Millennium Café

Peter Buckland | Sustainability Institute

What does a global threat sound like? The Pentagon, the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists all diagnose risks to global society including pandemics, weapons of mass destruction, failed states, and the failure to address anthropogenic climate change. In the this talk/performance I will show how heavy metal musicians have brought attention to these global threats through their music and art. Future Café talks this semester will highlight other approaches for communicating important messages beyond the standard approaches employed by researchers.

Catherine Nettles Cutter | Food Science

What do breath strips have to do with preventing foodborne illness? Pullulan, the polysaccharide used to make these strips shows promise as an edible delivery system for antimicrobials on food surfaces. I will discuss how a novel composite antimicrobial film, made from pullulan, antimicrobials, and polyethylene can inhibit pathogens associated with muscle foods.

Ruth Mendum | Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education

I am a rural sociologist and gender specialist working in refugee settlements and camps in Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia. My pecific research focuses on biomass energy use by households for home cooking and sometimes heating. Frequently I am asked by scientists and engineers here in the US how cutting edge research can be brought to communities in remote locations like the ones in which I work. Today I will share a snapshot of the research I do, outline some critical insights about how to work across cultural and technological divides, and demonstrate the arenas in which Penn State faculty can learn from communities that enjoy fewer material resources.

Bryan Vogt | Chemical Engineering

3D printing can enable new form factors, on demand inventory, and facile distributed manufacturing to provide a new additive manufacturing paradigm. However, low cost printing with polymers has tended to lead to brittle materials that offer limited use in engineering applications. Here we describe several routes to select polymeric materials to provide enhanced mechanical properties from 3D printing as well as provide new functionality to 3D printed parts.

Shashank Priya | Associate Vice President for Research and JP Maria | Materials Science & Engineering

The Multidisciplinary University Initiative (MURI) program is considered as one of the top opportunities for conducting team-based fundamental science investigations. MURI projects involve teams of researchers investigating high priority topics and opportunities that intersect more than one traditional technical discipline. A typical team consists of 4 – 6 researchers. Projects are funded for 5 years with total funding ranging from $5 – 7.5M. Each year 20 – 30 projects are funded under this program. This presentation will provide an overview of the MURI program and discuss strategies for Penn State researchers to develop stronger efforts. Team formation, past track record and innovation is key for proposing these projects.

We all like to dream about “what could be.” As chemists who make materials, this often takes the form of drawing pictures of what we want, based on our predictions of what the material might do. The challenge then becomes actually making what we designed. We can now design, and then actually make, a large megalibrary of nanoparticles with previously unimaginable complexity, all using simple benchtop chemistry and standard laboratory glassware. This begins to shift the narrative from “what is possible to make” to “what do we want to make.”