Faculty

New study shows road emission policies could save 1.9M lives by 2040

Alexander James Servantez — Thu, 22 May 2025 20:45:25 +0000

New study shows road emission policies could save 1.9M lives by 2040 Alexander Jame… Thu, 05/22/2025 - 14:45

A new global study featuring Professor Daven Henze reveals that implementing smart policies that address road transport emissions can improve health outcomes across more than 180 countries and 13,000 urban areas.

Off

Traditional

White

Tiny robot team could be a gamechanger for safety inspections

Alexander James Servantez — Wed, 21 May 2025 15:29:25 +0000

Tiny robot team could be a gamechanger for safety inspections Alexander Jame… Wed, 05/21/2025 - 09:29

Alexander Servantez

One slithers. One crawls. Neither looks like much on their own. But together, they form a super team—one that might just change how we inspect the most complicated machines in the world.

Kaushik Jayaram, an assistant professor in the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering at CU 51��ý, is working to build the next generation of robot inspection tools by studying some of nature’s simplest creatures.

This robotic duo is about as odd as it is ingenious: tiny, insect-inspired robots paired with inflatable vine-like robots that grow like plants and curl like snakes. These high-tech helpers can navigate a complex maze of machinery and squeeze through the tightest of spaces—like the guts of a jet engine—to potentially perform non-destructive evaluation faster, cheaper and better than ever before.

The tiny mCLARI robot, developed by Assistant Professor Kaushik Jayaram and his team in the Animal Inspired Movement and Robotics Laboratory.

“If you look at the infrastructure around us, there are a lot of buildings, bridges, dams and machines that have all of these little nooks and crannies,” said Jayaram, who is also affiliated with the BioFrontiers Institute, the Biomedical Engineering Program, the Robotics Program and the Materials Science and Engineering Program. “They need very careful, regular inspection and maintenance, but there’s just no easy, cost-effective way to get in.”

Jayaram said there is also an element of public safety involved. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, nearly 15% of aviation accidents are caused by mechanical malfunction.

In just this year alone, the National Transportation Safety Board has reported 94 aviation accidents, 13 of which have been identified as fatal incidents.

“When it comes to tasks such as flying, where human safety is paramount, we need aircraft technology and machinery to work 100% of the time,” Jayaram said. “Our research is one of the efforts to address these concerns using the advantages of robotics.”

The work, in collaboration with Laura Blumenschein at Purdue University, has drawn interest from the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. They’ve awarded the two researchers a three-year, $1.4 million grant to prove these small robots can work together to produce big results.

But as unlikely as this robotic team might seem, Jayaram believes they have the perfect blend of “offense” and “defense” to get these dirty and delicate jobs done.

First on the roster is Jayaram’s mCLARI microrobot. This tiny machine—weighing in at less than a gram—can climb, squeeze through cracks the size of a penny and move with a millimeter precision.

However, due to its small stature, it struggles to carry any extra weight. Large batteries and electronics are incompatible with the little robot, and without them it cannot travel long distances or maneuver tight spaces effectively.

The inflatable vine-like robot, developed by Laura Blumenschein, an assistant professor at Purdue University.

That’s where its vine-like teammate comes in. This robot can inflate like a party favor, allowing it to carry more weight and conform to the environment. In Jayaram’s vision, the inflatable snake can act as mCLARI’s personal Uber driver, negotiating constraints of tight spaces and dropping the tiny robot directly at the site of inspection.

Once in location, Jayaram said the mCLARI robot, fitted with cameras and miniature evaluation sensors, can gather and transmit real-time data for offline analysis. When it’s done, it can hop right back on the snake-like robot and the team can make the winding journey back home, saving hours of evaluation time and thousands of dollars in service costs in the process.

“Each of the robotic systems have their own pros and cons,” said Jayaram. “By combining the strengths of these two robots, we’re overcoming the disadvantages to create a single collaborative system that can give us quick insight into these compact and confined spaces.”

But this tiny squad of robots is capable of much more than just inspection. In fact, Jayaram dreams of a day where his insect and vine-inspired robotic friends can be deployed in a variety of scenarios where being small, agile and adaptive are a premium.

Maybe one day this robotic team can play a vital role in environmental monitoring to detect high-risk wildfire zones and prevent ecological damage. Or maybe they can be used in disaster response situations—like a collapsed building—to help save human lives.

Jayaram said the possibilities are truly endless.

“These small, confined crevices and spaces are actually way more ubiquitous than we originally thought. Even in the medical arena—if we shrink these robots even further, make them shapeshift, and use biocompatible materials, maybe our technology can one day be crawling inside our bodies, detecting and releasing blood clots or taking measurements just like a pill,” Jayaram said. “We get very excited when we think about the future. If we can build systems that can effectively navigate the world and combine them with sensors, we can do a lot.”

Assistant Professor Kaushik Jayaram, in collaboration with Laura Blumenschein, has received a $1.4 million grant from the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory to develop a tiny robot super team capable of navigating a complex maze of machinery and squeeze through the tightest of spaces—like the guts of a jet engine—to potentially perform non-destructive evaluation faster, cheaper and better than ever before.

Off

Traditional

White

Vance turns her house into lab to study health risks of cleaning products

Alexander James Servantez — Tue, 20 May 2025 19:16:38 +0000

Vance turns her house into lab to study health risks of cleaning products Alexander Jame… Tue, 05/20/2025 - 13:16

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, global spending on household cleaning products have increased by nearly $50 billion. Associate Professor Marina Vance is turning her home into a research laboratory to study and explore the possible implications of the increased product usage on human health.

Off

Traditional

White

We can turn bugs into flying, crawling RoboCops. Does that mean we should?

Alexander James Servantez — Wed, 14 May 2025 16:44:44 +0000

We can turn bugs into flying, crawling RoboCops. Does that mean we should? Alexander Jame… Wed, 05/14/2025 - 10:44

Scientists and engineers are modifying animals with mechanical parts to create next-generation biohybrid cyborg animals that can perform difficult and unappealing tasks for humans. But do humans have the right to overlook animal consciousness for personal gain? In this article by Salon, Assistant Professor Nicole Xu blazes this new terrain and explores the ethical considerations behind these biohybrid creatures using her jellyfish case study as an example.

Off

Traditional

White

Burleson earns 2025 Exceptional Graduate Faculty Mentor Award

Alexander James Servantez — Tue, 13 May 2025 20:53:08 +0000

Burleson earns 2025 Exceptional Graduate Faculty Mentor Award Alexander Jame… Tue, 05/13/2025 - 14:53

Assistant Professor Grace Burleson has earned the Graduate School's 2025 Exceptional Graduate Faculty Mentor Award for her outstanding contributions to mentoring individual graduate students and improving the overall climate of graduate education.

Off

Traditional

White

New discovery shows how molecules can mute heat like music

Alexander James Servantez — Wed, 07 May 2025 03:00:00 +0000

New discovery shows how molecules can mute heat like music Alexander Jame… Tue, 05/06/2025 - 21:00

Alexander Servantez

Imagine you are playing the guitar—each pluck of a string creates a sound wave that vibrates and interacts with other waves.

Now shrink that idea down to a small single molecule, and instead of sound waves, picture vibrations that carry heat.

Ultra-high vacuum scanning probe setup modified by the Cui Research Group to conduct thermal microscopy experiments.

A team of engineers and materials scientists in the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering at CU 51��ý has recently discovered that these tiny thermal vibrations, otherwise known as phonons, can interfere with each other just like musical notes—either amplifying or canceling each other, depending on how a molecule is "strung" together.

Phonon interference is something that’s never been measured or observed at room temperature on a molecular scale. But this group has developed a new technique that has the power to display these tiny, vibrational secrets.

The breakthrough study was led by Assistant Professor Longji Cui and his team in the Cui Research Group. Their work, funded by the National Science Foundation in collaboration with researchers from Spain (Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Madrid, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), Italy (Istituto di Chimica dei Composti Organometallici) and the CU 51��ý Department of Chemistry, was recently published in the journal Nature Materials.

The group says their findings will help researchers around the world gain a better understanding of the physical behaviors of phonons, the dominant energy carriers in all insulating materials. They believe one day, this discovery can revolutionize how heat dissipation is managed in future electronics and materials.

“Interference is a fundamental phenomenon,” said Cui, who is also affiliated with the Materials Science and Engineering Program and the Center for Experiments on Quantum Materials. “If you have the capability to understand interference of heat flow at the smallest level, you can create devices that have never been possible before.”

The world’s strongest set of ears

Cui says molecular phononics, or the study of phonons in a molecule, has been around for quite some time as a primarily theoretical discussion. But you need some pretty strong ears to “listen” to these molecular melodies and vibrations first-hand, and that technology just simply hasn’t existed.

A sneak peek into the ultra-high vacuum scanning probe microscopy setup used to conduct molecular measurements.

That is, until Cui and his team stepped in.

The group designed a thermal sensor smaller than a grain of sand or even a sawdust particle. This little probe is special: it features a record-breaking resolution that allows them to grab a molecule and measure phonon vibration at the smallest level possible.

Using these specially designed miniature thermal sensors, the team studied heat flow through single molecular junctions and found that certain molecular pathways can cause destructive interference—the clashing of phonon vibrations to reduce heat flow.

Sai Yelishala, a PhD student in Cui’s lab and lead author of the study, said this research using their novel scanning thermal probe represents the first observation of destructive phonon interference at room temperature.

In other words, the team has unlocked the ability to manage heat flow at the scale where all materials are born: a molecule.

“Let’s say you have two waves of water in the ocean that are moving towards each other. The waves will eventually crash into each other and create a disturbance in between,” Yelishala said. “That is called destructive interference and that is what we observed in this experiment. Understanding this phenomenon can help us suppress the transport of heat and enhance the performance of materials on an extremely small and unprecedented scale.”

Tiny molecules, vast potential

Developing the world’s strongest set of ears to measure and document never-before-seen phonon behavior is one thing. But just what exactly are these tiny vibrations capable of?

PhD student and lead author of the study Sai Yelishala (right), along with Postdoctoral Associate and second author Yunxuan Zhu (left). Both are members of the Cui Research Group led by Assistant Professor Longji Cui.

“This is only the beginning for molecular phononics,” said Yelishala. “New-age materials and electronics have a long list of concerns when it comes to heat dissipation. Our research will help us study the chemistry, physical behavior and heat management in molecules so that we can address these concerns.”

Take an organic material, like a polymer, as an example. Its low thermal conductivity and susceptibility to temperature changes often poses great risks, such as overheating and degradation.

Maybe one day, with the help of phonon interference research, scientists and engineers can develop a new molecular design. One that turns a polymer into a metal-like material that can harness constructive phonon vibrations to enhance thermal transport.

The technique can even play a large role in areas like thermoelectricity, otherwise known as the use of heat to generate electricity. Reducing heat flow and suppressing thermal transport in this discipline can enhance the efficiency of thermoelectric devices and pave the way for clean energy usage.

The group says this study is just the tip of the iceberg for them, too. Their next projects and collaborations with CU 51��ý chemists will expand on this phenomenon and use this novel technique to explore other phononic characteristics on a molecular scale.

“Phonons travel virtually in all materials,” Yelishala said. “Therefore we can guide advancements in any natural and artificially made materials at the smallest possible level using our ultra-sensitive probes.”

Assistant Professor Longji Cui and his team in the Cui Research Group have developed a new technique that allows them to measure phonon interference inside of a tiny molecule. They believe one day, this discovery can revolutionize how heat dissipation is managed in future electronics and materials.

Off

Traditional

White

An artistic rendering showing thermal phonon interference in a molecule, otherwise known as "a molecular song."

Jayaram nabs prestigious grants to design insect-inspired, shapeshifting robots

Alexander James Servantez — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 16:57:24 +0000

Jayaram nabs prestigious grants to design insect-inspired, shapeshifting robots Alexander Jame… Tue, 04/29/2025 - 10:57

Assistant Professor Kaushik Jayaram is the recipient of a $650,000 CAREER award from the U.S. National Science Foundation. The funding will help Jayaram make advancements in robots by drawing from what might seem to be an unlikely source: insects and other small creatures.

Off

Traditional

White

51��ý’s Mana Battery is in race to perfect sodium-ion battery technology

Alexander James Servantez — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 18:12:41 +0000

51��ý’s Mana Battery is in race to perfect sodium-ion battery technology Alexander Jame… Mon, 04/07/2025 - 12:12

Associate Professor Chunmei Ban is a co-founder of CU 51��ý spinout Mana Battery. The company is at the forefront of a race to provide low-cost batteries with longer lifespans than the market offers today.

Off

Traditional

White

Borden, Rentschler inducted into the AIMBE College of Fellows

Alexander James Servantez — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 19:24:59 +0000

Borden, Rentschler inducted into the AIMBE College of Fellows Alexander Jame… Mon, 03/31/2025 - 13:24

Professors Mark Borden and Mark Rentschler have been inducted into the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) College of Fellows. The program is among the highest professional distinctions given to medical and biological engineers, representing the top 2% of these engineers around the world.

Off

Traditional

White

From research to impact: Massimo Ruzzene

Alexander James Servantez — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 15:52:12 +0000

From research to impact: Massimo Ruzzene Alexander Jame… Mon, 03/31/2025 - 09:52

Professor Massimo Ruzzene is the senior vice chancellor for research and innovation. His goal is to foster a campus environment that turns research into real-world impact in areas such as quantum, space, climate and health.

Off

Traditional

White