Millennium Café

In this brief primer on the pioneering work of world-renowned systems scientist Riane Eisler, I hope to offer an ethics-based, constructive critique of contemporary society’s oft-exalted concept of disruptive innovation. To this end, I will introduce the Café community to Eisler’s extraordinarily holistic and integrative analytical tool – the Biocultural Partnership-Domination Lens, along with its related four pillars of partnership: childhood, gender, economics, and narratives. Finally, I will offer an opportunity to participate in a book club that will dive deeper into Eisler’s work, for those who wish to learn more about practical strategies to transcend systems of rigid top-down domination and construct more egalitarian and evolved systems of partnership.

Cole Hons  |  Huck Institutes

Electrospinning is a process to prepare nonwoven fabrics of fine fibers. Control over fiber-scale and fabric-scale structure enables rapid exploration of new polymeric and hybrid materials. I’ll briefly describe “e-spinning” capabilities in our lab, followed by application examples spanning energy, medicine, and consumer products.

Patrick Mather  |  Schreyer Honors College, Chemical Engineering Materials Science & Engineering

Fungal-based materials, also known as fungal biomaterials or mycelium materials have been identified by many national initiatives and research programs as an area of high growth potential. Manufacturing of fungal biomaterials has the potential to revolutionize traditional manufacturing in the United States. Here, I will discuss how fungal evolutionary diversity impacts the properties and behavior of resulting materials spanning from food to biomedical scaffolds.

Josephine Wee Food Science

The layer by layer processing of AM has opened the door to novel designs and development of new materials that can help meet future engineering challenges.  The Center for Innovative Materials Processing through Direct Digital Deposition (CIMP-3D) is a multidisciplinary, intercollegiate research lab dedicated to cutting-edge additive manufacturing technologies (AM) and houses advanced equipment to support AM research of metal, polymer, and ceramic materials.  This presentation will provide an overview of CIMP-3D’s facilities and capabilities, its operational structure and collaboration opportunities, and will present on a selection of work performed in the past.

Jay Keist  CIMP-3D

The Penn State Plant Institute serves to develop and support a wide diversity of students, staff and faculty involved in many different areas related to plant science and applications. As the new director, I am leading the development of a new vision for the Institute, this will be an opportunity to hear updates, gather input from the community, and learn about some activities planned for this year.  We are specifically looking to increase interdisciplinary interactions across campus and so this talk is for anyone that might be looking to learn how there expertise can fit within the institute.

Mark Guiltinan  |  Plant Science

Shape memory polymers have many potential applications which includes biomedical devices, smart textiles, and soft robotics.  These polymers store elastic energy by freezing stretched polymer chains in an extended state, which is analogous to a spring.  I will discuss how the work that can be done by these systems is a combination of elastically stored energy (i.e., a spring) and energy stored through a phase change (i.e., transitioning between crystalline and amorphous solid states) while highlighting opportunities for new interdisciplinary applications.