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

​​​​​​​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!

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

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

By its nature, magic cannot have an abstract, but this routine, which comes from a long tradition, was designed in order to share the idea of ‘conservation law’ in physics and mathematics.  The magician must never reveal the trick; besides, the spectators would be silly to demand the trick, for it spoils their own enjoyment like reading a detective story from the end.  For this exceptional routine, however, revealing the trick is part of the show.

Tadashi Tokieda | 2025 Russell E. Marker Lecturer

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