A changing climate drives risks. To better manage climate risks, we need to: (i) do the research right and (ii) do the right research. Starting with real-world decision-problems and integrating decision-makers into an environment of shared discovery can help with this task.
John Elfar | Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation
Our lab has found striking new properties of Erythropoietin and 4-aminopyridine in the regeneration of nerve and preservation of muscle after peripheral nerve trauma. Our published work shows these compounds seem to enhance myelination at the site of severe nerve crush injuries and alter the evolution of post-denervation muscle atrophy - key unsolved problems in orthopaedic trauma. We seek collaborations to solve key problems in the treatment of these patients, including diagnosis of severed nerves, treatments of nerve degeneration, and muscle atrophy.
The impact of an asteroid at Chicxulub led to the extinction of more than 70 percent of species including the non-avian dinosaurs. Here I present mineralogical evidence that a thriving microbial community was established within days of the impact. This community helped survivorship and the recovery of higher orders of life in the oceans.
A variety of physical phenomena create color. Pigments and dyes selectively absorb light to create color. While micro- and nano-scale periodic structures can generate color via material-specific optical dispersion. I will describe a previously unrecognized mechanism for creating iridescent structural color with large angular spectral separation via interference occurring when light undergoes multiple total internal reflections at microscale interfaces.
Sebastiaan Van Nuffel | Materials Characterization Lab
Time-of-Flight Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (ToF-SIMS) is an imaging mass spectrometry technique that is capable of label-free chemical 2D and 3D imaging with a lateral resolution comparable to that of an optical microscope and a depth resolution down to 5 nm. ToF-SIMS imaging is thus possible at the level of a single cell. Furthermore, ToF-SIMS can detect both inorganic and organic molecules, and is sensitive enough to perform trace-element analyses. It is a particularly good technique for imaging lipids due to their high ionization efficiency, but it also allows high-spatial resolution imaging of nucleobases, amino acids, sugars, metabolites and non-native compounds such as drugs and toxins. This presentation will include an introduction to the technique, an overview of my past and current research involving tissue and single cell imaging, and potential areas for new collaborations here at Penn State.
X-ray microtomography has become a standard for 3D exploration of materials microstructure in engineering and medicine. However, while the form of data remains the same, the techniques used to analyze it qualitatively and quantitatively have advanced at varying rates within different disciplines. This is where the Penn State X-MEN enter: our mission is to accelerate the translation of knowledge across disciplinary boundaries, sharing segmentation strategies, feature extraction, and classification methods. From specimen preparation to a Data-Driven modeling we’ve leveraged the strength of five PSU colleges to get the most out of X-ray micro-CT data.