Millennium Café

Autonomous, engineered materials composed of soft matter could assist society in a wide variety of ways that are outside the scope of microprocessor-based robots. A major technical hurdle is creating a soft matter realization of an information processor that can process sensory stimuli according to logical operations, thus guiding reactions. This presentation will describe how we engineered soft materials that process all decision-making operations resulting from mechanical stimulus, and will invite collaborations to pursue the first fully autonomous, engineered materials that emulate the fundamental functions of lifeforms.

The Microsoft Office Suite has come a long way since Word/PowerPoint/Excel. The Teams collaboration interface is a powerful tool that can be used to organize your research group and keep track of all the details associated with all research activities. I will be talking about how faculty and other researchers can consider organizing their work around projects using the communication, project planning, lab notebook, document repository, and everything else associated with keeping track of information with your research groups all in one place. It will take a shift in thinking, but will provide a powerful return on investment. There are some tips and tricks on getting started that will be shared and lessons learned from more than a year working in the teams environment.  

Tim White | Earth and Environmental Systems Institute

Penn State’s Office of Physical Plant completes an annual system-wide Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions inventory, but because of its broad scope, the inventory does not provide unit-level detail to be used by individual colleges and campuses to assess their emissions. Unit-level inventories may provide more detailed identification and management of potentially avoidable GHG emissions, and may increase unit accountability to reduce emissions, increase sustainability, and help progress university goals. Here I describe: 1) College of EMS sustainability efforts including our first college-level GHG emissions inventory; 2) a “how to” guide for other colleges and units who care to create their own inventory; and, 3) our EMS actions aimed at reducing our college's, and therefore the university's, C footprint.

Laurie Mulvey | Sociology | World in Conversation

Students of history know that social destabilization and violence can emerge with too much polarization among the people. In this introduction to the dialogue method developed over two decades at World in Conversation, Laurie Mulvey (Director) will briefly discuss the "how" of building a healthy society, in particular the crucial role of dialogue facilitators. In her view, facilitated dialogue is not a space for correcting other people’s beliefs and narratives, nor is the goal to develop empathy. It is a space for thinking together--with the very people whose ideas we reject.

Matt Ferrari | Biology

The COVID pandemic has touched nearly every aspect of human life across the globe. The pandemic and the global response have catalyzed an unparalleled scale of innovation and brought renewed focus to long-standing challenges in public health. On the one year anniversary of my first Café presentation about the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, I reflect on the lessons of this pandemic and the opportunities to improve the practice of public health. 

The field of micromechanics is an established engineering domain with demonstrated impact on science, technology, and product development. At the core of this technology are movable mechanical structures, MEMS, with dimensions ranging from a few to 100’s microns, and rigid components that rely on external links for power supply and control. Removing these constraints would enable a new technology platform for responsive systems that can self-morph into different shapes, deploy, gather energy from the local environment, and self-propel. These shape morphing systems create a new paradigm in engineering where the distinction between materials and mechanisms gets vague. In this presentation, I will discuss the prospect of creating shape morphing micromachines by the integration of atomically thin electronics, flat optics, and nanomechanical devices.