Millennium Café

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

Due to the campus closure from 5 a.m. to noon the Millennium Café will be canceled, Tuesday, December 2. This will conclude our 2025 café talks. Thank you for a wonderful year! Enjoy the rest of the semester and a relaxing winter break. We look forward to welcoming you back, refreshed and ready for more coffee and conversation in January 2026!

​​​​​​​There will be no Millennium Café on November 25.
Please join us on the following Tuesday, December 2, for the last of the 2025 Millennium Café series!

The High Field Magnetic Resonance Imaging (HFMRI) Facility at Penn State hosts two advanced preclinical MRI systems and two micro-CT systems for multimodal imaging. MRI, a non-invasive technique traditionally used in medicine, is now gaining traction in materials research thanks to innovations in hardware and imaging strategies. Applications span a wide range: from characterizing medical implants (scaffolds, stents, bioglass) and visualizing hydrogels, to monitoring drying in seeds or concrete, measuring flow and pH, and tracking diffusion of water, lithium, or sodium. Combined with micro-CT, MRI delivers complementary insights for comprehensive material characterization.

Thomas Neuberger | Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences

Want to learn what a single document could both prevent research misconduct and help improve the quality of research papers? In this quick primer, Katie Bode-Lang from the Office for Research Protections will share resources for helping to manage expectations in a lab and share what rugby has to do with running an efficient check-in.

Katie Bode-Lang | Office for Research Protections

Multi-legged animals such as centipedes exhibit remarkable agility across complex terrains, yet their locomotion strategies differ dramatically depending on their developmental mode. In this talk, I will present a comparative framework combining numerical modeling, organismal experiments, and robophysical modeling to explore how locomotor control and body kinematics co-evolve with developmental processes. In doing so, we establish first-principle hypotheses on how locomotion shapes development and, conversely, reveal a new paradigm for co-designing control and morphology in future agile, modular, multi-legged robots.

Baxi Chong | Mechanical Engineering