Cellular medicine is growing rapidly. However, there are many technical challenges related to cell manufacturing, delivery, and tracking. In this talk, I will show how my lab uses simple engineering and biomaterials to improve cell culture efficiency. I will also introduce the newly established Sartoris Cell Culture Facility at Huck Institute and call for collaborations from engineers, biologists, and materials scientists to address challenges in cell manufacturing.
Penn State’s Center for Energy Law and Policy supports interdisciplinary teams from across Penn State that want to use their joint scientific expertise in the service of complex problems in energy, regulation and society. The process of working across many domains is complicated, and how researchers can get their work noticed within the policy system is sometimes daunting - but the potential to have real impact is tremendous. Come learn about how you can work with the Center for Energy Law and Policy, and how we harness the depth of expertise from our university to improve real-world decisions.
Current sand shortages symbolize the onset of numerous global challenges within our immediate future - our world has started to run out of resources. In this talk, I aim to inspire you to ponder how our materials, buildings, and infrastructure can take the giant leap to become ‘resource independent.’ Framed with the research challenges of building on Mars, I invite you to consider how the small steps we undertake in extraterrestrial construction can lead to giant leaps to decarbonize our built environment on Earth.
Heather Preisendanz | Agricultural and Biological Engineering
Analyzing wastewater provides an unbiased view of the physical and mental health of communities. By analyzing wastewater for the novel coronavirus (SARS-Cov-2), prescription medicines, and over-the-counter medications, we can provide valuable information regarding the well-being of an entire community, without the need to interview, survey, or test individual people. We are currently partnering with four wastewater treatment plants in Pennsylvania to understand how the presence of the virus and related pharmaceuticals have changed over the course of the pandemic and hope that the information generated from this project will provide community leaders with the information they need to make informed, near-real time decisions in response to any increases or decrease in viral genome counts detected in the wastewater.
Tremendous amounts of low-grade thermal energy are lost to the environment through industrial practices because we lack viable recovery methods. Simultaneously, the intermittent nature of renewable energy has created a need for new sources of electricity that can be accessed quickly during times of need. Thermally rechargeable batteries are a promising new option that may help us solve these seemingly unrelated problems and improve our electric grid's sustainability. I will present some ideas from my laboratory to develop new thermally rechargeable batteries that have performances comparable to those recharged with electrical energy.
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.