and conducting research in this area, he said.

“This technology will allow a lot of renewable sources of energy, such as solar and wind, to transmit energy and electricity over long distances,” said Agarwal. “It’s the perfect technology to change the world.”

Agarwal jointly holds more than 90 patents and has co-authored more than 400 research papers. In 2012, he was elected an IEEE Fellow for his lifetime contributions to Wide Band Gap technologies.

Alan Luo 

Luo joined Ohio State in 2013 after working for 15 years with General Motors Global Research and Development Center. He now leads the Lightweight Materials and Manufacturing Research Laboratory and is Director of the Advanced Casting Research Center at Ohio State.

His research involves developing alternatives to steel by designing lightweight materials, like aluminum, magnesium and titanium alloys for the automotive industry. The core of his work stems from a desire to use science to make real-world impacts, as better transportation benefits all of society. 

“By changing a light metal’s microstructure through adding alloying elements to make it as strong as steel, you can reduce the weight of a transportation product,” he said. “Significantly lighter cars consume less energy, making them more efficient and easier to build.” This applies to both gas and electric cars, as more energy-efficient vehicles mean they could last longer without refueling, and reduced emissions could help lessen the burden on the environment. 

Luo also contributed several new manufacturing processes and developed tools used in  integrated computational materials engineering for vehicle development. He hopes his membership to the NAI inspires the next generation of scientists to continue pushing the envelope in the field. 

Additional recognitions include an R&D 100 Award for his role in developing a lightweight truck engine with General Motors, receiving the USCAR (United States Council for Automotive Research) Special Recognition Award and being an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). To date, Luo has 28 patents and more than 400 technical publications in advanced materials, manufacturing and applications. 

Dehua Pei

Pei joined Ohio State in 1995.  His scientific contributions are centered around combating human diseases with novel therapeutic agents. His research aims to understand the mechanisms behind natural biological processes and then use those discoveries to develop new therapeutic strategies. 

“People have been studying viruses and bacteria for quite some time, but there is still much to learn about how they enter the human cell and cause diseases,” said Pei. Now, Pei’s team has discovered a previously unrecognized and potentially universal cell entry mechanism, a fundamental discovery that has enabled the design of artificial systems that could help with previously untreatable diseases and conditions.  

“Our work is extremely important in terms of practical applications, because if we know how large biomolecules get into the cell, we might be able to take advantage of that mechanism and design cell-permeable biomolecules that could be useful as human therapeutics,” said Pei. “That’s something that the pharmaceutical industry has only dreamed about in the past.” 

Pei’s lab is currently investigating how widely applicable the newfound cell entry mechanism is, and leveraging the mechanism to develop a brand new class of drugs.

“It takes many, many years to make a very important discovery,” said Pei. “One needs to have patience, be ready to work hard and endure the frustrations that come along with it, and if you keep working on it, you can make a difference.” 

His notable recognitions include receiving the Ohio State Innovator of the Year award in 2017, the American Chemical Society Columbus Section Award in 2018, and the Ohio State Distinguished Scholar Award in 2025. He founded or co-founded several biotech companies including Entrada Therapeutics in 2016, where Pei served as its chief scientific advisor between 2016 and 2021. Pei holds 33 U.S. patents.  

The NAI Fellows Program was established to highlight academic inventors who have demonstrated a prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development, and the welfare of society. This class of Fellows will be honored at the NAI 15th Annual Conference on June 4, 2026, in Los Angeles.

Though research to date shows that these bubbles, called extracellular vesicles and particles, influence human health and disease, they come in so many different sizes and contain such a huge range of contents that it’s difficult to pinpoint their specific functions. Found circulating in biological fluids and embedded in tissues, they are being explored for applications ranging from early disease detection to drug delivery.     

In a study published recently in Nature Methods, scientists at The Ohio State University report on a new approach to immobilize extracellular vesicles in a way that mimics their interactions with tissues, a tricky environment compared to bodily fluids because these particles have a specific characteristic: They’re sticking to a surface.

“The extracellular vesicles present in tissues are very poorly understood in terms of how the particles actually interact with cells in our body,” said senior author Eduardo Reátegui, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Ohio State. 

The new technique enables label-free immobilization of extracellular vesicles and particles without damaging them, allowing researchers to study them individually or in clumps and observe how they interact with cells. 

“What we want to do is not only understand what these vesicles contain, but also identify their tissue of origin, and how they interact with cells. One way to do that is to analyze them without destroying them,” said Reátegui, also a member of the Cancer Biology Program in The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center. 

Researchers began by coating a glass surface with a chemical layer, and then used UV light to “etch” a micropattern on that layer, creating tiny spaces with an attractive electrostatic charge to which the proteins on the extracellular vesicles’ outer layers would stick. Computer simulations confirmed that electrostatic attractions dominate the interactions between the tiny spaces and the particles. 

The researchers found that every extracellular vesicle type used in experiments adhered to the surface only where the light-induced micropattern was produced, without seeping outside those micropatterns. 

The team calls the technology Light-Induced Extracellular Vesicle and Particle Adsorption, or LEVA. 

This analytical advance opens the door to studying these particles and their complex interactions with cells at a whole new level, such as exploring their contents for disease biomarker discovery or loading them with therapeutic molecules and watching cells respond, to name just a few possibilities. 

Previously, Reátegui and colleagues developed a method of using antibodies to immobilize these extracellular vesicles and particles for analysis, which allowed the team to identify molecules inside specific types of particles that were biomarkers for brain cancer or indicators of immunotherapy response. But the method had a limitation: Only EVs with a specific molecule on their surface that would be recognized by the antibody could be isolated for analysis. 

With this new technique focused on surface-based extracellular vesicles and particles (EVPs), the UV light degrades regions of a coating to coax particle adsorption to the surface that is dictated by electrostatic interactions rather than any biological signature.  

“We started to think about how we can remove that bias in terms of pre-selecting this extracellular vesicle population with antibodies,” he said. “And now we can basically immobilize all of them, and have the ability to interrogate them with molecular probes or even cells.”

In one application of the study, researchers showed that the new technique can be used to study early stages of inflammation by mimicking the response of immune cells to pathogens such as bacteria or fungi – but instead of using bacteria such as E. coli, they used the extracellular vesicles produced by the bacteria. They found that the EVs emitted by E. coli induced what is known as a neutrophil swarming – the coordinated recruitment and migration of neutrophils toward sites of infection, along the micropatterns where the bacterial EVs were bound.   

“This showed that, first, we can generate matrix-bound EVPs in different contexts for easy analysis, and second, this approach allows exploration of EVP interactions in tissue,” Reátegui said. 

This work was supported by the Ohio State Center for Cancer Engineering-Curing Cancer Through Research in Engineering Sciences; the National Institutes of Health; the Burroughs Wellcome Fund; and Ohio State postdoctoral scholars programs. 

Co-authors include Colin Hisey, Xilal Rima, Jacob Doon-Ralls, Chiranth Nagaraj, Sophia Mayone, Kim Truc Nguyen, Sydney Wiggins, Kalpana Deepa Priya Dorayappan, Xin Huang, Karuppaiyah Selvendiran, David Wood, Chunyu Hu, Divya Patel, Andre Palmer and Derek Hansford of Ohio State; Mangesh Hade and Setty Magaña of Nationwide Children’s Hospital; and James Higginbotham, Oleg Tutanov, Jeffrey Franklin and Robert Coffey of Vanderbilt University.

Mushrooms have long been recognized for their extreme resilience and unique properties. Their innate abilities make them perfect specimens for bioelectronics, an emerging field that, for next-gen computing, could help develop exciting new materials. 

As one example, researchers from The Ohio State University recently discovered that common edible fungi, such as shiitake mushrooms, can be grown and trained to act as organic memristors, a type of data processor that can remember past electrical states. 

Their findings showed that these shiitake-based devices not only demonstrated similar reproducible memory effects to semiconductor-based chips but could also be used to create other types of low-cost, environmentally friendly, brain-inspired computing components.

“Being able to develop microchips that mimic actual neural activity means you don't need a lot of power for standby or when the machine isn't being used,” said John LaRocco, lead author of the study and a research scientist in psychiatry at Ohio State’s College of Medicine. “That's something that can be a huge potential computational and economic advantage.”

Fungal electronics aren’t a new concept, but they have become ideal candidates for developing sustainable computing systems, said LaRocco. This is because they minimize electrical waste by being biodegradable and cheaper to fabricate than conventional memristors and semiconductors, which often require costly rare-earth minerals and high amounts of energy from data centers. 

“Mycelium as a computing substrate has been explored before in less intuitive setups, but our work tries to push one of these memristive systems to its limits,” he said. 

The study was recently published in the journal PLOS ONE.

To explore the new memristors' capabilities, researchers cultured samples of shiitake and button mushrooms. Once mature, they were dehydrated to ensure long-term viability, connected to special electronic circuits, and then electrocuted at various voltages and frequencies. 

“We would connect electrical wires and probes at different points on the mushrooms because distinct parts of it have different electrical properties,” said LaRocco. “Depending on the voltage and connectivity, we were seeing different performances.”

After two months, the team discovered that when used as RAM – the computer memory that stores data – their mushroom memristor was able to switch between electrical states at up to 5,850 signals per second, with about 90% accuracy. However, performance dropped as the frequency of the electrical voltages increased, but much like an actual brain, it could be fixed by connecting more mushrooms to the circuit.  

Overall, their research details how surprisingly easy it is to program and preserve mushrooms to behave in unexpected and useful ways, said Qudsia Tahmina, co-author of the study and an associate professor in electrical and computer engineering at Ohio State. Moreover, it’s an example of how technology can advance when it relies on the natural world.

“Society has become increasingly aware of the need to protect our environment and ensure that we preserve it for future generations,” said Tahmina. “So that could be one of the driving factors behind new bio-friendly ideas like these.”

Building on the flexibility mushrooms offer also suggests there are possibilities for scaling up fungal computing, said Tahmina. For instance, larger mushroom systems may be useful in edge computing and aerospace exploration; smaller ones in enhancing the performance of autonomous systems and wearable devices. 

Organic memristors are still in early development, but future work could optimize the production process by improving cultivation techniques and miniaturizing the devices, as viable fungal memristors would need to be far smaller than what researchers achieved in this work. 

“Everything you'd need to start exploring fungi and computing could be as small as a compost heap and some homemade electronics, or as big as a culturing factory with pre-made templates,” said LaRocco. “All of them are viable with the resources we have in front of us now.” 

Other Ohio State co-authors include Ruben Petreaca, John Simonis and Justin Hill. This study was supported by the Honda Research Institute.

By John M. Horack,

Vice President for Research and Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering,
The Ohio State University

Instead, algorithms and the people who use them in the most safety-critical organizations must be evaluated simultaneously to get an accurate view of AI’s effects on human decision making, researchers say. 

The team also contends these evaluations should assess how people respond to good, mediocre and poor technology performance to put the AI-human interaction to a meaningful test – and to expose the level of risk linked to mistakes. 

Participants in the study, led by engineering researchers at The Ohio State University, were 450 Ohio State nursing students, mostly undergraduates with varying amounts of clinical training, and 12 licensed nurses. They used AI-assisted technologies in a remote patient-monitoring scenario to determine how likely urgent care would be needed in a range of patient cases.

Results showed that more accurate AI predictions about whether or not a patient was trending toward a medical emergency improved participant performance by between 50% and 60%. But when the algorithm produced an inaccurate prediction, even when accompanied by explanatory data that didn’t support that outcome, human performance collapsed, with an over 100% degradation in proper decision making when the algorithm was the most wrong. 

“An AI algorithm can never be perfect. So if you want an AI algorithm that’s ready for safety-critical systems, that means something about the team, about the people and AI together, has to be able to cope with a poor-performing AI algorithm,” said first author Dane Morey, a research scientist in the Department of Integrated Systems Engineering at Ohio State. 

“The point is this is not about making really good safety-critical system technology. It’s the joint human-machine capabilities that matter in a safety-critical system.” 

Morey completed the study with Mike Rayo, associate professor, and David Woods, faculty emeritus, both in integrated systems engineering at Ohio State. The research was published recently in npj Digital Medicine. 

The authors, all members of the Cognitive Systems Engineering Lab directed by Rayo, developed the Joint Activity Testing research program in 2020 to address what they see as a gap in responsible AI deployment in risky environments, especially medical and defense settings. 

The team is also refining a set of evidence-based guiding principles for machine design with joint activity in mind that can smooth the AI-human performance evaluation process and, after that, actually improve system outcomes. 

According to their preliminary list, a machine first and foremost should convey to people the ways in which it is misaligned to the world, even when it is unaware that it is misaligned to the world. 

“Even if a technology does well on those heuristics, it probably still isn’t quite ready,” Rayo said. “We need to do some form of empirical evaluation because those are risk-mitigation steps, and our safety-critical industries deserve at least those two steps of measuring performance of people and AI together and examining a range of challenging cases.” 

The Cognitive Systems Engineering Lab has been running studies for five years on real technologies to arrive at best-practice evaluation methods, mostly on projects with 20 to 30 participants. Having 462 participants in this project – especially a target population for AI-infused technologies whose study enrollment was connected to a course-based educational activity – gives the researchers high confidence in their findings and recommendations, Rayo said. 

Each participant analyzed a sequence of 10 patient cases under differing experimental conditions: no AI help, an AI percentage prediction of imminent need for emergency care, AI annotations of data relevant to the patient’s condition, and both AI predictions and annotations. 

All examples included a data visualization showing demographics, vital signs and lab results intended to help users anticipate changes to or stability in a patient’s status. 

Participants were instructed to report their concern for each patient on a scale from 0 to 10. Higher concern for emergency patients and lower concern for non-emergency patients were the indicators deemed to show better performance. 

“We found neither the nurses nor the AI algorithm were universally superior to the other in all cases,” the authors wrote. The analysis accounted for differences in participants’ clinical experience. 

While the overall results provided evidence that there is a need for this type of evaluation, the researchers said they were surprised that explanations included in some experimental conditions had very little sway in participant concern – instead, the algorithm recommendation, presented in a solid red bar, overruled everything else. 

“Whatever effect that those annotations had was roundly overwhelmed by the presence of that indicator that swept everything else away,” Rayo said. 

The team considered the study methods, including custom-built technologies representative of health care applications currently in use, as a template for why their recommendations are needed and how industries could put the suggested practices in place. 

The coding data for the experimental technologies is publicly available, and Morey, Rayo and Woods further explained their work in an article published at AI-frontiers.org. 

“What we’re advocating for is a way to help people better understand the variety of effects that may come about from technologies,” Morey said. “Basically, the goal is not the best AI performance. It’s the best team performance.” 

This research was funded by the American Nurses Foundation Reimagining Nursing Initiative.

NASA’s Human Lander Challenge is an annual competition that invites university groups to explore innovative solutions to help support future astronaut missions to the moon and Mars. This year, participants created solutions for super-cold liquid propellant storage and transfer technologies, critical apparatuses vital to spacecraft propulsion and human life support systems.

Among all entrants, 12 student teams were chosen as finalists and brought to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, to showcase their projects. After presenting their prototypes to a panel of NASA and industry experts, the agency announced that the Ohio State group who began their work in March with their project, the autonomous magnetized cryo-couplers with active alignment control (AMCC-AAC), was named Best Prototype. 

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Prescott was the overall winner and recipient of a $10,000 award. The second place team, Old Dominion University was awarded $5,000, while the third place team, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, received $3,000.

“Our project is unique in the sense that we want to future-proof the system,” said Max Heil, the team’s project manager and an undergraduate student in aerospace engineering at Ohio State. “If you’re going to colonize Mars, you’re going to need technology that is pretty universal.”

While current technologies allow cryogenic liquids to be stored for short periods, scientists are looking for ways to improve the efficiency and reliability of these systems because long-term human spaceflight will require them to function effectively for weeks or even months.

Unlike other propellant transfer technologies, the AMCC-AAC is designed to eliminate the need for constant human interaction when performing refueling missions in space, said Heil. In space, safely transferring liquid propellant between two spacecraft can be challenging, but this team’s prototype suggests such issues could be solved by using AI to fully automate the process. 

“AI is so adaptable, it can do just about anything,” said Heil. “The beauty of the system is there are different ways that we could utilize it, so that’s why we're really excited about it.” 

Using a combination of LIDAR distance measurements, cameras, onboard human landing system sensors and artificial intelligence algorithms, their system would achieve autonomous coupling via robotic cooling rods. In this way, the Ohio State team’s solution would work to mitigate misalignment during cryogenic docking and reduce opportunities for potential propellant leakage, said Heil.   

Although implementation of these promising technologies may be years away, if adopted, the AMCC-AAC would also benefit NASA’s Artemis Program in its push to return humans to the moon as well as the agency’s planned operation of Gateway, an outpost in lunar orbit that will act as both a scientific hub and fuel outpost for sustained deep space exploration. 

After the event, participants also had the opportunity to connect with other subject matter experts working on NASA’s Human Landing System capabilities. Some reflected on how the chance to polish unique ideas for future spaceflight risks inspired new interest in the field.

“This started as more of a small hobby for me, but Ohio State’s support for space technology and research has turned it into a real passion,” said Zafar Shaik, another member of the team and an undergraduate student in aerospace engineering at Ohio State. “I don’t know if I would have gotten this far without the university’s big push into space.”

Overall, many in the group hope that the experience opens doors for upcoming Ohio State students to get involved in NASA’s Human Lander Challenge and, more widely, helps them jump-start fulfilling careers in the emerging commercial space sector. 

“Ohio State has invested quite a bit into the space industry, and the rise in the amount of people that want to work in it is growing so rapidly,” said Heil. “So to imagine our project could be implemented on future mission systems is really rewarding for our whole team.”

The group was advised by Ohio State’s John Horack, a professor in mechanical and aerospace engineering. Other engineering members of the team include Rahul Ravishankar, Will Rueter, Kevin Subin, Nishanth Kunchala, Anastasia Anikina, Ryan Endicott, Artur Leonel Machado Ulsenheimer, Shiv Amin and Tejdeep Somi Reddy.

By Melanie Dickman 

Lecturer in Aviation Studies, The Ohio State University
and Brian Strzempkowski 

Assistant Director, Center for Aviation Studies, The Ohio State University

Biomedical Engineering Associate Professor Matthew Reilly leads a multidisciplinary team of researchers at The Ohio State University that received a $6.2 million Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs grant from the Department of Defense Vision Research Program to identify and treat traumatic optic neuropathy.

Traumatic optic neuropathy (TON) can be caused by direct injuries to the eyes or head, such as those caused by blunt-force or blast exposure, or, more commonly, indirect injuries, where the mechanical forces are transmitted to the nerve via surrounding tissues.

“At present, it is not possible to preserve or restore vision after these injuries, even in the safety of a civilian hospital. There are no effective treatments for traumatic optic neuropathy and no therapies in clinical trials in the United States,” said Reilly, who is an expert in eye biomechanics and trauma. “However, recent work by my lab in collaboration with Professor Tonia Rex at Vanderbilt has indicated how and why these cells die after injury. Understanding the mechanisms of cell death provides hope that treatment may be possible.”

An additional barrier to developing treatments for traumatic optic neuropathy is the lack of a suitable animal model of the disease, said Reilly. Traditional experiments have focused on manually crushing the optic nerve with forceps, which does not replicate the types of injuries that occur on the battlefield.

“We have developed several different experiments which apply battlefield-like injuries to the optic nerve,” Reilly explained. “We will utilize these novel models of TON to evaluate treatments that inhibit the recently discovered mechanisms of cell death.”

The research team will use various models that simulate common battlefield eye injuries to study the effectiveness of therapies. Two separate projects involve testing various treatments and delivery methods to treat optic nerve damage occurring from blast injury – the most common cause of eye injuries in modern warfare – and eye rotation.

A third project will explore two primary treatment strategies for low-level traumatic brain injuries, which can significantly impact vision even when the eye is not injured. More than 505,000 service members experienced traumatic brain injuries from 2000 through March 2024.

The final project aims to develop new techniques and technologies that can be administered by a medic on the battlefield to deliver drugs to the eye and optic nerve. These approaches will be used in the other projects to ensure enough drug reaches the target tissues to achieve the desired effect.

“Our end goal is to identify one or two promising treatments for traumatic optic neuropathy that are suitable for clinical trials,” said Reilly. “This brings hope to the tens of thousands of Americans suffering TON each year in either battlefield or civilian settings.”

Ohio State co-investigators include Natalia Higuita-Castro, associate professor, Daniel Gallego-Perez, professor, and Katelyn Swindle-Reilly, associate professor, all in the Department of Biomedical Engineering; Andy Fischer, professor of neuroscience; Philip Yuhas, assistant professor of optometry; and Ray Cho, clinical professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences. Rex, professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences at Vanderbilt, and Julie Racine, director of the Visual Electrophysiology Clinic at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, are also co-investigators.

Gathered in support of future human activities in space, students, professionals and researchers from numerous industries assembled in April for the third annual Workshop for Research in Low-Earth Orbit, hosted by The Ohio State University.  

Presented by Starlab Space Inc. and the Mitsubishi Corporation, the two-day event involved scientific talks and panels aimed at preserving and advancing research in low-Earth orbit (LEO), an orbital plane relatively close to the planet’s surface. Many satellites, including the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope, operate at this altitude.  

Due to the weightlessness of this unique environment, there are major benefits to doing research in microgravity. Because removing Earth’s gravity from the equation may reveal new insights about forces on the ground, scientists can use space as a test bed to investigate and study new phenomena and processes. Experiments conducted in LEO have led to the development of next-generation materials across a multitude of fields, including communications, defense, medicine and green energy.  

“Low-Earth orbit is going to push us in terms of our design capability,” said Kate Rubins, a former NASA astronaut, during a speech where she offered new perspectives of life aboard the ISS and recounted how she became the first person to sequence DNA in space. “Thinking about all these things that we’re going to design anyway for spaceflight hardware, that’s going to make this perfect equipment to take to other places on Earth.” 

During the workshop, panelists showcased their vision for the growing commercial space industry by sharing emerging technologies best suited to support human space exploration. Discussion topics ranged from devices next-gen travelers might use to enhance space station living to gadgets for astronaut health monitoring and advances that will help scientists refine future space food systems.  

Marta Nowak, a professor of architecture at Ohio State, presented student-devised ideas for addressing spaceflight habitability issues, or how astronauts interact with the spaces and objects within their built environment. Some proposals suggested specialized sleep and storage modules for work, while another recommended using furniture as an exercise component to help astronauts maintain their health.  

“The International Space Station, after more than 25 years in orbit, has proven humans can survive in space, but thriving remains elusive,” said Nowak. “NASA recognized early that improving astronauts’ quality of life would lead to better mission outcomes.”  

A one-size-fits-all approach to designing comfortable and accessible habitats won’t work to keep people connected in such confined spaces, so adapting custom living solutions for future micro-environments will be vital for successful space exploration, said Nowak.  

In advance of the many challenges NASA is likely to face over the next few decades of long-duration space exploration, speakers emphasized the need for more human-centered development in commercial research as well. “There is nothing in these [commercial] LEO stations that we are not going to need on the way to the moon or Mars,” Rubins said.  

Most notably, tech-heavy portions of the event focused on Starlab’s forthcoming research facilities, an upcoming commercial space station which, in collaboration with Ohio State’s George Washington Carver Science Park (GWCSP), promises to create essential infrastructure to prioritize scientific discovery for both astronauts in space and those of us at home. 

“Our job is to reinvent how we assist the modern world and the people in it,” said John Horack, Neil Armstrong Chair in aerospace policy at Ohio State and one of the co-hosts of the event. “That link starts with knowledge gained through research and education.” 

The event concluded with an announcement of the winner of the GWCSP Innovation Pitch Competition, a contest that invited space startups to present creative ideas on how to harness LEO for advanced scientific goals.  

Of the three team finalists, Spaero Systems, a group that includes Ohio State students Ian Harris and Nikolas Harris, placed first and received the top prize of $5,000.  

By Gerald Frankel 

Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University

The analysis of health insurance claims data from almost 3 million U.S. patients investigated prescribed stimulants’ impact on prescription opioid use over 10 years, looking for origins of the so-called “twin epidemic” of combining the two classes of drugs, which can increase the risk for overdose deaths. 

“Combining the two drugs is associated with an increase in overdose deaths. This is something we know. But we didn’t know whether stimulant use has a causal role in high use of opioids, so we conducted a big data analysis of how these two patterns interacted over a long period of time,” said senior study author Ping Zhang, associate professor of computer science and engineering and biomedical informatics at The Ohio State University.

“What we found is that if someone is taking a stimulant and an opioid at the same time, they’re generally taking a high dose of the opioid,” he said. “And if the patient in this study population takes the stimulant before beginning opioid use, they are more likely to have higher doses of subsequent opioids.” 

The study was published Feb. 17 in The Lancet Regional Health – Americas.     

The research team obtained data on 22 million patients with 96 million opioid prescriptions from MarketScan Commercial Claims and Encounters, a large U.S. health insurance database. Researchers established a cohort for this study of 2.9 million patients with an average age of 44 who had at least two independent opioid prescriptions between 2012 and 2021. 

Because these prescriptions included a range of oral formulas – codeine, hydrocodone, methadone, oxycodone, morphine and others – researchers standardized every prescription to morphine milligram equivalents (MME) and calculated each patient’s monthly intake of opioids. The MME computation from electronic health records was previously co-developed by co-senior author Wenyu Song, an instructor at Harvard Medical School. 

First author Seungyeon Lee, a PhD student in Zhang’s lab, used statistical modeling and classified patients into five baseline groups of opioid dosage trajectory over the 10-year study period: very low-dose, low-dose decreasing, low-dose increasing, moderate-dose increasing and high-dose sustained use. 

“Some patients had stable low-dose opioid use, while others had increasing or high dose patterns over time,” Lee said. 

Of the total cohort, 160,243 patients (5.5%) also were prescribed stimulants. The addition of a monthly calculated cumulative number of stimulant prescriptions to the model and statistical analysis showed a shift in the trajectory groups. Characteristics that could serve as risk factors for increasing opioid use also emerged in the data, Lee said. 

Moderate-dose increasing and high-dose groups had an overall higher average MME and a higher proportion of patients with diagnoses of depression, anxiety and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder compared to other groups. The low-dose increasing group also had a higher proportion of patients with ADHD compared to the low-dose decreasing group. 

The most common diagnoses linked to co-prescription of stimulants and opioids were depression and ADHD or ADHD and chronic pain. 

“This was an important finding, that many patients with ADHD and depression, also experiencing chronic pain, have an opioid prescription,” said Zhang, also a core faculty member in the Translational Data Analytics Institute at Ohio State. “This cohort represents a very realistic health care problem.” 

Even taking those factors into account, the model showed that stimulant use was key to driving up the odds that patients who took both stimulants and opioids would belong to a group of people who increased their doses of opioids. 

“Stimulant use before initiating opioids and stimulant co-prescription with opioids are both positively associated with escalating opioid doses compared to other factors,” Lee said. 

Analysis of geographic and gender data also offered some clues to opioid use patterns in the United States. Patients in the South and West regions had higher total opioid intakes over the 10-year study period compared to the Northeast and North Central regions, with the highest frequency of opioid prescriptions in the South and higher MMEs per prescription in the West. Males also had higher average daily opioid intakes than females. 

The results linking high opioid doses and stimulant use suggest stimulants may be a driving force behind the emergence of the twin epidemic and offer evidence that regulation of stimulant prescribing may be needed for patients already taking prescription opioids, the researchers said. In addition to the increased risk of overdose death, co-using prescription stimulants and opioids can increase the risk for cardiovascular events and mental health problems, previous research has shown. 

Zhang’s Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Lab focuses primarily on using AI to aid in clinician decision making, and these findings are part of a larger project aimed at development of safer personalized treatment recommendations for people who are prescribed both opioids and stimulants. 

“We want to reduce the risk of opioid- or stimulant-related adverse drug events in real-world practice,” Zhang said. 

This work was funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Science Foundation. 

Additional co-authors were David Bates of Harvard Medical School and Richard Urman, chair of anesthesiology in Ohio State’s College of Medicine.

The newest NAI fellows from Ohio State are Joseph Heremans, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and an Ohio Eminent Scholar in Nanotechnology, and two retired professors: 2023 Nobel Laureate Pierre Agostini, professor emeritus of physics, and Longya Xu, who recently retired as professor of electrical and computer engineering after more than 30 years on the faculty.

The NAI Fellowship is the highest professional distinction awarded solely to inventors. The 2024 class comprises 170 researchers from 135 research universities, governmental and nonprofit research institutions worldwide. This year’s selection of Heremans, Agostini and Xu brings the number of Ohio State NAI fellows to 21. 

“The work done by Ohio State’s newest NAI fellows demonstrates the breadth and depth of research and innovation expertise that can be found at Ohio State,” said Peter Mohler, executive vice president, enterprise for research, innovation and knowledge. “Their research continues to positively impact people’s lives, and I’m pleased that the National Academy of Inventors is recognizing their efforts.” 

Heremans joined the Ohio State faculty in 2005 after spending over 20 years as an industry scientist, primarily at the General Motors Research Labs. He holds more than 40 U.S. patents, many dating to his work with GM. 

Two families of patents led to commercialization: highly sensitive and tunable infrared lasers initially designed to analyze car exhaust gases that were manufactured by a German company and used to analyze isotope separation, and a set of magnetic sensors used in car engines for crankshaft and camshaft position sensing. 

“This was a highly successful product that was in production for 10 years at a rate up to 2.6 million per year,” said Heremans, also a professor of materials science and engineering and physics. “All GM V6 and V8 engines had them at one time. They were gradually replaced by other sensors – technology eventually becomes obsolete.” 

Heremans also has had a role in two startup companies. The first, focused on thermoelectric materials for waste heat recovery from car exhaust, was purchased by a company that manufactures automotive heating and cooling systems. He is also secretary and co-founder of Goniotech LLC, founded in 2019 to make devices for military applications. 

More recently, he has applied for U.S. patents related to his work on thermoelectric materials; heat switches based on two distinct technologies, magnetic fields and electrical fields; and heat sensors, many of which are of interest to the U.S. Department of Defense. 

Heremans was one of 11 university scientists named to the 2024 class of the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship, the DOD’s flagship single-investigator award for basic research. He is the first Ohio State faculty member to be selected for the fellowship. 

He is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Physical Society. 

“Here at Ohio State, the goal is to graduate students and do research and contribute to knowledge. I try in an academic setting to emphasize the fundamentals – but the applications are always there,” he said. “There’s a clear split between the fundamental part and the applied part, and it is nice to be recognized from the applied side.” 

Agostini and two of his colleagues were recognized in 2023 by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences “for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter.” The scientists created techniques to capture electrons using pulses of light that last just an attosecond – one quintillionth of a second. 

The Nobel Prize committee said Agostini and his fellow winners “have given humanity new tools for exploring the world of electrons inside atoms and molecules … (and) have demonstrated a way to create extremely short pulses of light that can be used to measure the rapid processes in which electrons move or change energy.” 

Agostini joined the Ohio State physics faculty in 2005 after he retired from French institutions. He visited the Columbus campus in March, meeting with students and delivering a lecture. 

Xu was the founding director of Ohio State’s Center for High Performance Power Electronics, established in 2010 to focus on the commercialization of semiconductors for electrical power handling in the military and civil aircraft industry.

His research and teaching interests included the dynamics and optimized design of special electrical machines and power converters for variable-speed systems, the application of advanced control theory and digital signal processors for motion control, and distributed power systems in super-high-speed operations. He has served as a consultant to industry leaders including Raytheon, Boeing, Honeywell, GE Aviation, U.S. Wind Power, General Motors and Ford, among others. 

An IEEE Fellow and recipient of IEEE’s Nikola Tesla Award in 2018, Xu also was named to the National Academy of Engineers in 2023.

The 2024 class of fellows will be honored at the NAI Annual Meeting on June 26, 2025, in Atlanta, Georgia.

By Don Leonard
Assistant Professor of Practice in City and Regional Planning, The Ohio State University

This new collaborative space features a peer-led tutoring center aiming to engage first- and second-year students enrolled in gateway STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) courses. The Oct. 2 ribbon cutting marked the completion of the first phase of space renovation in Ramseyer Hall.

The Amgen STEM Learning Center is the result of a $2 million investment supporting Ohio State’s colleges of Arts and Sciences and Engineering. The new learning center is an important milestone in the university’s partnership with Amgen, a leading biotechnology company with a growing presence in central Ohio. The gift bolsters Amgen’s significant commitment to workforce development in the university’s STEM fields, while also advancing the shared goal of building a talent pipeline for the state of Ohio.

“Amgen is proud to support The Ohio State University’s STEM Learning Center, which will play a crucial role in strengthening the educational foundations of students enrolled in gateway STEM courses. This initiative aligns with our commitment to fostering innovation and diversity in the STEM fields, and we are excited to see the positive impact it will have on the students and the broader community,” said Sandra Rodriguez-Toledo, vice president of site operations for Amgen Ohio.

Nearly 100 guests, including Mike Duffey, chancellor of the Ohio Department of Higher Education, attended the ribbon cutting. During the ceremony, Peter Mohler, executive vice president for research, innovation and knowledge at Ohio State, offered his thoughts on the partnership that has made this new interdisciplinary center possible.

“The continued strengthening of Amgen’s relationship with Ohio State is inspiring. Through interdisciplinary research and education, we are bringing together our collective knowledge and expertise to invest in the futures of our bright students and the biomanufacturing sector,” he said.

David Horn, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, also praised the partnership. “We are grateful for Amgen’s support. Together we will transform teaching in STEM disciplines and create new learning and engagement opportunities for students,” he said. “The new collaborative space and peer-led tutoring model will benefit students of all backgrounds who enter these fields and help create a diverse workforce to address tomorrow’s challenges in the Midwest and beyond.”

Amgen’s investment has helped fuel other impactful developments, serving as a catalyst for additional gifts that will fortify excellence in STEM education and workforce development within the college.

“This center will help our students not only succeed but prosper. We thank Amgen for their support and continued collaboration,” said Susan Olesik, dean of the division of natural and mathematical sciences, who led the effort to create the center. “We will work alongside Amgen to contribute to Ohio’s spectacular future in STEM innovation.”

In a new study, using a ventilator-on-a-chip model developed at The Ohio State University, researchers found that shear stress from the collapse and reopening of the air sacs is the most injurious type of damage.

This miniature “organ-on-a-chip” model simulates not only lung injury during mechanical ventilation, but also repair and recovery, in human-derived cells in real time, said co-lead author Samir Ghadiali, PhD, professor and chair of biomedical engineering at Ohio State.

“The initial damage is purely physical, but the processes after that are biological in nature – and what we’re doing with this device is coupling the two,” Ghadiali said.

The team hopes the device will also help in the hunt for therapies to address ventilator-induced lung injury.

“This is an important advance in the field that will hopefully allow for a better understanding of how lung injury develops in mechanically ventilated patients and identification of therapeutic targets so that we can give drugs to prevent that kind of injury or treat it when it happens,” said co-lead author Joshua Englert, MD, associate professor of pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.

The research was published recently in the journal Lab on a Chip.

Ventilators save the lives of patients with severe respiratory problems related to disease or trauma, but it has been known for a long time that the mechanical forces exerted on the lungs also cause injury. The damage at the cellular level can make the barrier between tiny air sacs and capillaries carrying blood become leaky, leading to fluid buildup that interferes with oxygen getting to the lungs.

Of particular value is the ventilator-on-a chip’s measurement of real-time changes to cells that affect the integrity of that barrier, enabled by an innovative approach: growing human lung cells on a synthetic nanofiber membrane mimicking the complex lung matrix. It’s closer to the authentic ventilated lung microenvironment than any similar lung chip systems to date, the researchers say.

The device measures the effects of three types of mechanical stress on the integrity of the barrier: lung cell stretch from overinflation, increased pressure on lung cells, and cyclical collapse and reopening of air sacs.

Experiments showed that overinflation with a high volume of air and cyclic collapse and reopening of air sacs both led the barrier to become leaky, but the cells could recover more quickly from overinflation than from the repetitive opening and closing of air sacs.

Englert said the collapse and reopening may be more problematic because it makes fluid in the lungs move, exposing cells to high amounts of shear stress.

“There really hasn’t been a lot of data that could allow for the comparison of those two injurious forces in the same system,” he said. “But now for the first time, we can use the same device with the same cells and induce both types of injury and see what happens. Our data suggests neither one of them is good, they’re both injurious, but that the collapse and reopening seems to be more severe and makes recovery harder.”

This finding was a demonstration of the model’s sophistication, Ghadiali said.

“We knew for a long time that collapse and reopening is a pretty injurious force, but we never could measure it in real time,” he said. “Now that we know that collapse and reopening injury happens much quicker and takes a long time to recover, we plan to use the ventilator on a chip to figure out how to prevent this injury and/or enhance the repair.”

Next steps involve modeling diseases such as pneumonia and traumatic injuries experienced by ICU patients in combination with mechanical action.

“We’re in the early stages of developing some of those models, diving a little bit deeper into the complexity of lung injury in ICU patients,” Englert said. “This model is a platform we can build upon.”

Ghadiali and Englert, also investigators in Ohio State’s Davis Heart and Lung Research Institute, credited first author Basia Gabela-Zuniga, who recently received her PhD in biomedical engineering, with getting the project over the finish line, and acknowledged the contributions of College of Engineering co-authors Heather Powell and Natalia Higuita-Castro. Additional co-authors were Vasudha Shukla and Christopher Bobba of Ohio State.

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Defense.

Researchers created a predictive approach for modeling unintended microbial growth in critical spaces and applied it to life on the International Space Station.  

An analysis of dust samples obtained from the space station found that repeated elevated humidity exposures for even a short time can lead to rapid microbial growth and composition changes in dust that make it easier for microbes, such as fungi, to thrive.  

The study provides important insight into how healthy environments might be maintained during future missions, especially as the commercial space industry begins to prompt more people to live and work above Earth, said Karen Dannemiller, senior author of the study and an associate professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering and environmental health sciences at The Ohio State University.  

“It’s really important to understand the exposures that happen in the space environment in part because we see immune system changes in astronauts,” she said. “People who are normally healthy individuals may be especially vulnerable to microbes in space,  more so than on Earth.” 

The study was published today in the journal Microbiome.  

Historically, many spacecraft have had issues with unintended microbial growth because, much like a typical home on Earth, they, too, are environments that tend to trap the moisture humans emit. On the ISS, dust is usually produced by people as they go about their daily activities, but left unchecked, these floating particles can cause a range of negative health issues for the crew, such as asthma or allergies, and degrade building materials and equipment.  

To ensure that dust levels aboard the ISS are carefully controlled, every week astronauts must clean the protective screens that cover the filters of the space station’s air ventilation system. In this study, four separate vacuum bag samples of the dust collected from these housekeeping chores were sent down to Dannemiller’s team to be tested.  

After incubating the samples for two weeks at different relative humidities to simulate a scenario where an unexpected event, such as a temporary air ventilation system failure, could cause bursts of moisture, analysis revealed that fungi and bacteria can grow in the same concentrated amounts as dust collected from residential homes on the ground.  

“Spacecraft actually aren’t that different from what we see on Earth in terms of having a unique indoor microbiome,” said Nicholas Nastasi, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at Ohio State’s Indoor Environmental Quality Laboratory. “If you put people in a space, there will always be microbes there, so it’s important to prevent their spread because once it starts, it’s often not too easy to get rid of.”  

Spacecraft are especially prone to microbial growth because they are enclosed environments where humans constantly exhale moisture. If that moisture builds up, mold can begin to grow, as seen in past space stations such as Mir. Although the ISS has much improved controls for moisture, unexpected situations can still easily occur, said Nastasi.  

Additionally, while Earth and space environments are complex in their own unique ways, the two more often than not contain similar core microbial communities, Nastasi said. Moreover, staying knowledgeable about the evolution of these communities will make certain that vulnerable individuals both on- and off-world have the information needed to maintain a healthy indoor microbiome on the space station.  

“In designing some of our current space station systems, we’ve already learned a lot of really important lessons in terms of how to keep moisture under control,” said Dannemiller. “Now we’re learning even more that we can use to advance these systems in the future.” 

In general, the study also suggests that the team’s research could later aid the development of planetary protection protocols aimed at preventing contamination of Earth or any other celestial bodies humans may visit.  

Next, the team will likely work to discover what effect other untested spaceflight variables, such as microgravity, radiation and elevated carbon dioxide levels, have on microbial growth in similar working space stations, like NASA’s lunar station Gateway or other imminent commercial projects. Many of their upcoming projects will also benefit from Ohio State’s terrestrial analog of the George Washington Carver Science Park, a replica of Starlab space station science park that will allow researchers to conduct parallel missions on the ground.  

“There’s a lot of other unique spaceflight factors we can potentially add to these microbial models to make them more accurate and useful,” said Nastasi. “We’ll keep refining what we do to maintain those healthy space environments and having unprecedented access to a platform such as Starlab will help immensely.” 

This study was supported by NASA. Other Ohio State co-authors were Ashleigh Bope, Marit E. Meyer and John M. Horack. 

The middle of the United States, meanwhile, can expect bigger swings between wetter wet periods – high-rainfall years known as pluvials – and drier summers through the rest of this century, the study predicts. 

Researchers at The Ohio State University say the findings, based on modern precipitation data, historical tree rings and climate models spanning the years 850 to 2100, suggest climate change has shifted precipitation patterns across North America to extremes that were not experienced before industrialization began around the mid-1800s. 

“It’s very much a tale of Southwest versus the Northeast for most of the seasons,” said senior author James Stagge, assistant professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at Ohio State. “Mexico and the American Southwest tends to get drier across more or less all seasons, whereas we’re seeing in the Northeast – and Ohio is included in that – a trend toward wetter, particularly in the winter and early spring.” 

The combination of drier droughts and wetter pluvials in much of the nation’s midsection won’t necessarily occur in a predictable way. 

“So you might be going from, say, this year our drought is really bad, and in five years or so we might see the wettest pluvial we’ve had in a while,” Stagge said. “That variability is concerning because it changes how we might need to manage water to prepare for more extremes in both ways. Trying to plan for that is a real challenge. 

“This is all part of the same pattern moving into the future. It’s only going to get worse.” 

Former Ohio State graduate student Kyungmin Sung, now a research fellow at the Korea Environment Institute, is first author of the paper. The research is published today (Sept. 6, 2024) in Geophysical Research Letters. 

In contrast to attribution studies that examine whether or how human-associated climate change has influenced extreme weather events, this work focused on documenting centuries-long trends in pre- and post-industrial drought and pluvial extremes across North America.  

The researchers compared changing climate patterns observed in the past 20 years to the pre-industrial era and then predicted how periods of low and high precipitation will trend through the year 2100. 

“What we can say is, ‘here is the scale of change we’ve seen in the past 100 years under an increase in greenhouse gas concentration, and here’s what we saw in the previous 700 years,’” Sung said. “And the scale of the change we’re seeing now and into the future is dramatically larger in many areas than any natural climate variability we saw prior.” 

The researchers merged data from five sources: two modern compilations of precipitation observations, tree ring reconstructions from the distant past, and two climate models – each covering the same historical period as the tree ring analyses and continuing to predict future extreme dry and wet trends with increasing greenhouse gases.  

The integration of different data types lends credibility to the findings, Stagge said: “A benefit of having very different types of data is they can fill in each other’s gaps. We consider trends to be significant only when they’re showing up across multiple data sets – so that increases our confidence.”

Maps of the changing climate patterns show the method produced smooth spatial transitions and obvious boundaries, suggesting that “what we’re seeing is real,” he said. 

While the drying of the West is a well-known phenomenon, the team was surprised to see how extensive the precipitation increase has been and will be in the Northeast and how dramatic the heightened variability from droughts to pluvials is going to be in the center of the country. 

These patterns of water shortages and gluts could affect industries ranging from farming to construction and city planning, and are likely to strain management efforts to maintain household water-source reservoirs at optimum levels. 

“Planners, government agencies and engineers want to do the right thing and plan for a potentially changing climate, but oftentimes they don’t necessarily have the numbers or the broader picture of what’s going to be happening where,” Stagge said. “This puts regions on notice. In the Southwest, you’re going to have less water to deal with, and if you’re managing a farm in the middle of the country you might be seeing wider swings between droughts and pluvials. 

“Certainly, we’d like to arrest further climate change, but it takes a long time to turn that ship,” he said. “In the meantime, we should be planning on where we’re headed to decrease impacts on people, the economy and the environment.” 

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at Ohio State, and the Ohio Supercomputer Center. Gil Bohrer of Ohio State was also a co-author of the paper.

The system, called SepsisLab, was developed based on feedback from doctors and nurses who treat patients in the emergency departments and ICUs where sepsis, the body’s overwhelming response to an infection, is most commonly seen. They reported dissatisfaction with an existing AI-assisted tool that generates a patient risk prediction score using only electronic health records, but no input data from clinicians. 

Scientists at The Ohio State University designed SepsisLab to be able to predict a patient’s sepsis risk within four hours – but while the clock ticks, the system identifies missing patient information, quantifies how essential it is, and gives a visual picture to clinicians of how specific information will affect the final risk prediction. Experiments using a combination of publicly available and proprietary patient data showed that adding 8% of the recommended data improved the system’s sepsis prediction accuracy by 11%.

“The existing model represents a more a traditional human-AI competition paradigm, generating numerous annoying false alarms in ICUs and emergency rooms without listening to clinicians,” said senior study author Ping Zhang, associate professor of computer science and engineering and biomedical informatics at Ohio State.  

“The idea is we need to involve AI in every intermediate step of decision-making by adopting the ‘AI-in-the-human-loop’ concept. We’re not just developing a tool – we also recruited physicians into the project. This is a real collaboration between computer scientists and clinicians to develop a human-centered system that puts the physician in the driver’s seat.” 

The research was published Aug. 24 in KDD ’24: Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining and will be presented orally Wednesday (Aug. 28) at SIGKDD 2024 in Barcelona, Spain.

Sepsis is a life-threatening medical emergency – it can rapidly lead to organ failure – but it’s not easy to diagnose because its symptoms of fever, low blood pressure, increasing heart rate and breathing problems can look like a lot of other conditions. This work builds upon a previous machine learning model developed by Zhang and colleagues that estimated the optimal time to give antibiotics to patients with a suspected case of sepsis. 

SepsisLab is designed to come up with a risk prediction quickly, but produces a new prediction every hour after new patient data has been added to the system. 

“When a patient first comes in, there are many missing values, especially for lab tests,” said first author Changchang Yin, a computer science and engineering PhD student in Zhang’s Artificial Intelligence in Medicine lab. 

In most AI models, missing data points are accounted for with a single assigned value – a process called imputation – “but the imputation model could suffer from uncertainty that can be propagated to the downstream prediction model,” Yin said. 

“If the imputation model cannot accurately impute the missing value and it’s a very important value, the variable should be observed. Our active sensing algorithm aims to find such missing values and tell clinicians what additional variables they might need to observe – variables that can make the prediction model more accurate.” 

Equally important to removing uncertainty from the system over the passage of time is providing clinicians with actionable recommendations. These include lab tests rank-ordered based on their value to the diagnostic process and estimates of how a patient’s sepsis risk would change depending on specific clinical treatments. 

Experiments showed adding 8% of the new data from lab tests, vital signs and other high-value variables reduced the propagated uncertainty in the model by 70% – contributing to its 11% improvement in sepsis risk accuracy. 

“The algorithm can select the most important variables, and the physician’s action reduces the uncertainty,” said Zhang, also a core faculty member in Ohio State’s Translational Data Analytics Institute. “This fundamental mathematics work is the most important technical innovation – the backbone of the research.” 

Zhang sees human-centered AI as part of the future of medicine – but only if AI interacts with clinicians in a way that makes them trust the system. 

“This is not about building an AI system that can conquer the world,” he said. “The center of medicine is hypothesis testing and making decisions minute after minute that are not just ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ We envision a person at the center of the interaction using AI to help that human feel superhuman.”

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and an Ohio State President’s Research Excellence Accelerator Grant. Zhang has received additional NIH funding to continue collaborating with clinicians on this work. 

Additional co-authors include Jeffrey Caterino of The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, Bingsheng Yao and Dakuo Wang of Northeastern University, and Pin-Yu Chen of IBM Research.

The U.S. National Science Foundation announced funding today (Aug. 21, 2024) for the creation of the “Transformation of American Rubber through Domestic Innovation for Supply Security” (TARDISS) Engineering Research Center (ERC). The first round of funding will last for five years, with the ability to renew for another $26 million for five additional years.

“Our ongoing priority is to support the people, communities and businesses in Ohio by leveraging the expertise and research of our outstanding faculty and students through these partnerships,” Ohio State President Walter “Ted” Carter Jr. said. “Ohio State is proud to lead this work advancing domestic natural rubber production in our state and region.”

TARDISS, composed of academic partners and supported by industry stakeholders, will lead fundamental research supporting the creation of a “Silicon Valley of Domestic Natural Rubber Production,” said Judit Puskas, professor of food, agricultural and biological engineering (FABE) and a Distinguished University Professor at Ohio State. As principal investigator on the grant, Puskas will lead the center along with its director, Ajay Shah, also a professor in FABE. Katrina Cornish, Ohio State professor emeritus and current director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service and Arid Land Agricultural Research Center, will serve as an external adviser to TARDISS.

The ERC will harness the power of nature, creating bridges between engineering, biology and agriculture, to revolutionize alternative natural rubber production from domestic crops: guayule, the TK “rubber” dandelion and mountain gum. The initiative will also help create jobs, train a new and diverse engineering and agricultural workforce, and ease supply chain issues by building a domestic rubber supply.

“Ohio State is prepared to make the most of this opportunity to get domestic natural rubber production up and running,” said Puskas, a longtime scholar in rubber technology who joined the Ohio State faculty in 2019. “This significant federal support coupled with the large network of expertise under the ERC umbrella positions us well to meet the critical need for a biotechnology-driven solution that boosts domestic manufacturing and reduces reliance on imports.”

Disease and high demand threaten the tropical rubber tree Hevea brasiliensis, the world’s primary natural rubber source. In 2019, 10% of the natural rubber supply was lost to disease – and the risk for transmission of South American leaf blight to Southeast Asia has increased with the expansion of direct airline travel between Brazil and China. Collapse of the global supply would disrupt entire economies around the world, researchers predict.

As lead of the multi-institutional engineering research center, Ohio State will partner with the California Institute of Technology; North Carolina State University; Texas Tech University; the University of California, Merced; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; and Case Western Reserve University as well as industry, educational and technical organizations including The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., the Rubber Division of the American Chemical Society and the Waters Corp.

TARDISS will be headquartered at the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences (CFAES) Wooster campus.

“Ohio State is prepared and eager to lead this critical initiative. This center will integrate engineering with biology and other science disciplines to understand how plants naturally produce rubber, leading to breakthrough discoveries,” said Dean of the College of Engineering Ayanna Howard. “Our innovation ecosystem brings together over 30 industry partners, researchers, students, national labs and the community it serves, and features novel programs to encourage innovation.”

“As a land-grant university, we are dedicated to integrating research, education and extension to improve industry, the environment and the quality of people’s lives – and we work to ensure that groundbreaking scientific discoveries are brought out of the laboratory and into the hands of those who can put them to work,” said Cathann A. Kress, Ohio State vice president for agricultural administration and dean of CFAES. “This investment from NSF celebrates the university’s commitment to research that makes an impact.”

Industry partners are critical to the success of TARDISS ERC both in terms of supporting technology translation and workforce development efforts.

“There is a tremendous amount of economic potential in U.S. bioengineering that will be unlocked by the TARDISS Engineering Research Center,” said Fraser McLeod, vice president, QA/QC Waters Division and Wyatt Technology general manager. “As a leading manufacturer of analytical instruments used in macromolecular characterization, Waters is pleased to support this critical research and the light scattering technologies that will enable the cultivation and extraction of domestically produced natural rubber for the benefit of American industry.” 

“The Rubber Division of the American Chemical Society represents hundreds of companies that depend on a stable supply of natural rubber to make critical products for the U.S. economy.  This new Engineering Research Center will help shift the production of natural rubber from overseas to domestic sources, thereby improving supply chains for our members and creating many American jobs and startups in our industry,” said Lakisha Barclay, executive director and CEO, Rubber Division of the American Chemical Society.

Since its founding in 1985, NSF’s ERC program has funded 79 centers (not including those announced today) that receive support for up to 10 years. The centers build partnerships with educational institutions, government agencies and industry stakeholders to support innovation and inclusion in established and emerging engineering research.

“NSF’s Engineering Research Centers ask big questions in order to catalyze solutions with far-reaching impacts,” said NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan. “NSF Engineering Research Centers are powerhouses of discovery and innovation, bringing America’s great engineering minds to bear on our toughest challenges. By collaborating with industry and training the workforce of the future, ERCs create an innovation ecosystem that can accelerate engineering innovations, producing tremendous economic and societal benefits for the nation.”

This is the second NSF-funded ERC to be established at Ohio State in the last two years. The Hybrid Autonomous Manufacturing, Moving from Evolution to Revolution (HAMMER) ERC was awarded funding in 2022. With today’s announcement, Ohio State joins only a small number of universities to have led simultaneous awards.

With a new federal fellowship that funds tenured faculty members’ “blue sky” research pursuits, Heremans, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at The Ohio State University and an Ohio Eminent Scholar in Nanotechnology, will set out once again to prove something revolutionary about heat, spin and electricity.

Heremans is one of 11 university scientists named to the 2024 class of the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship, the Department of Defense’s flagship single-investigator award for basic research. He is the first Ohio State faculty member to be selected for the fellowship.

“I’m thrilled Professor Heremans is leading this ambitious work at Ohio State,” said Ohio State President Walter “Ted” Carter Jr. “Buckeyes are on the front lines of research and innovation that create meaningful impact in the world, and this Department of Defense fellowship presents an exciting opportunity to contribute to the United States’ global leadership in security technology.”

With about $3 million in funding over five years, Heremans will focus almost exclusively on the topic of polarization caloritronics, substituting ferroelectric materials for ferromagnets in potential spintronic-like applications.

“It’s like starting anew,” said Heremans, also a professor of materials science and engineering and physics. “It’s fantastic to have an established career in research, and then suddenly be given the opportunity to start a completely new direction. It is rejuvenating.

“Bindu Nair, director of the Basic Research Office for the U.S. Department of Defense, explicitly told me to take big risks in the research funded by this program.”

The DOD Basic Research Office that sponsors the fellowship received 170 white papers for this year’s competition. Expert panels invited 27 proposals as finalists, from which the 11 fellows were recommended.

“The idea has to be extremely ambitious, and yet the proposal has to provide enough preliminary data to prove that it’s possible,” Heremans said. “It doesn’t have to build on what you’ve done before – it’s based on the fact you’ve delivered in the past, but you’re now not bound by your past. You can come up with new ideas and try them.”

In early 2023, Heremans and a graduate student in his lab, Brandi Wooten, led the work behind a paper in which they predicted and confirmed theoretical properties of solid materials known as ferroelectrics – which hinted at the possibilities Heremans will pursue during the fellowship.

Spintronics makes use of the spin of electrons in materials known as ferromagnets. In these materials, the atoms behave like tiny magnets that all align with each other to form a big magnet with an overall magnetic “moment” that generates a magnetic field around it. Magnons, or spin waves, are how these tiny magnets move in relation to each other, much like a crowd doing “the wave” at a football game.

The Heremans team worked for over a decade on the propagation of spin waves under the influence of temperature differences. Heremans is now turning to another class of materials known as ferroelectrics – materials that contain positively and negatively charged atoms (ions). 

At the atomic level, strong local electric fields develop between these ions. Similar to how the tiny magnets align in ferromagnets, these local electric fields align with each other to form a ferroelectric material, with a net polarization moment.

The team hypothesized that the quasi-particles moving in wave-like patterns in ferroelectrics are the vibrations of the atoms themselves, called phonons. Preliminary data show that these phonons carry enough heat to change the heat conduction of the materials when an electrical field is applied externally, leading the team to propose that, since spin waves carry a spin current, the new quasi-particle in ferroelectric materials should carry a polarization current – an entirely new concept.

In this new work, Heremans will explore the theory that the flow of electric polarization – no magnetic field required – can be demonstrated experimentally and can be used for engineering functions similar to spin currents: controlling the flow of heat, generating electricity from heat, and transporting information about a thousand times faster than magnetic spins can.

Multiple classes of applications could follow.

“In principle, you can make polarization currents work as a heat engine. Second, you can modulate the heat conduction through a solid with an electric field, allowing you to make the thermal equivalent of a transistor,” Heremans said. “Third, and the most ambitious, would be devices that have logical memory, not based on magnetic spin waves but on polarization currents. They would consume less power, heat up less and wouldn’t require big power plants to run data centers.”

One advantage for the military would be the ability to minimize electromagnetic interference – specifically, enemy attempts to jam communication signals, he added.

Heremans has received U.S. Defense funding since 2010, but this opportunity feels special and, he said, places him among the “who’s who in experts doing work relevant to the DOD.”

“It’s really a chance to let the imagination run free.”

Researchers at The Ohio State University, the Army Research Laboratory and MIT determined that the material is the best among similarly built films for its electron mobility – an index of how easy it is for an electrical current to pass through it. Coupled with low defect density to reduce interference with electron movement on the surface, the material is like a tiny empty freeway where all the electrons can easily get where they need to go with no traffic to be seen. 

“We redefined what a car on this highway does – it’s like a car that can go really fast without getting encumbered by other things on the road,” said first study author Patrick Taylor, a physicist at the Army Research Laboratory. 

“Future generations of electronics will use that kind of technology because it’s low-power,” Taylor said. “The Army is interested in low power because they don’t want to give a soldier something that hogs their battery. On the flip side, the commercial sector is looking at this kind of technology for what happens after silicon, because silicon’s reaching the end of its road and there has to be something that follows it.” 

The research team reported the findings recently in Materials Today Physics. 

Co-lead author Brandi Wooten, a recent PhD graduate in materials science and engineering at Ohio State who is now a research technician in mechanical and aerospace engineering, noted that exhaustive testing of the materials produced another milestone: Researchers were able to detect elusive oscillations that confirmed the pristine films were nearly scatter-free – unlike their counterparts in nature. 

“These materials, naturally speaking, just aren’t the best quality in terms of thin film growth, but we need thin films to make devices,” Wooten said. “This is a nice paper showing we can make these materials good enough in thin film form to be put into devices. This is a steppingstone to getting these materials to do more.” 

Part of doing more would likely involve taking advantage of – and expanding upon – the films’ thermoelectric capabilities. Wooten, who interned at Taylor’s lab for two summers while pursuing her PhD, oversaw highly sensitive tests to gauge the thin films’ thermal properties for this study, and the team has already begun working on new versions of the films based on what she found. 

Though military and commercial applications are years away, these films, consuming very little energy, could be integrated with the super-thin chips now fabricated for miniature electronics. Potential uses could include serving as a basic building block for the next generation of magnetic memory in computers or to generate energy that powers robots or drones – or even wearable devices that keep soldiers cool while they’re wearing heavy gear and bulletproof vests. 

The thin films – between 90 and 150 nanometers thick – are refined versions of ternary tetradymite, a mineral consisting of bismuth, tellurium and sulfur. For about two decades, scientists have focused on perfecting tetradymite films because of their potential to function as topological insulators: materials in which electrical current flows on the surface while the interior acts as an insulator, reducing any dissipation of the surface flow. This surface conduction also has spin properties, which could open the door to spintronic devices that use very low levels of power. 

To achieve those properties, Taylor built the thin films using a technique called molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) – starting with the same crystal structure as tetradymite, but substituting other elements to come up with two different compositions that feature separate conduction mechanisms. 

Joseph Heremans, a co-lead author of the paper, helped guide the selection of elements to arrive at the best films. A professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, materials science and engineering, and physics at Ohio State, Heremans advised Taylor to aim for equilibrium while composing the materials – not a typical characteristic of films made with the MBE process. 

“That was his guiding light,” Taylor said. “We did try to target more equilibrium conditions, and it paid off – and so the material we have has unusually high mobility.” 

The high electron mobility is enabled by growing films in a way that reduces the concentration of moving particles carrying an electric charge that exist in the interior of natural tetradymites, Wooten said. 

“By lowering that carrier concentration, we can utilize these really strong and robust states on the surface,” she said. “In topological insulators, the current can go in one direction on the surface, but not the other. It can’t back-scatter, and that’s what makes them more robust.” 

This work represented an advance in being able to not just build these films, but to test their properties in the lab – previously, materials made for lab study were much larger. 

“Using this molecular beam epitaxy technique, we can now envision a pathway toward something that might fit in your computer or cell phone someday,” Taylor said. 

This work was supported by the Department of Defense Basic Research Office, the Army Research Office, the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the Canada Research Chairs Program and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. 

Additional co-authors were Owen Vail, Harry Hier and Hang Chi (now at the University of Ottawa) of the Army Research Lab and Jagadeesh Moodera of MIT.

Scientists engineered nanocarriers using mouse connective-tissue cells called fibroblasts as a model of skin cells and loaded them with genetic material for a protein key to tissue development. The team injected a solution containing the carriers into damaged discs in mice at the same time the back injury occurred. 

Assessing outcomes over 12 weeks, researchers found through imaging, tissue analysis, and mechanical and behavioral tests that the gene therapy restored structural integrity and function to degenerated discs and reduced signs of back pain in the animals. 

“We have this unique strategy that’s able to both regenerate tissue and inhibit some symptoms of pain,” said co-senior author Devina Purmessur Walter, associate professor of biomedical engineering at The Ohio State University. 

Though there is more to learn, the findings suggest gene therapy could offer an effective and long-lasting alternative to opioids for the management of debilitating back pain. 

“This can be used at the same time as surgery to actually boost healing of the disc itself,” said co-senior author Natalia Higuita-Castro, associate professor of biomedical engineering and neurological surgery at Ohio State. “Your own cells are actually doing the work and going back to a healthy state.” 

The study was published online recently in the journal Biomaterials. 

An estimated 40% of low-back pain cases are attributed to degeneration of the cushiony intervertebral discs that absorb shocks and provide flexibility to the spine, previous research suggests. And while trimming away bulging tissue from a herniated disc during surgery typically reduces pain, it does not repair the disc itself – which continues to degenerate with the passage of time. 

“Once you take a piece away, the tissue decompresses like a flat tire,” Purmessur Walter said. “The disease process continues, and impacts the other discs on either side because you’re losing that pressure that is critical for spinal function. Clinicians don’t have a good way of addressing that.” 

This new study builds upon previous work in Higuita-Castro’s lab, which reported a year ago that nanocarriers called extracellular vesicles loaded with anti-inflammatory cargo curbed tissue injury in damaged mouse lungs. The engineered carriers are replicas of the natural extracellular vesicles that circulate in humans’ bloodstream and biological fluids, carrying messages between cells. 

To create the vesicles, scientists apply an electrical charge to a donor cell to transiently open holes in its membrane, and deliver externally obtained DNA inside that converts to a specific protein, as well as molecules that prompt the manufacture of even more of a functional protein. 

In this study, the cargo consisted of material to produce a “pioneer” transcription factor protein called FOXF1, which is important in the development and growth of tissues. 

“Our concept is recapitulating development: FOXF1 is expressed during development and in healthy tissue, but it decreases with age,” Purmessur Walter said. “We’re basically trying to trick the cells and give them a boost back to their developmental state when they’re growing and at their healthiest.” 

In experiments, mice with injured discs treated with FOXF1 nanocarriers were compared to injured mice given saline or mock nanocarriers and uninjured mice. 

Compared to controls, the discs in mice receiving gene therapy showed a host of improvements: The tissue plumped back up and became more stable through production of a protein that holds water and other matrix proteins, all helping promote range of motion, load bearing and flexibility in the spine. Behavioral tests showed the therapy decreased symptoms of pain in mice, though these responses differed by sex – males and females showed varying levels of susceptibility to pain based on the types of movement being assessed. 

The findings speak to the value of using universal adult donor cells to create these extracellular vesicle therapies, the researchers said, because they don’t carry the risk of generating an immune response. The gene therapy also, ideally, would function as a one-time treatment – a therapeutic gift that keeps on giving. 

“The idea of cell reprogramming is that you express this transcription factor and the cell is then going to convert to this healthier state and stays committed to that healthier phenotype – and that conversion is not normally transient,” Higuita-Castro said. “So in theory, you would not expect to have to re-dose significantly.” 

There are more experiments to come, testing the effects of other transcription factors that contribute to intervertebral disc development. And because this first study used young adult mice, the team also plans to test the therapy’s effects in older animals that model age-related degeneration and, eventually, in clinical trials for larger animals known to develop back problems. 

Higuita-Castro, director of advanced therapeutics and engineering in the College of Medicine Davis Heart and Lung Research Institute and a core faculty member of Ohio State’s Gene Therapy Institute, and Purmessur Walter, an investigator in Ohio State’s Spine Research Institute and director of the Spinal Therapeutics Laboratory in the College of Engineering, are co-principal investigators on National Institutes of Health grants funding this research. 

Additional co-authors include co-first authors Shirley Tang and Ana Salazar-Puerta, Mary Heimann, Kyle Kuchynsky, María Rincon-Benavides, Mia Kordowski, Gilian Gunsch, Lucy Bodine, Khady Diop, Connor Gantt, Safdar Khan, Anna Bratasz, Olga Kokiko-Cochran, Julie Fitzgerald and Benjamin Walter, all of Ohio State; Damien Laudier of Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; and Judith Hoyland of the University of Manchester. 

Ohio State has filed a patent application on nonviral gene therapy for minimally invasively treating painful musculoskeletal disorders.

By Daniel Veghte,

Senior Research Associate Engineer, The Ohio State University

The model was front-loaded with de-identified data on millions of patients gleaned from health care claims information submitted by employers, health plans and hospitals – a foundation model strategy similar to that of generative AI tools like ChatGPT. 

By pre-training the model on a huge cache of general data, researchers could then fine-tune the model with information concerning specific health conditions and treatments – in this case, focusing on stroke risk – to estimate the causal effect of each therapy and determine which therapy would work best based on individual patient characteristics. 

The team from The Ohio State University reported today (May 1, 2024) in the journal Patterns that their model outperformed seven existing models and came up with the same treatment recommendations as four randomized clinical trials. 

“No existing algorithm can do this work,” said senior author Ping Zhang, associate professor of computer science and engineering and biomedical informatics at Ohio State. “Quantitatively, our method increased performance by 7% to 8% over other methods. And the comparison showed other methods could infer similar results, but they can’t produce a result exactly like a randomized clinical trial. Our method can.”

Replacing gold standard clinical research is not the point – but researchers hope machine learning could help save time and money by putting clinical trials on a faster track and support the personalization of patient care. 

“Our model could be an acceleratory module that could help first identify a small group of candidate drugs that are effective to treat a disease, allowing clinicians to conduct randomized clinical trials on a limited scale with just a few drugs,” said first author Ruoqi Liu, a computer science and engineering PhD student in Zhang’s lab. 

The team dubbed the proposed framework CURE: CaUsal tReatment Effect estimation. 

The beauty of a treatment effect estimation model pre-trained with massive amounts of unlabeled real-world data is its applicability to a multitude of diseases and drugs, Liu said. 

“We can pre-train the model on large-scale datasets without limiting it to any treatments. Then we fine-tune the pre-trained model on task-specific small-scale datasets so that the model can adapt quickly to different downstream tasks,” she said. 

Unlabeled data used to pre-train the model came from MarketScan Commercial Claims and Encounters from 2012-2017, providing 3 million patient cases, 9,435 medical codes (including 282 diagnosis codes) and 9,153 medication codes. 

Two of Liu’s model-constructing techniques added to CURE’s power: filling in gaps in patient records by pairing patient information with biomedical knowledge graphs that represent biomedical concepts and relationships, and pre-training a deep synergized patient data-knowledge foundation model using medical claims and knowledge graphs at scale. 

“We also proposed KG-TREAT, a knowledge-enhanced foundation model, to synergize the patient data with the knowledge graphs to have the model better understand the patient data,” said Liu, who was the first author of a March Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence paper describing the knowledge graph work. 

To come up with treatment effect estimates, the model considers pre-trained data overlapped with more specific information on medical conditions and therapies, and after further fine-tuning, predicts which patient outcomes would correspond to different treatments. 

As part of comparing the model to other machine learning tools and validating it against clinical trial results, the study showed that the broad pre-training is the backbone of CURE’s effectiveness – and incorporation of knowledge graphs improved its performance further. 

Zhang envisions a day – pending Food and Drug Administration approval of AI as a decision-support tool – when clinicians could use this type of algorithm, loaded with electronic health record data from tens of millions of people, to access an actual patient’s “digital twin” and let the model function as a treatment guide. 

“This model is better than a crystal ball: Based on big data and foundation model AI, we can have reasonable confidence to be able to say what treatment strategy is better,” said Zhang, who leads the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Lab and is a core faculty member in the Translational Data Analytics Institute at Ohio State. “We want to put physicians in the driver’s seat to see whether this is something that can be helpful for them when they’re making critical decisions.” 

This research was funded by the National Institutes of Health. Pin-Yu Chen of IBM Research was a study co-author of CURE in Patterns. Lingfei Wu of Anytime AI was a study co-author of KG-TREAT in AAAI.

The findings in the new study significantly broaden the scope of what scientists can do using artificial intelligence to analyze images of plants, animals and fungi to answer new questions, said Samuel Stevens, lead author of the study and a PhD student in computer science and engineering at Ohio State.

“Our model will be useful for tasks spanning the entire tree of life,” Stevens said. “Researchers will be able to do studies that wouldn’t have been possible before.”

Stevens and his colleagues first curated and released the world’s largest and most diverse machine learning-ready image dataset, TreeOfLife-10M, which contains over 10 million images of plants, animals and fungi covering more than 454,000 taxa in the tree of life. In comparison, the previous largest database ready for machine learning contains only 2.7 million images covering 10,000 taxa. The diversity of this data is one of the key enabling features of their algorithm. 

They then developed BioCLIP, a new machine learning model released to researchers in December and designed to learn from the dataset by using both visual cues in the images with various types of text associated with the images, such as taxonomic labels and other information.

The researchers tested BioCLIP by seeing how well it could classify images as to where they belonged in the tree of life – including a rare species dataset that it did not see during training.  Results showed that it performed 17% to 20% better than existing models on the task.

The study was published on the open-access preprint server arXiv. The BioCLIP model is publicly accessible here. Its demo, said Stevens, can also accurately discern the species of an arbitrary organism image, be it from the Serengeti Savannah, your local zoo or your backyard.

Traditional computational approaches used to organize abundant biology image databases are typically designed for specific tasks and aren’t as capable of addressing new questions, contexts and datasets, Stevens said.

Additionally, because the model can be widely applied to the entire tree of life, their AI is more supportive of biologists whose real-world research is more broadly focused, instead of those studying specific niches, he added.

What makes this team’s approach so effective, said Yu Su, co-author of the study and an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Ohio State, is their model’s ability to learn fine-tuned representations of images, or being able to tell the difference between similar-looking organisms within the same species and one species mimicking their appearance.

Whereas general computer vision models are useful for comparing common organisms like dogs and wolves, previous studies have revealed that they can’t take note of the subtle differences between two species of the same plant genus. 

Because of its better grasp of nuance, said Su, the model in this paper is also uniquely qualified to make determinations on rare and unseen species as well. 

“BioCLIP covers many orders of magnitude more species and taxa than the previously publicly available for general vision models,” he said. “Even when it has not seen a certain species before, it can come to a reasonable conclusion about how if this organism looks similar to this, then it’s likely that.”

As AI continues to advance, the study concludes, machine learning models like this one could soon become important tools for unraveling biological mysteries that would otherwise take much longer to understand. And while this first iteration of BioCLIP relied heavily on images and information from citizen science platforms, Stevens said future models could be upgraded by including more images and data from scientific labs and museums. Because labs are able to collect richer textual descriptions of species that detail their morphological features and other subtle differences between closely related species, such resources will provide a bevy of important information for the AI model. 

In addition, many scientific labs have information on the fossils of extinct species, which the team expects will also broaden the model’s usefulness.

“Taxonomies are always changing as we update names and new species, so one thing we’d like to do in the future is leverage existing work much more heavily on how to integrate them,” he said. “In AI, when you throw more data at a problem, you’re going to get better results, so I think there’s a bigger version we can continue to train into a larger, stronger model.”

The study was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Ohio Supercomputer Center, and the NSF Imageomics Institute. Other Ohio State co-authors include Jiaman Wu, Matthew J. Thompson, Elizabeth G. Campolongo, Chan Hee Song, David Edward Carlyn, Tanya Berger-Wolf and Wei-Lun Chao. Li Dong from Microsoft Research, Wasila M Dahdul from the University of California, Irvine, and Charles Stewart from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute also contributed.

Researchers found that they could use the subjective ratings of sound quality made by people and combine that with a speech enhancement model to lead to better speech quality as measured by objective metrics.

The new model outperformed other standard approaches at minimizing the presence of noisy audio – unwanted sounds that may disrupt what the listener actually wants to hear. Most importantly, the predicted quality scores the model generates were found to be strongly correlated to the judgments humans would make. 

Conventional measures to limit background noise have used AI algorithms to extract noise from the desired signal. But these objective methods don’t always coincide with listeners’ assessment of what makes speech easy to understand, said Donald Williamson, co-author of the study and an associate professor in computer science and engineering at The Ohio State University. 

“What distinguishes this study from others is that we’re trying to use perception to train the model to remove unwanted sounds,” said Williamson. “If something about the signal in terms of its quality can be perceived by people, then our model can use that as additional information to learn and better remove noise.

This study, published in the journal IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, focused on improving monaural speech enhancement, or speech that comes from a single audio channel, such as one microphone.

This study trained the new model on two datasets from previous research that involved recordings of people talking. In some cases, there were background noises like TV or music that could obscure the conversations. Listeners rated the speech quality of each recording on a scale of 1 to 100.

This team’s model derives its impressive performance from a joint-learning method that incorporates a specialized speech enhancement language module with a prediction model that can anticipate the mean opinion score that human listeners might give a noisy signal.

Results showed that their new approach outperformed other models in leading to better speech quality as measured by objective metrics such as perceptual quality, intelligibility and human ratings. 

But using human perception of sound quality has its own issues, Williamson said.

“What makes noisy audio so difficult to evaluate is that it’s very subjective. It depends on your hearing capabilities and on your hearing experiences,” he said. Factors like having a hearing aid or a cochlear implant also impact how much the average person perceives from their sound environment, he said. 

Since enhancing the quality of noisy speech is crucial for improving hearing aids, speech recognition programs, speaker verification applications and hands-free communication systems, it’s important that these differences in perception be small enough to prevent noisy audio from being less than user-friendly. 

As the complex relationship between artificial intelligence and the real world continues to evolve, Williamson imagines that, similar to augmented reality devices for images, future technologies may augment audio in real-time, adding or removing certain parts of the sound environment to improve a consumer’s overall listening experience. 

To help get to that point, the researchers plan to keep using human subjective evaluations to bolster their model to handle even more complex audio systems and ensure it keeps up with the ever-fluctuating expectations of human users.

“In general, the entire machine learning AI process needs more human involvement,” he said. “I’m hoping the field will recognize that importance and continue to support going down that path.”

Khandokar Md. Nayem of Indiana University co-authored the study. 

While accelerating sea level rise will result in widespread intermittent flooding and long-term inundation in many coastal communities, the paper, recently published in Nature Communications, showed that when these levels increase above 4 feet, minority populations will be disproportionately at risk of isolation.

Rising sea levels could lead to isolation by disrupting transportation networks and roads, meaning that those affected lose access to essential locations such as critical emergency services and schools. 

The study further exposed that renters and older adults face a greater risk of isolation, highlighting the growing connection between historical drivers of existing social inequality and the groups that incur the most risk of climate change.

According to Kelsea Best, lead author of the study and an assistant professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at The Ohio State University, the first step in better characterizing these threats is changing how researchers assess community risk, as most studies measure this by exclusively determining impacts via direct flooding. But concentrating on this sole measurement neglects more complex aftereffects of sea level rise, such as isolation, and reinforces inequality in coastal areas, Best said. 

“We need to re-conceptualize how we measure who is burdened by sea level rise because there are so many ways that people might be burdened before their home is flooded,“ she said. 

Current reports estimate that around 20 million coastal residents in the U.S. will be affected by rising sea levels by 2030, but the paper notes that this number doesn’t include the whole impact global warming will have on certain communities and demographics. 

Notably, because people need access to essential places like grocery stores, public schools, hospitals and fire stations, Best and her colleagues argue that an inability to reach these places impacts individuals just as negatively as if they were living in inundated homes themselves, and should be documented as such. 

Most importantly, their results expose one of the main reasons for these vast differences in risk: A group’s risk of isolation is intimately entwined with specific road networks and where vital services are located in relation to where affected individuals reside. 

They identified these disparities in risk by overlaying OpenStreetMap (OSM) road network data with National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) mean higher high water (MHHW) scenarios. These projections were then combined with recent census data to estimate the percentage of a population that would be left out or missed in estimates of who would be impacted by sea level rise if researchers only counted those who suffered direct inundation. 

“If we take a one-size-fits-all approach, or a seemingly ‘neutral’ approach to understanding who gets access to safe, affordable housing and community in a world with climate change, then we’re really just exacerbating these inequities and it’s not good enough,” said Best. “We have to deliberately seek to provide access to adaptation resources to groups of people who have historically been left out and therefore have fewer resources to respond in the first place.”

The researchers showed that Hispanic populations are often overrepresented in the total citizenry for being at risk of isolation beginning at 4 feet of sea level rise, and Black populations are overrepresented after 6 feet. Alternatively, white populations are underrepresented after 5 feet of sea level rise. 

But to determine when these disparities will begin to develop, Best’s team compared two long-term sea level rise scenarios: an intermediate scenario in which global sea level rise increased by a meter by 2100, and a high scenario in which that number increased to 2 meters by the same year. 

Alarmingly, the study found strong evidence that these isolation effects would set in by 2120 in the intermediate scenario and as early as 2090 in the high scenario. “This timeline matters from a planning and adaptation perspective,” said Best. “Part of why we included the temporal piece is to say this issue would not be as much of a problem if we had urgent, aggressive mitigation. 

“The effects of climate change are going to be further reaching and more cascading than might be directly obvious, and those effects are not going to be felt equitably,” said Best. “So we need to be thinking about those populations most at risk from the beginning and develop policies to support them.” 

The work was supported by the Clark Distinguished Chair Endowment (given to study co-author Deb. A. Neimeier of the University of Maryland) and the National Science Foundation. Other co-authors were Qian He from Rowan University, Allison C. Reilly from the University of Maryland, and Mitchell Anderson and Tom Logan from the University of Canterbury. 

Organized by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Stellantis and Argonne National Laboratory, the competition tasks 12 selected universities, along with their vocational partners, to design, build, test and integrate an advanced electric vehicle (EV) battery into a future Stellantis vehicle, which will be announced in early 2024.

The Battery Workforce Challenge Program aims to inspire a robust workforce within the EV battery sector through multiple educational platforms that will help the DOE achieve net-zero emissions across industries by 2050 and advance the Stellantis goal of becoming a carbon net-zero corporation by 2038.

The three-year competition will culminate in 2026, with the winning teams receiving dozens of annual engineering and sponsor-related category awards, $100,000 in industry-provided prize money, and invaluable employment, collaboration and networking opportunities with industry leaders.

“Ohio State has a long history in R&D programs related to energy storage,” said Assistant Professor Matilde D’Arpino, the team’s faculty adviser. “The Battery Workforce Challenge is the perfect way to expose more students to the technical challenges of lithium-ion batteries and generate innovative solutions. The team has access to state-of-the-art facilities for battery testing and system development at the Center for Automotive Research to test their prototype.”

Each team will design a custom battery pack utilizing production battery cells and complete a professional battery design review with the competition’s subject matter experts. This hands-on experience will include functions such as wiring, battery management, structural integrity, thermal management, power interfacing, cell balancing algorithms, fusing, power busing and enclosure. Students will learn valuable skills and gain unparalleled educational experience that will ready them for future careers throughout the battery industry.

“The Battery Workforce Challenge promotes an environment of technical achievement, coupled with a strong sense of community,” said the team’s project manager, David DeLisle, an electrical and computer engineering graduate student. “I am excited to advance my technical and leadership expertise and build lasting relationships with students and experts from diverse fields. Together, we are shaping the future workforce and driving progress in the electrification of vehicles.”

The 12 teams participated in a competitive process to secure a spot in the elite competition. The participating students will receive firsthand, experiential learning and will work in close partnership with industry experts to tackle one of the most relevant real-world engineering challenges facing the automotive industry today. 

“As new EV battery technician jobs come to central Ohio through unprecedented investment in brand-new industry in our region, two-year community colleges like Columbus State and our K12 career education partners will play a critical role in workforce preparedness to meet the full potential of our growing high-tech manufacturing support sector,” said Steve Levin, professor and coordinator of Automotive Technology. “Partnership throughout the K12 and higher education spectrum will meet the challenge and opportunity these thousands of incoming jobs represent. This is a great opportunity to further our collaboration with Ohio State as we build out new industry-aligned curriculum at our college.”

• The universities and vocational partners selected for the Battery Workforce Challenge are:
• California State University, Los Angeles and Cerritos College
• Clemson University and Greenville Technical College
• Colorado School of Mines and Arapahoe Community College
• Jackson State University and Hinds Community College
• McMaster University and Mohawk College
• The Ohio State University and Columbus State Community College
• Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and Ivy Tech Community College
• University of Alabama and Shelton State Community College
• University of California, Merced and Merced College
• University of Michigan-Dearborn and Henry Ford College
• University of Nevada, Las Vegas and College of Southern Nevada
• University of Waterloo and Lambton College: Lambton Energy Research Centre

“Initiatives like the Battery Workforce Challenge Program are created from a compelling need for heightened American ingenuity and an increased workforce in the EV sector,” said Michael Berube, deputy assistant secretary for sustainable transportation and fuels in the DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. “This competition will immerse students in hands-on, real-world experiences crucial to building skills needed to support a cleaner, more sustainable energy economy.”

The Ohio State-Columbus State team currently includes seven students and welcomes additional members from both institutions.

The study, coinciding with a recent shift from a strong La Niña to a strong El Niño, brings a degree of precision to efforts to make more accurate winter precipitation predictions in the intermountain West by comparing 150 years of rain and snow data with historic El Niño-Southern Oscillation patterns. 

Overall, the analysis shows increasing winter precipitation trends in the north and decreasing trends in the south, particularly during the latter part of the 20th century. It also sheds light on how mountains both amplify and obstruct precipitation, leading to heavier rainfall to their west and lower levels of precipitation to their east. 

The more accurate estimate of where and how much winter precipitation has been driven by El Niños of the past may help guide future management of resources in western North America, one of the most water-stressed parts of the world, researchers say. 

“Because of the seasonality of precipitation in the West, most of it falls during the winter. If you can predict how much precipitation you’ll have in the winter, you’ll have a good sense of what your summer dry period will look like in terms of your water allocation,” said James Stagge, lead author of the study and an assistant professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at The Ohio State University. 

“Anything we can do to improve our ability to predict how much water we’ll get during this critical period allows cities, farmers, water managers and member states of the Colorado River Compact to prepare for upcoming drought and potentially start to go into conservation ahead of time so they’re not caught flat-footed.” 

The study is published today (Dec. 4, 2023) in Nature Water. 

El Niño and La Niña together constitute the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), representing warmer or cooler than normal ocean temperatures, respectively, in a section of the Pacific Ocean between South America and Australia. This anomaly has widespread impact on temperatures and precipitation – including extreme drops or increases of each – around the world. 

In this study, Stagge and colleagues singled out the intermountain West, historically understudied in relation to ENSO patterns, for analysis of El Niño and La Niña wintertime precipitation effects using water gauge readings dating to 1871 – in this way, linking actual precipitation levels to not only a specific geographic location, but its elevation as well. 

The readings were matched with ENSO trends documented by the Multivariate ENSO Index maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which provides real-time and historic ENSO data. 

“Rather than using climate models, we’re using only observations, which allow us to be a little bit closer to reality,” Stagge said. “We didn’t use averages – we showed more precise information about where precipitation fell between the designations of El Niño and La Niña. We put each gauge in its specific location, assigned it an elevation, and looked at how it changed depending on whether it was an El Niño or La Niña year: Was it wetter or drier than normal?” 

This approach unearthed finer details of historic patterns – especially in the northern portion of the intermountain region, where variations in elevation have made it more complicated to track ENSO effects on winter precipitation. 

The study suggests that along this corridor, the presence of mountains can be expected to amplify the El Niño-related increase in precipitation by between 2 and 6 times – but that increase is most evident on the western side of mountains because of what is known as the orographic effect. Moist air from the Pacific moves west to east and then is pushed up over mountains into the cooler atmosphere and releases precipitation – leaving the air dry once it gets to the other side. 

“All the rain falls on the west side and then by the time it gets to the east side of the mountains, there’s no more moisture to fall,” Stagge said. “Add in the effect of ENSO and it’s just like a multiplier, so the wet side gets a lot wetter during El Niño in the south, and much drier during La Niña.” 

The effect of ENSO on precipitation in the region is considered a dipole, with opposite effects in the north and south, and this study supported that conclusion: Winter precipitation has tended to increase in northern Utah and Wyoming during La Niña, and winters were wetter than normal in New Mexico and Arizona during El Niño.

That said, the analysis found that the two regions don’t respond in the same way to the ENSO effect. In the south, one increment of El Niño temperature difference is linked to a corresponding increment of precipitation change. In the north, precipitation change doesn’t occur on a continuous scale based on the strength of the ENSO, but instead operates more like a light switch – it either happens or it doesn’t. 

“That may have to do with the complexity of the topography,” Stagge said. “In the south, the Sierra Nevadas are not blocking the air flow, like they are for Utah and Wyoming.” 

That finding has implications for water managers hoping to know what to expect in the winter, he said: Forecasts focusing on the strength of El Niño or La Niña are more informative in the north, while quantitative temperature change estimates would be more useful in the south. 

Stagge hopes to connect with NOAA about combining data and modeling tools to work on forecasts for the very near future. 

“Water is a determining factor in western North America. It drives the economy, it drives extremely large cities, and all of these stakeholders are concerned about it,” he said. “If we’re able to better understand or in some cases predict precipitation in this part of the world, then we have a better chance of preparing for water shortages.” 

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation. 

Co-authors were Kyungmin Sung and Benjamin Phillips of Ohio State, Max Torbenson of Johannes Gutenberg University and Daniel Kingston of the University of Otago.

Researchers conducted experiments in cell cultures and mice to demonstrate the therapeutic potential of these nanoparticles, which are extracellular vesicles similar to the ones circulating in humans’ bloodstream and biological fluids that carry messages between cells. 

The hope is that a drop of solution containing these nanocarriers, delivered to the lungs via the nose, could treat acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), one of the most frequent causes of respiratory failure that leads to putting patients on a ventilator. In ARDS, inflammation spiraling out of control in the lungs so seriously burdens the immune system that immune cells are unable to tend to the initial cause of the damage. 

“These extracellular vesicles would be an alternative ARDS therapy that gives a fighting chance to your own immune system,” said senior author Natalia Higuita-Castro, associate professor of biomedical engineering and neurosurgery at The Ohio State University. “The issue with ARDS is that you have a shift in the normal balance that favors inflammation. By introducing the anti-inflammatory agents, you shift that balance to a more level stage so the immune system can resolve the underlying issue.” 

The study was published online recently in the journal Advanced Materials. 

Starting the engineering process with adult skin cells called dermal fibroblasts is a significant secret to this technology’s success, noted Higuita-Castro, also director of advanced therapeutics and engineering in the College of Medicine Davis Heart and Lung Research Institute. 

Many nanocarriers are engineered from stem or progenitor cells that can differentiate into other cell types, but also have mysterious properties that aren’t yet fully understood. 

“Using skin cells from adult animals is very important for us because we wanted to demonstrate the feasibility of translating this to clinical settings, where we could have a universal donor cell from adult patients,” Higuita-Castro said. “Dermal fibroblasts are easily available, we can grow them, they’re used in the clinic for grafting and wound healing, and they don’t produce an immune response like that seen with other cell sources.” 

To create the vesicles, scientists apply an electrical charge to a donor skin cell to transiently open holes in its membrane, and deliver externally obtained DNA inside. The donor cell converts that genetic information into one of two anti-inflammatory proteins as well as into messenger RNA, molecules that translate instructions for the manufacture of more of those functional proteins. 

Those materials are the payload inside these nanocarriers, whose surfaces are tagged with a molecule enabling interaction with specific cells to improve their retention in the lungs. In this study, separate nanocarriers were packed with one of two anti-inflammatory proteins, IL-4 or IL-10, plus mRNA for recipient cells in the lung to process and make more protein.

“The proteins have an immediate effect, and adding mRNA will give a more sustained effect,” said Higuita-Castro, also a core faculty member of Ohio State’s Gene Therapy Institute. 

The different proteins were not combined into one vesicle for a reason: “Our vision for clinical applications is to have a mix-and-match platform depending on what the patient needs,” she said. “That way, we could also administer lower doses multiple times, if needed, and re-dosing with these nanocarriers will be OK because they don’t trigger a significant immune response.” 

Cell culture experiments suggested these vesicles could be used as a pre-treatment in sick patients at high risk for developing ARDS. Studies in mice showed their potential to help patients who are already severely ill. 

After mice were injected with a molecule that triggered high inflammation in the lung, researchers gave them a single drop of liquid loaded with engineered nanocarriers that traveled straight to their injured lungs and got to work. Inflammation was reduced as expected, but repeated experiments in the animals showed the vesicles also lowered damage to lung tissue. 

Even more exciting to Higuita-Castro was a finding that cells in the treated lungs secreted substances with additional therapeutic benefits – including antioxidants and more anti-inflammatory molecules.

“Honestly, that was mind-blowing,” she said. “It’s a local treatment because it’s delivered intranasally, and it stays in the lung because we designed it that way, but it has this global effect that is really powerful.” 

Finding a safe, effective treatment for ARDS is a significant medical need. The current use of ventilators and steroids comes with lots of side effects, and while the dangerous lung condition used to be relatively rare, case numbers skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“COVID-19 shined a light on the lack of effective therapeutic options for acute lung injury in general,” Higuita-Castro said. 

There is more to do with the nanocarriers, including pinning down the precise details of all they can do to repair damaged lungs and testing the therapy in larger animals. But Higuita-Castro is optimistic about the technology’s future. 

“These extracellular vesicles are naturally derived nanoparticles, and we think they’re great because nature is the best example we could have – as it has had millions of years to optimize the system,” she said. 

This research was funded by Ohio State Office of Research COVID-19 seed funding and grants from the National Institutes of Health. 

The work was led by co-first authors Ana Salazar-Puerta and María Rincon-Benavides. Additional Ohio State co-authors included Tatiana Cuellar-Gaviria, Julian Aldana, Lilibeth Ortega-Pineda, Devleena Das, Daniel Dodd, Charles Spencer, Binbin Deng, David McComb, Joshua Englert, Samir Ghadiali, Loren Wold and Daniel Gallego-Perez. Gabriela Vasquez Martinez and Diana Zepeda-Orozco of Nationwide Children’s Hospital also worked on the study.

Today, most drug discovery is carried out by human chemists who rely on their knowledge and experience to select and synthesize the right molecules needed to become the safe and efficient medicines we depend on. To identify the synthesis paths, scientists often employ a technique called retrosynthesis – a method for creating potential drugs by working backward from the wanted molecules and searching for chemical reactions to make them.

Yet because sifting through millions of potential chemical reactions can be an extremely challenging and time-consuming endeavor, researchers at The Ohio State University have created an AI framework called G²Retro to automatically generate reactions for any given molecule. The new study showed that compared to current manual-planning methods, the framework was able to cover an enormous range of possible chemical reactions as well as accurately and quickly discern which reactions might work best to create a given drug molecule. 

“Using AI for things critical to saving human lives, such as medicine, is what we really want to focus on,” said Xia Ning, lead author of the study and an associate professor of computer science and engineering at Ohio State. “Our aim was to use AI to accelerate the drug design process, and we found that it not only saves researchers time and money but provides drug candidates that may have much better properties than any molecules that exist in nature.”

This study builds on previous research of Ning’s where her team developed a method named Modof that was able to generate molecule structures that exhibited desired properties better than any existing molecules. “Now the question becomes how to make such generated molecules, and that is where this new study shines,” said Ning, also an associate professor of biomedical informatics in the College of Medicine.

The study was published today in the journal Communications Chemistry. 

Ning’s team trained G²Retro on a dataset that contains 40,000 chemical reactions collected between 1976 and 2016. The framework “learns” from graph-based representations of given molecules, and uses deep neural networks to generate possible reactant structures that could be used to synthesize them. Its generative power is so impressive that, according to Ning, once given a molecule, G²Retro could come up with hundreds of new reaction predictions in only a few minutes. 

“Our generative AI method G²Retro is able to supply multiple different synthesis routes and options, as well as a way to rank different options for each molecule,” said Ning. “This is not going to replace current lab-based experiments, but it will offer more and better drug options so experiments can be prioritized and focused much faster.”

To further test the AI’s effectiveness, Ning’s team conducted a case study to see if G²Retro could accurately predict four newly released drugs already in circulation: Mitapivat, a medication used to treat hemolytic anemia; Tapinarof, which is used to treat various skin diseases; Mavacamten, a drug to treat systemic heart failure; and Oteseconazole, used to treat fungal infections in females. G²Retro was able to correctly generate exactly the same patented synthesis routes for these medicines, and provided alternative synthesis routes that are also feasible and synthetically useful, Ning said.

Having such a dynamic and effective device at scientists’ disposal could enable the industry to manufacture stronger drugs at a quicker pace – but despite the edge AI might give scientists inside the lab, Ning emphasizes the medicines G²Retro or any generative AI creates still need to be validated – a process that involves the created molecules being tested in animal models and later in human trials. 

“We are very excited about generative AI for medicine, and we are dedicated to using AI responsibly to improve human health,” said Ning. 

This research was supported by Ohio State’s President’s Research Excellence Program and the National Science Foundation. Other Ohio State co-authors were Ziqi Chen, Oluwatosin Ayinde, James Fuchs and Huan Sun. 

When study participants were told they were performing poorly in a precision lowering experiment in the lab, after initially being told they were doing well, their movements were linked to increased loads on vertebrae in their neck and low back. 

Results showed that the higher the cognitive dissonance score, the greater the extent of loading on the upper and lower parts of the spine. 

The finding suggests cognitive dissonance may be a previously unidentified risk factor for neck and low back pain, which could have implications for risk prevention in the workplace, according to researchers. 

“This increased spine loading occurred under just one condition with a fairly light load – you can imagine what this would be like with more complex tasks or higher loads,” said senior author William Marras, executive director of the Spine Research Institute at The Ohio State University. “Basically, the study scratched the surface of showing there’s something to this.” 

The research was published recently in the journal Ergonomics. 

Marras’ lab has been studying daily living and occupational forces on the spine for decades. About 20 years ago, he found that psychological stress could influence spine biomechanics, using a study design that involved having a fake argument with a graduate student in front of research participants. 

“We found that in certain personality types, the loads in the spine increased by up to 35%,” Marras said. “We ended up finding that when you’re under that kind of psychosocial stress, what you tend to do is what we call co-activate muscles in your torso. It creates this tug of war in the muscles because you’re always tense. 

“In this study, to get at that mind-body connection, we decided to look at the way people think and, with cognitive dissonance, when people are disturbed by their thoughts.” 

Seventeen research participants – nine men and eight women aged 19-44 – completed three phases of an experiment in which they placed a light-weight box within a square on a surface that was moved left and right, up and down. After a short practice run, researchers gave almost exclusively positive feedback during the first of two 45-minute trial blocks. During the second, the feedback increasingly suggested participants were performing in an unsatisfactory way. 

To arrive at a cognitive dissonance score for each participant, changes during the experiment to blood pressure and heart rate variability were combined with responses to two questionnaires assessing discomfort levels as well as positive and negative affect – feeling strong and inspired versus distressed and ashamed. 

Wearable sensors and motion-capture technology were used to detect peak spinal loads in the neck and low back: both compression of vertebrae and vertebral movement, or shear, from side to side (lateral) and forward and back (A/P). 

Statistical modeling showed that, on average, peak spinal loads on cervical vertebrae in the neck were 11.1% higher in compression, 9.4% higher in A/P shear and 19.3% higher in lateral shear during the negative-feedback trial block compared to the baseline measures from the practice run. Peak loading in the lumbar region of the low back – an area that bears the brunt of any spinal loading – increased by 1.7% in compression and 2.2% in shear during the final trial block. 

“Part of the motivation here was to see whether cognitive dissonance can manifest itself not only in the low back – we thought we’d find it there, but we didn’t know what we’d find in the neck. We did find a pretty strong response in the neck,” said Marras, a professor of integrated systems engineering with College of Medicine academic appointments in neurosurgery, orthopaedics and physical medicine and rehabilitation. 

“Our tolerance to shear is much, much lower than it is to compression, so that’s why that’s important,” he said. “A small percentage of load is no big deal for one time. But think about when you’re working day in and day out, and you’re in a job where you’re doing this 40 hours a week – that could be significant, and be the difference between a disorder and not having a disorder.” 

Marras is also principal investigator on a federally funded multi-institution clinical trial assessing different treatments for low back pain that range from medication to exercise to cognitive behavioral therapy. 

“We’re trying to unravel this onion and understand all the different things that affect spine disorders because it’s really, really complex,” he said. “Just like the whole system has got to be right for a car to run correctly, we’re learning that that’s the way it is with the spine. You could be in physically great shape, but if you’re not thinking correctly or appropriately, or you have all these mental irregularities, like cognitive dissonance, that will affect the system. And until you get that right, you’re not going to be right. 

“We’re looking for causal pathways. And now we can say cognitive dissonance plays a role and here’s how it works.” 

This research was supported by internal Spine Research Institute funds. Co-authors included first author Eric Weston, a former integrated systems engineering graduate student at Ohio State; Afton Hassett of the University of Michigan; and Safdar Khan and Tristan Weaver of Ohio State.

The key is to make the artificial blood molecules big enough so they don’t leak from blood vessels into tissue and cause dangerous cardiovascular side effects, notes a new study led by researchers from The Ohio State University. 

Although blood loss is typically treated by transfusing units of donated blood, in cases where transfusions aren’t readily available or time is too limited to screen for patient blood type compatibility (such as in certain rural areas or on the battlefield), artificial blood products offer medical professionals more flexibility for treatment. In clinical trials, previous generations of these blood substitutes often resulted in several poor health outcomes, as individuals experienced symptoms ranging from narrowing of blood vessels and high blood pressure to tissue injury.

In this study, researchers found that a certain sized fraction of red blood cell substitute can provide a range of health benefits, and can decrease the risk of cardiovascular side effects – if its components are the right size. 

“We found that as you make the red blood cell substitute molecules bigger, you have fewer side effects,” said Alisyn Greenfield, lead author of the study and a PhD student in chemical and biomolecular engineering at Ohio State. “There’s even a particular size range that has better benefits when it comes to the kind of cardiovascular effects that were seen with previous generations of this material.” 

Their findings were published in the journal Biomacromolecules.

The researchers tested a red blood cell substitute called polymerized human hemoglobin – PolyhHb. Although past commercial versions have been explored in clinical settings, they did not receive FDA approval due to their many side effects. 

To find a better solution, the team focused on identifying a target therapeutic size of PolyhHb by synthesizing material in four different-sized brackets and exploring the cardiovascular response in guinea pig models. Findings showed that the largest-sized brackets did not escape the blood vessels, or cause the blood vessels to narrow and elicit high blood pressure.  

Study senior author Andre Palmer, professor of chemical and biochemical engineering at Ohio State, said the antioxidant status of guinea pigs is more similar to humans than other rodents, making them a good model for the study.  

While these red blood cell substitutes aren’t meant to replace blood entirely, this research highlights the potential of these materials. If transfused into a person soon after injury, they could be used to buy the person enough time to be transported to a medical facility to receive a blood transfusion, said Palmer.   

Additionally, because blood substitutes aren’t made with any surface antigens or markers on the outside of the red blood cell’s membrane, they can be transfused into anyone, regardless of their blood type. That said, artificial blood is still a long way from commercialization.  

Even though it can be stored at room temperature for several years compared to the 42-day storage period for donated blood, artificial blood doesn’t come close to replicating the lifetime of real blood cells, said Palmer. Once produced, a typical red blood cell circulates in the human body for a period of about 120 days, yet the materials in current blood substitutes only have a half-life of about 24 hours after administration. 

Further study is needed to more accurately determine the red blood cell substitute’s safety and efficacy in clinical settings. “By performing this study, we demonstrated that we can improve upon what currently exists and, hopefully, be able to move our research forward and translate those materials into the clinic,” said Greenfield.  

This study was supported by the National Institutes of Health. Other Ohio State co-authors were Xiangming Gu, Ahmad Yahya, Amid Vahedi and Mohd. Asim Khan. Other co-authors came from the University of Maryland. 

In a paper published today (April 6, 2023) in Nature Machine Intelligence, scientists from The Ohio State University describe the new model, which uses artificial intelligence to take on the complex question of when to administer antibiotics to patients with a suspected case of sepsis. 

Time is of the essence because sepsis, the body’s overwhelming response to an infection, can rapidly lead to organ failure. And yet, its symptoms – fever, low blood pressure, increasing heart rate and breathing problems – can look like a lot of other conditions. Federal guidelines call for quick treatment with broad-spectrum antibiotics as the first line of defense – a strategy that typically requires action before cultures confirming a bacterial infection can be obtained from a lab.

The model was designed to take into account these uncertainties and time pressures. 

Researchers tested the model’s performance using critical-care patient information from a U.S. database and a European database, comparing outcomes in patients whose actual treatment matched the model’s recommended treatment timeline to outcomes for patients whose actual treatment had differed from what the model would have recommended based on their vital signs, lab results and risk-related demographic data. The measure representing the outcome was patient survival 30 and 60 days after sepsis treatment.

“We showed that when the actual treatment and artificial intelligence agree, we have a lower mortality rate. If they don’t agree, the mortality rate can be as high as 25%,” said senior author Ping Zhang, PhD, assistant professor of computer science and engineering and biomedical informatics at Ohio State. 

The model was trained and validated on a dataset obtained from a publicly available database, called MIMIC-III. The model was tested on different portions of MIMIC-III and a new external dataset from AmsterdamUMCdb. Key measures from almost 14,000 individuals with sepsis included changes to patient vital signs and lab test results as time passed – serving as indicators of illness severity and type of infection – and an innovative method devised to compare outcomes for patients who did and did not receive antibiotics at a specific time. 

“We want the modeling to predict whether it’s beneficial to use antibiotics at a given time – yes or no. But we’ll never know what happens if we don’t give the antibiotic. So we applied a clinical trial concept to this model: For every patient who had taken the drug, we included a matched, clinically similar patient who didn’t take antibiotics at that time,” said Zhang, who leads the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Lab and is also a core faculty member in Ohio State’s Translational Data Analytics Institute. “That way, we can predict the counterfactual outcome, and train the counterfactual treatment model to find whether treatment for sepsis works or not.” 

Sepsis contributes to more than one-third of in-hospital deaths, and is seen most often in intensive care units and emergency departments, “where we’re often making decisions without the gold standard – results from a culture,” said study co-author Katherine Buck, MD, assistant professor of emergency medicine in the College of Medicine and director of the Geriatric Emergency Department at Ohio State Wexner Medical Center. “Not every patient that meets sepsis criteria goes on to have proof of a bacterial infection.” 

Antibiotics don’t come without risks – they can be toxic to kidneys, prompt an allergic reaction or lead to C. difficile, an infection that causes severe diarrhea and inflammation of the colon. 

“What this paper starts to get at is, can we use information available to the clinicians, sometimes at the forefront and sometimes not, to say: Things are changing in a way that suggests the patient will benefit from antibiotics,” Buck said. “A decision-support tool could tell clinicians if it matches what we’re already thinking or prompt us to ask ourselves what we’re missing. Hopefully, with time, all the electronic health record data we have will reveal signals – and from there it’s a matter of figuring out how to use them and how to get that to clinicians.” 

Those insights – and availability of electronic health record data – were important to feeding the model with the right kind of data and designing it to take into account multiple considerations that come with changing medical circumstances, Zhang said. 

“We modeled the patient record like it’s language,” he said. “And for machine learning, we always train the model batch by batch – you need the model to analyze the pattern of data, set parameters, and based on these parameters, add another training dataset to make improvements. And then the machine always finds better parameters to fit the model.” 

A key measure used to guide how the model arrives at a recommendation is the Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) score, which is used to regularly assess how an ICU patient’s organ systems are performing based on results from six lab tests. The researchers ran example case studies to demonstrate what an interface developed for the clinical setting might look like, showing how SOFA scores change when the model adjusts the recommended treatment timeline based on changes to personalized patient data. 

“Our paper is the first to use AI to pursue an antibiotic recommendation for sepsis, using real-world data to help clinical decision making,” Zhang said. “Any research like this needs clinical validation – this is phase one for retrospective data analysis, and phase two will involve human-AI collaboration for better patient care.” 

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Additional co-authors, both from Ohio State, were first author Ruoqi Liu, a PhD student in computer science and engineering, and Jeffrey Caterino, MD, professor and chair of emergency medicine and chief of emergency medical services.

Alan Luo, Judit E. Puskas and Longya Xu are among 124 new NAE members, bringing the total U.S. membership to 2,420 and the number of international members to 319.

“One newly elected NAE member is a big deal for any institution, but three in one year is exceptional,” said College of Engineering Dean Ayanna Howard. “I am delighted for Judit, Alan and Longya, but I’m even happier for our students, faculty and staff that have had the opportunity to learn from and collaborate with these exemplary engineers. They certainly won’t be the last.”

Since the establishment of NAE in 1964, 16 Ohio State engineering professors have been elected, 11 of whom are active faculty. Election to the academy is one of the highest professional distinctions an engineer can receive, and honors those who have made outstanding contributions to “engineering research, practice or education,” and to “the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education.”

A professor of materials science and engineering and integrated systems engineering, Alan Luo was elected “for implementation of lightweight aluminum, magnesium, and titanium materials and advanced manufacturing processes for automotive applications.”

He leads the Lightweight Materials and Manufacturing Research Laboratory and is director of the Advanced Casting Research Center at Ohio State. An internationally recognized leader in lightweight materials and manufacturing, he has made significant contributions throughout his career in the automotive industry and as a professor. An elected Fellow of the American Society of Metals and the Society for Automotive Engineers, he has 21 patents and more than 300 technical publications. Prior to joining Ohio State in 2013, Luo was a GM Technical Fellow at General Motors Global Research and Development Center with 20 years of industrial experience.

A distinguished professor of food, agricultural and biological engineering and chemical and biomolecular engineering, Judit E. Puskas was elected “for coinventing an FDA-approved, life-saving coronary stent coating, and fundamental research and scale-up of polymerization processes.”

Puskas joined Ohio State in 2019, continuing a prolific industry and academic career in rubber technology, developing polymers with multiple applications. She is perhaps known best as co-inventor of the polymer used to coat the Taxus coronary stent licensed by Boston Scientific, which has been implanted in more than 10 million patients. She was the first woman to win the Charles Goodyear Medal, the highest honor conferred by the American Chemical Society's Rubber Division, and was elected to the National Academy of Inventors in 2020. A Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, she has over 400 technical publications and 35 issued patents.

A recently retired professor of electrical and computer engineering, Longya Xu was elected “for contributions to high-performance electric machines and variable-speed drives for aerospace and wind turbines.”

An IEEE Fellow and recipient of IEEE’s Nikola Tesla Award in 2018, Xu was the founding director of Ohio State’s Center for High Performance Power Electronics. His research and teaching interests include the dynamics and optimized design of special electrical machines and power converters for variable-speed systems, the application of advanced control theory and digital signal processors for motion control, and distributed power systems in super-high-speed operations. He has served as a consultant to industry leaders including Raytheon, Boeing, Honeywell, GE Aviation, U.S. Wind Power, General Motors and Ford, among others.

The U.S. National Academy of Engineering is a private, independent, nonprofit institution that provides engineering leadership in service to the nation. Its mission is to advance the welfare and prosperity of the nation by providing independent advice on matters involving engineering and technology, and by promoting a vibrant engineering profession and public appreciation of engineering.

Individuals in the newly elected class will be formally inducted during the NAE's annual meeting on Oct. 1, 2023.

Nearly 4,000 votes were cast in this year’s contest.

Co-senior authors Amal Amer, professor, and Jacob Yount, associate professor, both in the Department of Microbial Infection and Immunity, will receive a trophy from Ohio State News and a $500 award from the Enterprise for Research, Innovation and Knowledge.

Amer, Yount and a large team of Ohio State colleagues found in mice that blocking the molecule, an enzyme known as caspase 11, holds promise in preventing or treating severe COVID-19 symptoms by reducing inflammation, tissue injury and blood clots in the lungs. Versions of this enzyme exist and have similar functions in both mice and humans, making it an attractive therapeutic target. The study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Here were the other contest finalists:

Future wearable health tech could measure gases released from skin: Scientists have taken the first step to creating the next generation of wearable health monitors. New research suggests that a wearable sensor may be able to monitor the body’s health by detecting the gases released from a person’s skin. The method would allow the technology to sense biomarkers related to metabolic disorders, like heart disease or diabetes. Senior author: Pelagia-Irene Gouma, professor of materials science and engineering, published in PLOS One.

Climate change is turning the trees into gluttons: Forests appear to be bulking up on the excess carbon they pull from the atmosphere. This study showed that elevated carbon levels consistently led to an increase of wood volume in 10 different temperate forest groups across the country, suggesting that trees are helping to shield Earth’s ecosystem from the impacts of global warming through their rapid growth. Co-author: Brent Sohngen, professor of environmental and resource economics, published in Nature Communications.

Ohio State News extends thanks to readers and voters, to the faculty finalists for their enthusiastic participation in our sixth annual contest, and to all the researchers who let our staff help tell their stories.

We can’t wait till next year to do it all again!

A key finding of the study is that this control of thermal conductivity is attributable to the structure of the material rather than any random collisions among atoms. Specifically, the researchers describe quasiparticles called ferrons whose polarization changes as they “wiggle” in between vibrating atoms – and it’s that ordered wiggling and polarization, receptive to the externally applied electrical field, that dictates the material’s ability to transfer the heat at a different rate.

“We figured out that this change in position of these atoms, and the change of the nature of the vibrations, must carry heat, and therefore the external field which changes this vibration must affect the thermal conductivity,” said senior author Joseph Heremans, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, materials science and engineering, and physics at The Ohio State University.  

“People tend to think atom vibrations are a given fact and don’t respond to an electric field or a magnetic field. And we are saying you can affect them with an electric field.” 

With the use of a simple external electrical stimulus, the thermal conductivity in this type of material can be changed at room temperature rather than at the extremely low temperatures required to control most candidate materials for solid-state heat switches, enhancing the possibilities for real-world applications of the technology, the researchers say. 

The study is published today (Feb. 1, 2023) in the journal Science Advances. 

The material used in the study is a common lead zirconium titanate ceramic belonging to a class of materials called piezoelectrics, which change shape when an electric field is applied to them or produce an electrical charge under mechanical stress.

Ferroelectrics, a subset of piezoelectrics, are materials in which the electrical charges on the atoms can spontaneously form electrical dipoles that all align in the same direction, forming what is known as polarization. These dipoles can be switched by an external electric field.  

Until now, scientists had not formally written down how this polarization will move when heat is applied. In this new article, this motion is described by introducing the quasiparticle – called a ferron – that carries waves of polarization and heat at the same time. The ferron is sensitive to an external electric field, and that means the application of an external electrical field can turn the material into a heat switch. 

“The quasiparticle has always been there. It just hasn’t been identified and measured,” said first author Brandi Wooten, a PhD student in materials science and engineering at Ohio State. 

Wooten likened ferrons’ behavior to a stadium wave, with each sports fan representing a cell of atoms collected together in a crystal. 

“You have all these atoms, and they have this special dipole – an atom with an electrical charge that moves up and down creates a dipole. You can think of people’s hands going up doing the wave as the dipole’s strength – if their hands are up, it’s really strong. If they’re a little bit down, it’s weaker, and if they’re all the way down, it’s negative,” she said. “That’s the dipole’s strength. We found that these special waves carry both heat and polarization, and we labeled them ferrons.” 

This heat-transferring property is induced by the electric field through a phenomenon known as the piezoelectric strain: The lattice contracts or stretches when the voltage is applied, with atoms and forces between them moving back and forth, ultimately changing the mechanical properties of the material and, as a result, changing its thermal conductivity, said Heremans, also an Ohio Eminent Scholar in Nanotechnology. 

“The ferron is also sensitive to strain in the solid. Since the ferron carries heat, that makes the amount of heat carried dependent on the electrical field,” he said. “So we wrote a new theory that relates an external electric field, the strain it induces in a ferroelectric, and ultimately how this strain affects the thermal conductivity.” 

The theory is predictive, so researchers can now use it to find materials where the effect is much larger, ultimately leading to materials where it is large enough to be used in heat switches in everyday applications, like collection of solar power. 

The application of an electrical field to the material produced a 2% difference between maximum and minimum conductivity – as the new theory predicted would be the case. A series of experiments quantifying the atomic vibrations through measuring the velocity of the material’s sound waves and equilibrium and transport properties validated “that this all depends only on the material structure, not necessarily what’s scattering the vibrations,” Wooten said. 

The researchers are now studying other materials that might increase that change in thermal conductivity by up to 15%, as the new theory predicts. 

“Any application depends on us finding a material where the effect is much larger,” Heremans said. “We are looking for materials that have the right parameters.” 

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Defense, the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science and the Japanese Science and Technology Agency. 

Additional co-authors include Ryo Iguchi and Ken-ichi Uchida of the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan; Ping Tang and Gerrit Bauer of Tohoku University; and Joon Sang Kang of Ohio State.

The AAAS Fellowship, recognizing scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications, is one of the most prestigious honors a U.S. scientist can receive. Fellows are elected by their academic peers.

“This year’s Fellows are an exceptional class of leaders in their respective disciplines and representative of Ohio State’s world-class faculty,” said Peter Mohler, vice president for research. “I am pleased that their scholarly pursuits and achievements are being recognized by a distinguished group of scientists, engineers and innovators as part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s newest inductees.”

The 2022 class includes 505 scientists, engineers and innovators spanning 24 scientific disciplines. 

Ohio State’s newest Fellows are: 

• Antonio Conejo, professor of integrated systems engineering and electrical and computer engineering. For outstanding contributions to power system operations, planning and markets, and service as an educator and leader in power engineering and operations research.
• Amy Fairchild, dean of the College of Public Health and professor of health services management and policy. For her eminent contributions to public health ethics and policy that are grounded in the history and philosophy of science.
• Mohit Randeria, professor of physics. For contributions to the theory of BCS-BEC crossover, to the understanding of angle-resolved photoemission of cuprate superconductors, and for providing rigorous bounds on the superconducting transition temperature in two-dimensional materials.
• Laura Wagner, professor of psychology. For contributions to language and conceptual development, and for broadening participation in publicly engaged science.

The new Fellows will be celebrated in Washington, D.C., this summer.

The university is one of 12 teams from universities, national laboratories and the private sector to address and remove key technology barriers to EV adoption by developing next-generation battery technologies. Anne Co, professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry is the principal investigator of the project.

Ohio State collaborators include Honda, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Professor Marcello Canova and Assistant Professor Jung Hyun Kim, leveraging resources and staff at the Center for Automotive Research and the Institute for Materials Research. The technology-to-market team will be led by Professor Jay Sayre, assistant vice president in the Office of Research and the director of innovation for the Institute for Materials Research.

“The U.S. Department of Energy’s grant is an exciting investment in the future of clean energy and a testament to the dedicated Ohio State researchers who are working at the forefront of more affordable, sustainable and accessible transportation,” said Melissa Gilliam, executive vice president and provost. “I am delighted to see those efforts recognized with this funding that will accelerate electric vehicle adoption.”

Most of today’s electric vehicles (EV) can achieve driving range comparable to gas-powered vehicles, while the fastest charging times are a far cry from the five minutes to fill a gas tank. The ability to produce affordable, reliable and safe EVs with the convenience created by rapid charging could alleviate barriers to EV adoption among a larger percentage of the population.

In response to the challenges in promoting mass adoption of EVs, Ohio State developed a prototype high-power battery technology that can tolerate rapid charging while exhibiting longevity far beyond the current state-of-the-art lithium-ion cells.

“Collaboration is essential for the creation of innovative technology,” said Co. “It is as exciting as it is rewarding to work alongside colleagues and industry partners who are working together to find effective and affordable solutions that will advance science and preserve our environment.”

In partnership with the Honda and Argonne National Laboratory, Ohio State will scale the high-power battery prototype by (1) addressing manufacturing challenges in achieving large-format, commercial-quality cells, (2) allowing for drop-in compatibility with existing battery components and (3) optimizing battery performance for cold temperatures. The technology can potentially double the usable battery lifetime, reduce pack size, decrease cell and battery cost, and enable rapid charging, which will help to accelerate the introduction of affordable entry-level electric vehicles.

EVs4ALL aims to expand domestic EV adoption by developing batteries that last longer, charge faster, perform efficiently in freezing temperatures and have better overall range retention. The program is managed by DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). Electrifying the transportation sector is critical to rapidly decarbonizing the American economy and eliminating heavy-emitting industries.

DOE is directly supporting President Biden’s goals to develop advanced technologies in America that will power the clean energy transition globally and for EVs to make up half of all domestic vehicle sales in 2030. The Ohio State battery technology is based on abundant, inexpensive materials, which exhibit exceptional longevity under extreme fast-charging scenarios, and is essential to achieving the vision of affordable, resilient EVs for all.

Ohio State has a track record of ARPA-E funding success. Most recently, a research team led by Electrical and Computer Engineering Associate Professor Julia Zhang received more than $2.4 million to transform the design and manufacturing processes of electric machines for electrified vehicles. In 2021, a team including Canova earned $5 million in funding from ARPA-E’s Next-Generation Energy Technologies for Connected and Automated On-Road Vehicles (NEXTCAR) program to optimize fuel economy in light-duty vehicles.

“We are excited to be included among the teams imagining revolutionary transformations of electric vehicles; it’s another example of the power of Ohio State collaborations,” said David Horn, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. “This breakthrough research in EV batteries is pointing us toward a more responsible and sustainable future.”

By Brian Strzempkowski

Interim Director, Center for Aviation Studies, The Ohio State University

Pilots must check the NOTAM system before takeoff so that they know about any situations that may affect safety. Bill Abbott/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Late in the evening of Jan. 10, 2023, an important digital system known as NOTAM run by the Federal Aviation Administration went offline. The FAA was able to continue getting necessary information to pilots overnight using a phone-based backup, but the stopgap couldn’t keep up with the morning rush of flights, and on Jan. 11, 2022, the FAA grounded all commercial flights in the U.S. In total, nearly 7,000 flights were canceled. Brian Strzempkowksi is the interim director of the Center for Aviation Studies at The Ohio State University and a commercial pilot, flight instructor and dispatcher. He explains what the NOTAM system is and why planes can’t fly if the system goes down.

What is NOTAM?

Aviation is full of acronyms, and Notice to Air Missions, or NOTAM, is one acronym that pilots learn early on in their training. A NOTAM is quite simply a message that is disseminated to flight crews of every aircraft in the U.S.

The NOTAM system is a computer network run by the Federal Aviation Administration that provides real-time updates to crews about situations relating to weather, infrastructure, ground conditions or anything else that may affect the safety of flight. Trained professionals – like air traffic controllers, airport managers, airport operations personnel and FAA personnel in charge of national airspace infrastructure – can access the system and enter any information they need to share broadly.

Pilots, air traffic controllers and anyone else who needs to know about flying conditions can access the NOTAM system and make appropriate changes to planned flights. It’s similar to checking the traffic on your phone or on the local news before you head to work in the morning. A traffic report will inform you of potential hazards or backups on the roadways that may lead you take a different route to work.

What’s in the NOTAM system and how is it used?

NOTAMs are issued for a wide range of reasons. Some of the notices are good to know but don’t affect a flight – such as personnel mowing grass alongside a runway or a crane working on a building next to the airport. Others are more critical, such as a runway being closed because of snow, ice or damage, forcing a plane to take off or land on a different runway. Changes in access to airspace are also logged with a NOTAM. For example, airspace is always closed above the president and when he or she travels; a NOTAM will alert pilots to changes in airspace closures.

Pilots review these NOTAMs during their preflight briefings. Generally this is done digitally using a computer, but pilots and air traffic controllers can also access the system by calling flight service briefers, who can share live weather and NOTAM information. Airline pilots also rely on their dispatchers to relay any relevant NOTAMs not only before but also during the flight.

The NOTAMs themselves use a lot of abbreviations and are often cryptic to nonaviation folks, but a small amount of text can carry a lot of information. Hundreds of different acronyms can convey a range of information, from taxiway closures to certain types of airport lighting being out of service to a notice that some pavement markings may be obscured.

But not all NOTAMs are straightforward. I remember once seeing a notice from an airport alerting pilots that a fire department was conducting a controlled burn of a house nearby.

Why can’t you fly if the NOTAM system is down?

The Federal Aviation Authority requires flight crews to review NOTAMs before every flight for safety reasons. Without access to this information, a plane cannot legally depart, because there may be an unknown hazard ahead.

As an example, a pilot departing Seattle to fly to Miami would need to know that the Miami airport is open, that the runways are clear and that all the navigational sources – like GPS signals and ground-based navigation antennas – that a pilot may use while in the air are working. Theoretically, they could call the Miami airport and ask, and then call the person who oversees every navigational aid on their route, but that would take a lot of time. A much more efficient way to gather this information before and during a flight is to use the NOTAM system.

At the end of the day, the NOTAM system is about safety. When the system is down, pilots can’t fly as safely. It is for good reason that planes don’t go anywhere unless the NOTAM system is up and running.

Brian Strzempkowski, Interim Director, Center for Aviation Studies, The Ohio State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This is our sixth annual contest, and the winner receives a very cool trophy from Ohio State News and a $500 award from Ohio State’s Enterprise for Research, Innovation and Knowledge. 

We’ve done the hard part, selecting three finalists for consideration from the over 160 stories we’ve written so far this year about cool research – and let’s just be honest, all Ohio State science is inherently cool. From here, we are asking readers to vote early and often – really! – to pick the winner.

Be sure to watch the videos above of our finalist faculty talking about their work and the excitement of being a scientist. And scroll down to VOTE!

Here are the finalists:

Climate change is turning the trees into gluttons: Forests appear to be bulking up on the excess carbon they pull from the atmosphere. This study showed that elevated carbon levels consistently led to an increase of wood volume in 10 different temperate forest groups across the country, suggesting that trees are helping to shield Earth’s ecosystem from the impacts of global warming through their rapid growth.

Future wearable health tech could measure gases released from skin: Scientists have taken the first step to creating the next generation of wearable health monitors. New research suggests that a wearable sensor may be able to monitor the body’s health by detecting the gases released from a person’s skin. The method would allow the technology to sense biomarkers related to metabolic disorders, like heart disease or diabetes. 

Blocking enzyme could hold the key to preventing, treating severe COVID-19: Blocking a single immune response-related molecule holds promise in preventing or treating severe COVID-19 symptoms by reducing inflammation, tissue injury and blood clots in the lungs, research in mice suggests. Versions of this enzyme exist and have similar functions in both mice and humans, making it an attractive therapeutic target.

Voting starts today – see the poll below – and is open until 5 p.m. Friday, Jan. 13, 2023. The process is decidedly unscientific: Participants may cast one vote per day until the poll closes.

Thank you in advance for helping us name the Coolest Ohio State Science Story of 2022!

Editor's note: Voting has closed. Stay tuned for news about the winner!

Ohio State President Kristina M. Johnson joined U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, university leaders, faculty, students, and government and industry partners to make the announcement at the Center for Automotive Research on Friday. Johnson and Brown toured the facility and discussed the future of transportation that reduces greenhouse gas emissions.

“I want to commend Sen. Brown’s steadfast leadership in securing this important investment,” Johnson said. “The transportation sector is the largest domestic contributor to climate change, generating more greenhouse gas emissions than any other part of our economy. Encouraging public transportation use can help reduce that impact, which is why it’s so important that the bus fleet of the future is as clean and energy-efficient as possible. This investment recognizes and supports the innovative research and testing work being done by Ohio State’s Center for Automotive Research to maximize clean, safe and efficient mobility to advance the mission of the FTA.” 

Funding for the investment was made possible through the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, also called the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which Brown helped to write and pass.

“The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is already getting resources to Ohio communities to improve transportation,” Brown said. “We worked to ensure the infrastructure law will allow communities to upgrade their buses, and with our long history of the Ohio auto industry leading the country and the world, our state is the obvious choice to lead this innovative research. I’m working to make sure Ohio gets its fair share – or more – of infrastructure investment, and this is a great step in that effort.”   

The new agreement will support the construction and operation of the testing center through fiscal year 2026. The funds will go toward establishing a dedicated research, development and testing laboratory at CAR’s facilities on the university’s west campus. 

The new lab will include component and vehicle-level testing and validation equipment, with a focus on batteries and energy storage, hydrogen fuel cells, electric motors and power electronics. The testing center will also use the network of on-road testing facilities of the university-affiliated Transportation Research Center Inc. (TRC), North America’s most advanced vehicle proving ground, and its SMARTCenter, an advanced test track for vehicle automation testing and development. TRC brings a vast range of facilities and expertise to the program to speed up development and deployment of zero- and low-emission transit vehicle technologies.

Ohio State’s expertise in mobility research will help the transit industry develop and deploy the cleanest and most energy-efficient buses and transit vehicles. The program will also help transit agencies across the U.S. select the best vehicles and technologies to meet their customers’ needs. The university’s testing center will collaborate with transit vehicle manufacturers, component suppliers, industry organizations and transit agencies. The resulting research will be used by the public transportation industry and the FTA.

“Investment in public transportation advances American industries and its workforce, mitigates climate change and spurs innovation,” said FTA Administrator Nuria Fernandez. “Thanks to President Biden and Chairman Brown, this partnership with The Ohio State University merges the significant investment in low-emission transit vehicles, made possible by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, with the talent and expertise of the Center for Automotive Research. The transit sector continues to lead in advancing the climate, equity, innovation and workforce development goals prioritized by this administration.”

Research and testing at the center will be led by dedicated engineering staff and supported by research faculty, senior research staff, and skilled laboratory and testing technicians. All aspects of the programs will engage students at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Additionally, the program will support CAR’s STEM education and K-12 engagement initiatives, including summer internships for high school students and a mobility research summer camp. 

“This program will allow us to further expand our efforts towards developing the electrified mobility workforce our industry and our nation need,” said Giorgio Rizzoni, director of the Center for Automotive Research. “We are delighted to be able to assist the FTA in its goal to achieve zero emissions in the transit fleet.”

The Ohio State bus-testing center is supported by funding that Brown secured to accelerate the deployment of zero-emission bus technology. Brown worked to establish FTA’s testing program for bus components in the 2015 transportation law and secured additional funding in annual appropriations.

Balaji Ponnu, with Transportation and Traffic Management at Ohio State, joins a project of the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) titled “Pedestrian Crosswalk Spacing and Placement Guidance to Improve Safety.”

Each year, the NCHRP focuses on a set of projects that are critical to state departments of transportation across the country. This year, one of the project’s main research objectives is to determine the maximum distance pedestrians will travel to use a crosswalk and develop various crosswalk spacing recommendations to discourage them from crossing at higher-risk locations between crosswalks.

According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities are about 19% of all traffic fatalities every year. In 2019, more than 6,000 pedestrians in the United States were killed due to traffic collisions, and over 80% of those accidents occurred at unmarked midblock locations, places where a traffic signal or a stop sign is nonexistent.

Ponnu, who received a doctorate in civil engineering from Ohio State in 2018, believes he was asked to participate because he serves as the traffic engineer for a large college campus in the country and due to his work investigating choice of countermeasures and pedestrian volume patterns of college crosswalks. His previous research has also helped to develop measures to discourage jaywalking on Ohio State’s Columbus campus. Earlier this year, Ponnu presented his findings on pedestrian crossing volume patterns at the 101st annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board, which was held in Washington, D.C.

“College crosswalks are very different from public road crosswalks in that they’re very unique in terms of heavy pedestrian movements and a young student population,” he said. Uncontrolled crossing locations, or places where people often choose to jaywalk, can be dangerous, but Ponnu said that penalizing people isn’t conducive to improving traffic conditions.

“The onus to prevent pedestrians from jaywalking should not be on the pedestrian. It should be on those of us who design crosswalk systems,” he said.

Case in point: During trips around campus to study local crosswalk operations, Ponnu discovered a huge variation in traffic control for crosswalks with similar characteristics across different areas around the university. “There is no consistency in how we provide crosswalk traffic control, and that’s something we need to standardize,” he said. But this issue isn't confined to college campuses; Ponnu’s previous research has shown that there is a lack of consistency in the choice of crosswalk traffic control across the country because there is no clear national guidance.

According to the NCHRP, national crosswalk spacing guidance is ambiguous as well; most agency regulations only point to where marked crosswalks should not be installed, rather than give advice on where they should be.

But how do researchers fix such a failing on a national scale?

By turning research like Ponnu’s into well-defined objectives, the project, which has received $500,000 in funding for the 2023 fiscal year, aims to be a first step in changing the way pedestrians interact with roads. It’ll be a year or two before the panel is able to share its recommendations on how to improve our current roadway system with other federal agencies, but Ponnu said he’s looking forward to serving as a “champion” for the implementation of the project’s results at Ohio State.  

“It is an absolute honor to have been invited to serve on this panel,” he said. “Being on this project will be a significant help in assisting me to design better facilities for both students and the many other people who travel to Ohio State’s campus.”

“Dutch Knowlton’s legacy is forever cemented on the Ohio State campus – not just in the brick and mortar of this transformational and state-of-the-art complex, but also in the ethos of generosity he has inspired, through the Knowlton Foundation and its important work,” Ohio State President Kristina M. Johnson said. “Future generations of students will benefit from his vision and philanthropy, which will both strengthen the College of Engineering’s highly ranked academic programs and drive economic development across our city and state.”

The gift will support construction of the second and final phase of BMEC, located on the corner of Woodruff Avenue and College Road. BMEC’s first phase, named Mars G. Fontana Laboratories, was completed in the summer of 2020. Bringing together the departments of Biomedical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering, Fontana Labs showcases teaching and research happening in the heart of Ohio State’s Columbus campus, while inspiring life-saving, unprecedented advances in the rapidly growing field of biomaterials.

Referred to as “The Gateway to Engineering,” the second phase of BMEC will reinvent how Ohio State inspires and educates future Buckeye engineers. By the summer of 2025, students and faculty will begin moving into the modernized facility, completing the most significant capital investments in teaching, learning and discovery in the College of Engineering’s history.

“I believe Mr. Knowlton would be beyond thrilled to see how his legacy through the foundation is impacting and will continue to impact the students and faculty at his alma mater,” said alumnus John Lindberg, president of the Austin E. Knowlton Foundation. “Since Mr. Knowlton started the foundation during his lifetime in 1981, our mission has been to promote and advance higher education in the United States through direct grants and contributions to qualified colleges and universities.”

The $90 million Gateway to Engineering project, funded by state and university investment in addition to philanthropy, includes the demolition of 68-year-old Watts Hall prior to the construction of a new facility that will attach to a renovated structure, formerly known as MacQuigg Laboratories. In total, this second phase of BMEC will be a 136,000-square-foot facility featuring modern, efficient spaces for 21st-century teaching and research. Combined with Fontana Labs, the entire BMEC footprint will be 260,000 square feet.

In addition to becoming home to the departments of Materials Science and Engineering and Biomedical Engineering, phase two will provide STEM education-focused teaching labs, a new College of Engineering leadership suite and dedicated space for the Department of Electrical Engineering’s materials research group. The Department of Engineering Education and its first-year engineering classes also will move to the new Gateway to Engineering facility, providing a model for the classroom of the future.

“From architecture to aviation to engineering, the Knowlton Foundation’s investments are literal and figurative pillars of the experiential education our students enjoy,” said College of Engineering Dean Ayanna Howard. “Our students’ current and future successes bear testament to Dutch Knowlton’s passion for education and his beloved alma mater.”

Dutch Knowlton received his architectural engineering degree from Ohio State in 1931. He was the owner and chairman of the Knowlton Construction Company, which started in Bellefontaine, Ohio, in 1937 and whose predecessors dated back to 1906. His company was responsible for over 600 major construction projects throughout Ohio and the Midwest, including school buildings, hospitals and libraries.

In 1994, Knowlton pledged $16.2 million to Ohio State to support the growth and continued excellence of its architecture program. The Austin E. Knowlton School of Architecture remains one of the country’s most admired institutions and Knowlton Hall has become a signature building on Ohio State’s campus.

In 2015, the Knowlton Foundation donated $10 million to upgrade aviation education facilities and the terminal at The Ohio State University Airport. The Austin E. Knowlton Aviation Learning Center and Executive Terminal enabled the university to meet the educational needs of 500-plus Ohio State students, research demands of the state and nation, and service expectations of local businesses and pilots.

In addition to modern classrooms and research environments, the Gateway to Engineering facility will include a two-floor makerspace for students to bring ideas to life as well as rooms dedicated to K-12 STEM outreach programming.

Senior biomedical engineering student Aneesh Zutshi has enjoyed Fontana Labs, the first phase of BMEC, since it opened. He credits it with propelling his research, helping him cultivate friendships and affording him more hands-on learning opportunities.

While Zutshi will graduate before the second phase is complete, he is happy for the younger Buckeye engineers following him.

“Their first-year engineering courses being located near the future makerspaces will provide them early exposure to upper class design projects,” he said. “I know they will be excited to see these prototypes, and it will spark their own curiosity for their future projects.”

Founded in 1981, the nonprofit Austin E. Knowlton Foundation seeks to promote and advance higher education in the United States and to provide direct grants and contributions to qualified colleges and universities. The foundation’s rich history with Ohio State has spurred innovation and excellence in educational programs, paving the way for creativity and discovery among diverse disciplines.

The new center will lay the foundation for a sustained, highly skilled and diverse semiconductor manufacturing workforce by developing comprehensive experiential learning frameworks for both graduate and undergraduate students, all while paving the way for leading-edge device technologies through state-of-the-art research.

Intel announced a funding award today for the Center for Advanced Semiconductor Fabrication Research and Education (CAFE) of $3 million over three years. This grant comes on the heels of Ohio State convening the Midwest Regional Network to Address National Needs in Semiconductor and Microelectronics, a network of 12 Midwest colleges and universities developing innovative solutions in higher education to support domestic semiconductor education, research and workforce needs.

Earlier this year, Intel announced it will invest more than $20 billion to construct two new chip factories in Ohio. Intel will invest $50 million directly in institutions of higher education in the state, while another $50 million investment from Intel will be matched by $50 million from the National Science Foundation in national funding opportunities.

“The Midwest has extensive experience in serving as an economic driver and support system for some of this nation’s most important undertakings, dating back to World War II and beyond,” said Ohio State President Kristina M. Johnson. “We look forward to reprising that role and helping America retake its rightful place as a leader in the semiconductor industry through this important collaborative effort to train the workforce of tomorrow. By working together, we are much greater than the sum of our parts, and the proof of that will be in the highly trained experts who will emerge from this program prepared to take any challenge and succeed.”

CAFE will partner Ohio State with nine other institutions in the state, including Ohio University, the University of Cincinnati, Central State University and Wilberforce University, as well as the education consortium Five Colleges of Ohio, Inc., composed of Denison University, Kenyon College, Oberlin College, Ohio Wesleyan University and the College of Wooster.

By bringing together these institutions of higher education into a single, interdisciplinary center, CAFE will provide semiconductor research opportunities to students from diverse backgrounds and disciplines, who can share in the access to world-class facilities in an experiential learning environment with a team science approach.

CAFE will be operated at Ohio State by the Institute for Materials Research (IMR), which promotes and supports materials and manufacturing research and initiatives across disciplines and colleges at the university. In addition to IMR operating Ohio State’s premier semiconductor fabrication facilities, the institute’s mission is to build large-scale programs that leverage the multidisciplinary strengths of Ohio State. IMR executive director Steven Ringel, professor in Ohio State’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and associate vice president for research, is the lead principal investigator.

CAFE will offer exceptional opportunities for undergraduates to learn through hands-on research experience. Manufacturing internships for students, as well as graduate and postdoctoral research associateships, will further immerse and train tomorrow’s semiconductor workforce in a variety of real-world settings.

The new research center’s multidisciplinary, diverse and interactive culture will also be enhanced through its coordination with the National GEM Consortium and the Ohio Five-OSU Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) program.

The center will create new training programs and explore next-generation semiconductor device fabrication with activities aligning with many areas of strength within Ohio State’s semiconductor ecosystem: materials synthesis, characterization, device design and processing.

“The research we will carry out as part of the Intel-funded CAFE center will benefit our students, faculty and staff who are engaged in semiconductor research tremendously,” said Ringel. “The structure of CAFE will enable the convergence of both graduate and undergraduate students in an environment of interdisciplinary research and experiential learning that will provide exciting opportunities for current and future generations of students to get in on the ground level and cultivate the future of America’s silicon heartland.”

At Ohio State, access to world-class facilities related to semiconductor fabrication and research will afford experiential learning environments with a team science approach. Primary shared facilities central to CAFE’s research and education efforts at the university include Nanotech West Laboratory, the Semiconductor Epitaxy and Analysis Laboratory, the NanoSystems Laboratory, and the Center for Electron Microscopy and Analysis.

“We are excited to have this opportunity in Ohio’s semiconductor ecosystem, so diverse teams of faculty, staff and students can showcase their talent by having access to state-of-the-art facilities and research experts in semiconductor fabrication,” said IMR Director of Innovation Jay Sayre, who leads the CAFE student experiential plan. “This new, unique learning experience will introduce undergraduate and graduate students, and will inspire them to seek new horizons of research in academic labs and create a sustained pipeline of talent entering the semiconductor industry.”

CAFE anticipates broadening its reach to Ohio colleges and universities currently not part of the initial effort as it evolves its core program through event series that include lab training sessions and student-centric symposiums.