Millennium Café

About a decade ago, our team began studying how a tiny backyard insect produces microscopic, hollow particles—called brochosomes—that control how light reflects and scatters, enabling natural camouflage. We uncovered how the shape of these particles governs their optical behavior and, most recently, developed the first biomimetic strategy to manufacture brochosome-like particles at scale. This talk will highlight how this platform is opening new opportunities across sustainable materials, biomedical devices, and advanced optical technologies.

Tak Sing Wong | Mechanical Engineering

My approach to mentoring and advising PhD students has remained largely unchanged over the past decades, with a focus on developing critical thinking, challenging published work, forming and testing hypotheses, and advancing knowledge and discovery. However, accomplishing these goals requires continual adaptation to the technologies students use to obtain and process research information, which have changed dramatically over the past 30 years—from the internet and search engines such as Google to today’s AI-based tools like ChatGPT. To remain effective, PhD advisors must recognize how deeply AI has been integrated into the way that students access, interpret, and synthesize information, and how this integration necessitates changes in mentor–student interactions. In this talk, I discuss the challenges and opportunities AI presents for making advising and mentoring time more efficient, while avoiding pitfalls and preserving the central goals of doctoral training: cultivating independent critical thinkers and enabling meaningful, impactful discoveries rather than following a path toward bland accomplishments.

Bruce Logan | Director, Institute of Energy and the Environment

In nature, symbiosis is a survival strategy. In science, it is an innovation strategy—but it rarely happens by accident. At the One Health Microbiome Center, we are not just studying ecosystems; we are engineering one. I will discuss how we intentionally fuse distinct disciplines, linking a unified vision with the data scientist’s algorithm, the ecologist's field trial, and the technologist’s state-of-the-art platforms. By "designing" this collision and training bilingual, industry-academia PhDs through our NIH T32 BIOMS program, we are creating a culture where technology, biology, and scholars co-evolve. This is symbiosis by design, ensuring that our collective output is far greater than the sum of our individual labs.

Seth Bordenstein | Biology & Entomology | One Health Microbiome Center

The brain, as a physical substrate, exploits rich dynamics arising from neuronal coupling through dynamic synapses, rather than centralized control or symbolic logic. In my group, we explore how similar principles can be realized in engineered materials by embedding computation directly into networks of soft, ionic, and biomolecular components. We create neuromorphic tissues—networks of physically coupled material nodes that process information through intrinsic nonlinear dynamics, fading memory, and signal propagation. By tuning coupling strength, connectivity, and material properties, these systems perform real-time temporal transformations without clocks, software, or hard-coded logic. Experiments and modeling show that these tissues can serve as physical substrates for reservoir computing, enabling the prediction and classification of highly nonlinear and chaotic temporal data.

Joseph Najem | Mechanical Engineering | LiMC2

It is existentially important (I would argue) for academia to bridge its immense (I would argue) divide with the general public.  Many long‑standing institutional norms and processes—including promotion and tenure criteria—effectively discourage research that prioritizes meaningful societal impacts ahead of traditional scholarly outputs. Let’s discuss concrete, responsive + proactive steps that can be taken to help shape an academic culture that remains rigorous while becoming more deeply engaged with the broader world it serves.

PJ Perry | Anthropology

What if the technologies we use to understand the brain were as soft and flexible as the brain itself? For decades, neural interfaces/devices that help us listen to, communicate with, and heal the nervous system have been built like machines: rigid, metallic, and mechanically mismatched to the living tissues they touch.  In this talk, I share how new generations of soft biomaterials and tissue-like bioelectronics are reshaping the way we connect with the nervous system.

Tao Zhou | Engineering Science & Mechanics