Engineering Magazine Spring 2025

CARNEGIE MELLON ENGINEERING

About the cover

IN ALASKA’S WRANGELL-ST. ELIAS NATIONAL PARK & PRESERVE, RESEARCHERS FROM CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY’S CIVIL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING DEPARTMENT ARE MAPPING ROOT GLACIER’S THICKNESS AND BEDROCK ELEVATION USING TWO TYPES OF ICE-PENETRATING SURVEYS— FROM THE AIR AND ON THE GROUND. THESE SURVEYS WILL FURTHER SCIENTIFIC UNDERSTANDING OF GLACIER RETREAT AND HELP US ASSESS POTENTIAL HAZARDS TO COMMUNITIES AND INFRASTRUCTURE.

4 MAPPING GLACIERS FROM ABOVE

IMPLANTABLE BIOELECTRIC DEVICES TO TREAT THYROID DISORDERS

BIOELECTRIC MEDICINE-BASED TREATMENT FOR TYPE 2 DIABETES

THE BATTLE FOR CURB SPACE

PLANTS INSPIRE BIOHYBRID SYSTEMS

REVOLUTIONIZING ROBOT DEXTERITY

BEYOND SILICON COMPUTER CHIPS

BLENDING THE VIRTUAL AND PHYSICAL WORLD

CMU-AFRICA WILL EXPAND DIGITAL PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE

ROBOTICS FOR ENVIRONMENTAL INNOVATION

IN THE WORLD ARE

STUDENTS’ DREAM JOBS?

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STUDENTS FIND TRADITION AND FUTURE IN NAVAL ROTC 60 TOY

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ASTRONAUT ALUMNUS EXPERIMENTS IN ZERO-GRAVITY

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ALUMNI ENTREPRENEURS PUT INNOVATION IN ACTION

BUZZ-WORTHY ENGINEERING DESIGN COURSE

ENGINEERING BENEATH THE SURFACE

CARNEGIE MELLON ENGINEERING Spring 2025 magazine

EDITOR Sherry Stokes (DC ’07)

DESIGNER Tim Kelly (A ’05, HNZ ’14)

Mapping glaciers from above

Nestled within Alaska’s Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, the largest national park in the United States, the Kennicott and Root glacier complex draws more than 50,000 visitors every year. This region, accessible by one of only two roads in the park, offers a unique opportunity for hikers to explore the

icy surface of Root Glacier. However, like many other glaciers around the world, looking beyond the park’s stunning views reveals pressing environmental concerns around the thinning and retreat of the glacier system.

To better understand the region’s current and future conditions, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, in collaboration with the National

Park Service, University of Alaska Fairbanks, and University of Arizona, launched a project to map the glacier’s thickness and bedrock elevation using two types of ice-penetrating surveys—from the air and on the ground.

Beginning on foot, CMU’s Brandon Tober and team donned skis to survey the four-kilometer lower section of Root Glacier where visitors access the park. This approach, while limited in range, collected data on the most trafficked area of the glacier system and later served as ground-truth validation for the second phase of surveys from above.

THE ICE IS THE MEMORY OF THE WORLD

"Traditional ground-based ice penetrating radar surveys are very labor intensive,” said Tober, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “With a helicopterborne radar, we were able to cover approximately 550 kilometers of landscape in three days.”

Suspended from a bright orange helicopter, the four-pronged, drone-like sensor flew over both Kennicott and Root Glaciers in a serpentine pattern, using radar sounding to capture detailed measurements of the ice thickness and bedrock elevation below.

The data collected from both surveys will help predict how the glacier will evolve in the future, construct detailed regional maps, and better understand the glacier’s marginal lakes and their subsequent threat: outburst floods.

“Outburst floods occur when dammed lakes fed by glacial meltwater are released. They can be detrimental to towns in close proximity, like McCarthy, Alaska,” said Tober. “So, the surveys will not only enable us to further scientific understanding of glacial retreat but will also help to assess potential future hazards to the downstream community and infrastructure.”

The results of these surveys will ultimately help inform the National Park Service of potential hazards to existing and future infrastructure developments including roads, pedestrian bridges, and trails. Until then, Tober and his team— including David Rounce, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, Martin Truffer from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Jack Holt from the University of Arizona, and Mike Loso from the National Park Service—remain dedicated to analyzing their radar data to better understand what the future holds for Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and the Kennicott and Root glacier complex.

WATCH OUR VIDEOS TO SEE ENGINEERING’S SIGNIFICANT CONTRIBUTIONS TO GLACIOLOGY

Albert Einstein “

Creativity intelligenceishaving fun.”

From the dean C

arnegie Mellon Engineering, like other colleges and research institutions, is operating in an era of shifting federal expectations and support. As we navigate these times, I am reminded that the college is agile, and has always remained strong when change occurs. I proudly recall how the college maneuvered during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide excellent education and keep our research operational. Today, like then, if we stay focused on those goals and maintain a culture that is respectful and receptive to different perspectives, we will thrive.

Reflecting on the caliber of our educational programming, the hallmarks of a Carnegie Mellon engineer include the capacity for critical thinking and problem solving, and these skills are developed through hands-on learning. Students play an important role in our research activities, especially our Ph.D. candidates. With their advanced training, they become leaders in their fields, advance the state of the art and practice, and are entrepreneurial, whether it be the context of a job in industry or academia, or in a startup that they create.

From the start of a student’s academic career to when they graduate, we give them space to explore educational and professional opportunities, so they can make informed decisions about their future careers. In this magazine, we include a survey in which we polled juniors and seniors to find out their aspirations.

Other stories in this issue highlight robotics, an area of excellence for the college. Here we are exploring multi-sized devices, ranging from swimming robots made from DNA nanostructures that have medical applications to robots that can gather and analyze environmental samples in the field.

Finally, many of you will be aware of the recent news that I will depart from Carnegie Mellon to become the president at Rochester Institute of Technology at the beginning of July. It has been my incredible honor to lead this college over the past five and a half years, and I truly appreciate the support I have received from faculty, staff, students, and alumni across our community. Through the work of our entire community, I leave the college and university in a strong position, and I will remain an avid fan of the university’s transformative impact in both education and research.

Sincerely,

William H. Sanders

Dr. William D. and Nancy W. Strecker Dean, College of Engineering

Implantable bioelectric devices to treat thyroid disorders

An award of up to $42 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) has been secured by a CMU-led team to accelerate the development of implantable, cell-based bioelectronic devices that deliver patientspecific therapy and monitor disease status, for conditions like hypo- and hyperthyroidism, in real time.

A Body,

Carnegie Mellon University-led team has secured an award of up to $42 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H)  to accelerate the development of implantable, cell-based bioelectronic devices that deliver patient-specific therapy and monitor disease status, for conditions like hypo- and hyperthyroidism, in real time. This award is part of the ARPA-H REACT program, which supports the advancement of implantable bioelectronic devices to improve patient management of chronic diseases.

Burak Ozdoganlar, professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, will head the Biointegrated Implantable Systems for Cell-based Sensing and Therapy (BIO-INSYNC) project as the primary investigator. This effort is part of the ongoing Bioelectric Medicine Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University.

In addition to Carnegie Mellon researchers, the multidisciplinary project team includes members from the University of Pittsburgh/UPMC, University of Florida, and University of California - Santa Cruz. Two companies, Ginkgo Bioworks and Velentium, are also integral parts of the consortium.

During the six-year project term, the team will develop and test two multi-part, pacemaker-sized system platforms that will be implanted in a patient’s chest cavity through an outpatient procedure and offer real-time, adjustable, low-cost therapy and disease monitoring for up to 12 months.

Following a “living pharmacy” concept, one of the systems will use human cells to produce and release the necessary dose of a hormone or other therapeutic molecules on demand. Utilizing a “living sentinel” concept, the second system will use cells that measure critical biomarkers to monitor the patient’s disease status continuously in real time. Both will feature remote interfaces to communicate key information and measurements with the patient via smart devices or directly to their healthcare provider.

While this technology can be used to treat various diseases and conditions, the collaborative team will specifically focus on its application to thyroid disorders, which impact an estimated 12% of Americans, including children and adults. BIO-INSYNC devices will provide a significant advantage to patients who will be able to continuously monitor key hormones and deliver the right therapeutic dose as needed, eliminating current management protocols like daily medications and regular blood testing. Notably, the project will conduct a first-in-human clinical trial for patients facing thyroid conditions.

“The thyroid gland controls so many integral processes within the body, and thyroid hormone imbalances can lead to weight gain or loss, mental health issues, fertility problems, and even heart diseases,” explained Ozdoganlar. “It’s important also to note that thyroid disorders disproportionally impact vulnerable populations. Our bioelectronic system offers an innovative avenue for patients to self-manage their thyroid hormone levels at a fraction of the cost. The aim is to improve patients’ quality of life by improving thyroid treatments while bridging disparities in healthcare to attain equitable care for all.”

This project is supported by the Engineering Research Accelerator. Additional researchers on the project include Carnegie Mellon faculty members Anne Robinson, Douglas Weber, Gary Fedder, James Schneider, Marc Dandin, Maysam Chamanzar, Phil Campbell, Philip LeDuc, and Rosalyn Abbott

brain, behavior moonshot: Advancing neurotechnology for peak performance, health, and well-being

Imagine a day when people will wear non-invasive devices to improve brain fitness. For patients, this means improving their neural health, and healthy people will be able to optimize cognitive function or “brain fitness.” Think of it as wearing a Fitbit headband and an Apple watch.

To understand how physical health, internal and external stressors, and the environment impact brain health, we need to gain real-time feedback to create AIdriven solutions for a closed-loop system.

Jana Kainerstorfer, professor of biomedical engineering, leads this moonshot that brings together CMU and clinical institutions to ask how different factors influence the performance of the brain and behavior. The researchers will develop engineering solutions for understanding and optimizing human cognitive performance in the healthy brain, focusing on innovative solutions for treating neural health conditions.

Project co-leads include Matthew Smith, professor of biomedical engineering; Steven Chase, professor of biomedical engineering; and Barbara ShinnCunningham, director of the Neuroscience Institute and professor of biomedical engineering and electrical and computer engineering.

Restoring movement for stroke survivors

Doug Weber, professor of mechanical engineering, is exploring ways to restore shoulder, arm, and hand movement for stroke survivors. Spinal cord stimulation technology uses a set of electrodes placed on the surface of the spinal cord to deliver pulses of electricity that activate nerve cells inside the spinal cord. By engaging intact neural circuits, Weber's team, in partnership with UPMC, implanted a pair of thin metal electrodes resembling spaghetti strands along the necks of stroke patients. The stimulation has enabled patients to fully open and close their fist, lift their arm above their head, or use a fork and knife to cut a piece of steak for the first time in years.

A Carnegie Mellon University-led team of researchers has secured an award of up to $34.9 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to develop a new bioelectric medicine-based treatment for obesity and Type 2 diabetes patients that aims to improve adherence and reduce climbing healthcare costs.

Implantable bioelectronics developed in the lab of Rice University bioengineer Omid Veiseh.

Source: Brandon Martin/Rice University

Research to fight obesity and Type 2 diabetes

ACarnegie Mellon University-led team of researchers has secured an award of up to $34.9 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). The funds will support the development of a bioelectronic implant that could radically improve treatment options and significantly reduce the cost of care for patients with obesity and Type 2 diabetes.

The award will drive the accelerated development and testing of “Rx On-site Generation Using Electronics (ROGUE),” a bioelectrical device that hosts a “living pharmacy,” consisting of engineered cells that produce biological therapy to treat Type 2 diabetes and obesity. The device will offer continuous, adjustable, and low-cost therapy deployment via a minimally invasive procedure performed in an outpatient clinic. Additionally, in a stark contrast from the traditional delivery of biologics, it will eliminate the need for weekly injections, trips to the pharmacy, and careful storage of expensive medications.

“This project is the peak deployment of several core technologies we have developed and refined over the past five years, as part of the Bioelectric Medicine Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University,” said Carnegie Mellon University materials science and bioengineer Tzahi Cohen-Karni, who serves as primary investigator on the ARPA-H award.

“Bioelectronic devices offer a myriad of benefits, including adjustable therapy delivery, dynamic monitoring, and reduced biologics healthcare costs. We are leveraging our collective strengths to develop an effective and sustainable solution to reduce the burden of chronic care for two global epidemics—obesity and Type 2 diabetes.”

ARPA-H is a federal funding agency established in 2022 to support research that has “the potential to transform entire areas of medicine and health.” The collaborative team includes 17 co-PIs from Boston University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, Rice University, UC Berkeley, the Mayo Clinic, and New York City-based Bruder Consulting and Venture Group. It includes engineers, physicians, and multidisciplinary specialists in synthetic biology, materials science, electrical engineering, and other fields.

“Rice Biotech Launch Pad is determined to facilitate the clinical translation and commercialization of this breakthrough and market disruptive, first-in-class technology,” said Rice University bioengineer Omid Veiseh, co-investigator on the ARPA-H award.

“We are developing a minimally invasive implant that can produce a year’s supply of a treatment for chronic diseases like Type 2 diabetes and obesity. With a simple, once-ayear procedure, ROGUE will replace current treatments that have to be administered daily, weekly, or monthly.”

This effort is funded under ARPA-H’s REACT program and includes funding for a first-inhuman clinical trial for patients facing obesity and Type 2 diabetes. The trial preparation is slated to begin in the fifth year of the six-year project.

This project is supported by the Engineering Research Accelerator. Additional researchers on the project include Carnegie Mellon faculty members Adam Feinberg, Charlie Ren, Phil Campbell, and Subha Das.

Continuing research: Implant technology to

help patients with difficult-to-treat cancers

In fall 2023, ARPA-H awarded $45 million to rapidly develop sense-and-respond implant technology that could slash U.S. cancer-related deaths by more than 50%. The award, given to a multi-institutional team of researchers, including CMU, is fast-tracking development and testing of a new approach to cancer treatment that aims to dramatically improve immunotherapy outcomes for patients with ovarian, pancreatic, and other difficult-to-treat cancers. The project and team are named THOR, an acronym for “targeted hybrid oncotherapeutic regulation.” THOR’s implant, or “hybrid advanced molecular manufacturing regulator,” goes by the acronym HAMMR. Tzahi Cohen-Karni serves as co-investigator and bioelectronics lead on this project.

A neural explanation for choking under pressure

Every professional who functions at a high level of performance knows the value of keeping things loose during harrowing tasks. Choking under pressure or being unable to perform to one’s highest standard when it matters most, is an undesirable alternative. While athletes are often associated with this phenomenon, people choke under pressure in many settings, for example, test-taking, giving presentations, puzzle-solving, and beyond. New research from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh reveals a first-of-its-kind neural explanation for choking under pressure: a deficit in motor preparation induced by an overly large potential “jackpot” payoff.

To study how motor performance is impacted by choking under pressure, researchers recorded

the spiking activity of hundreds of motor control neurons in Rhesus monkeys, who were trained to perform a challenging task to earn rewards of varying sizes. When an unusually large jackpot reward was at stake, the animals underperformed, leading the group to examine how cued rewards modulated neural population activity during movement preparation.

“By looking at the activity of populations of neurons in the motor cortex, we found a signature of choking under pressure, that at the precision of 100s of milliseconds, was indicative of whether or not a subject would fail in an upcoming trial,” explained Adam Smoulder, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon and first author of the Neuron paper

“Through a series of three hypotheses, we

KNOWING WHAT’S GOING ON IN YOUR BRAIN CAN HELP PEOPLE WITH COPING AND MITIGATING THE RISKS OF CHOKING UNDER PRESSURE.

sought a more mechanistic explanation of choking under pressure. We found that rewards interact with target preparation signals to drive neural activity toward a region associated with improved reach execution, and then, at the highest rewards, spread away from this region. So, it seems that increasing motivation by offering larger rewards can improve the discriminability of the neural signals, but only up to a point. Beyond that point, we actually see a collapse in neural information, and that’s tightly correlated with when the animals choke under pressure.”

This nuts-and-bolts level of explanation differs from previous, more holistic work, due to its high-resolution nature, and ability to consider the activity of populations of neurons, versus either the aggregate activity which can be seen with fMRI, or prior work in which only the activity of individual neurons was available.

“It’s hard work to take something that everybody has an intuition about and relate it to neural activity,” noted Aaron Batista, professor of bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh. “Our data indicates that subjects seemed to become overcautious, self-monitoring to their detriment when the jackpots were offered. If people trying to avoid choking under pressure were to benefit from

our study, we suggest they could beat it by finding the right balance between self-awareness and selfcontrol, and just generally keeping it loose when the stakes go up, even if there is a natural tendency to clamp down.”

In terms of helpful application, the group believes that knowing what’s going on in your brain can help people with coping and mitigating the risks of choking under pressure.

“Choking under pressure is a really interesting example of when the brain gets it wrong,” added Steve Chase, professor of biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon and the Neuroscience Institute. “Now that we understand a little bit about how the brain is failing under these high reward situations, we want to try and correct it. One way to do this would be to design techniques that leverage our combined brain-computer interface (BCI) experience to encourage the brain not to do those things and ultimately, rescue the behavior.”

The group’s work is ongoing and done in collaboration with the Center for Neural Basis of Cognition, a cross-university research and educational program between Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh that leverages each institution’s strengths to investigate the cognitive and neural mechanisms that give rise to biological intelligence and behavior.

How an interdisciplinary team will advanceddevelop alloys

ACarnegie Mellon University team has been tapped by the Naval Nuclear Laboratory to lead two interconnected projects that aim to develop advanced additively manufactured structural alloys that can sustain extreme environments. The projects will be supported through funding of $1 million per year for two years. The team is specifically interested in using rare earth elements (REEs) in the composition to enhance the alloys’ properties.

Led by principal investigator  Mohadeseh Taheri-Mousavi , assistant professor of  materials science and engineering , the projects bring together the expertise of materials scientists and chemical engineers. The team intends to design the full cycle of developing alloys, from the extraction of elements from ores to refining their properties. Because REEs are currently imported mostly from other countries, this project has potential to develop a more sustainable pipeline for their exploitation.

“These elements have high potential that has yet to be fully explored,” says Taheri-Mousavi. We will be able to design additively manufactured alloys, specifically those containing the rare earth elements

while we consider processing and manufacturing conditions in the design objectives.”

Ana I. Torres, assistant professor of chemical engineering, will design innovative and environmentally friendly processes for the recovery of REEs from different feed sources and their purification into commercial grade for use in alloys.

“The U.S. possesses relatively large amounts of REE reserves but faces significant challenges in meeting its internal demand as it lacks processing capacity,” notes Torres. “Our process design and enviro-technoeconomic analysis efforts are key to establish how much it really costs to internally process REEs with modern environmental standards.”

Additional collaboration from the Department of Chemical Engineering will stem from data that will be curated by John Kitchin, professor of chemical engineering, who will create a database for different phase structures of these alloys.

Through this data, Taheri-Mousavi and her research group will develop and perform integrated computational materials engineering simulations to discover the non-linear roles of the elements on various properties. Because the design space is high dimensional and complex, the simulations will be combined with generative AI to incorporate different

modalities of data, explore the design space more efficiently, and reduce the time for the design.

From this point Bryan Webler, professor of materials science and engineering, will create the alloys in the additive manufacturing laboratory at Mill 19 using both laser powder bed fusion and powder-feed direct energy deposition methods.

“The first step is determining if we can print these materials without major defects,” says Webler. “We start by exploring the effects of processing variables on the print outcomes. Once we can print something without defects, then we characterize the microstructure and properties in detail.”

The results of Webler’s work will provide feedback for validation and next design iterations from Taheri-Mousavi, with the intent of improving predictions.

Seven doctoral students and postdoctoral scholars across the materials science and chemical engineering departments will have the opportunity to contribute to this work.

In addition to funding from the Naval Nuclear Laboratory, support from the Scott Institute for Energy Innovation and the Army Research Laboratory has enabled some of the preliminary results for this project.

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The battle for curb space

Many know the frustration of exiting the airport after a long flight, ordering an Uber or Lyft, and waiting too long for a vehicle that is just a short distance away. This type of congestion usually isn’t caused by typical traffic hold-ups, but rather rideshares and private drivers competing over limited curb space to pull over and pick up passengers.

Due to the expansion of new mobility technologies like ridesharing, grocery delivery, shared bike or scooter stations, and micro mobility systems, this problem is increasingly prevalent in cities across the country. On-street parking, curb-side passenger pickup and drop-off, and loading for commercial trucks transform a normal city curb into valuable public infrastructure over which cars, trucks, delivery vehicles, facilities, and pedestrians compete.

In a paper published in Transportation Science, researchers from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University developed a model to simulate how curbs are being used in real time within a large transportation network.

“Curb space could be a limited public resource in urban areas,” said Sean Qian, professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the Mobility Data Analytics Center. “Using it commercially by companies like Uber, Doordash, and Amazon delivery has substantial negative social externalities that have been historically overlooked.”

The framework takes into account not just where and when different vehicles and services are using curb space, but also how these different uses interact with each other. For example, how does an Uber picking up passengers affect a delivery truck searching for a spot to unload? And, zooming out, how do these activities influence roadway congestion and the choices others make on a different road across town?

Using real-world data, the team was able to identify patterns in usage and behavior to develop a ‘status-quo’ model and predict how travelers would react to changes in curb configuration, pricing, or space availability. This capability is useful to city planners looking to assess and implement new policies, like regulating and pricing spaces to ridesharing services or strategies to reduce vehicle emissions.

“We have a large team that includes technology startups, traffic engineers, and urban planners from cities across the country,” said Jiachao Liu, a Ph.D. candidate in civil and environmental engineering. “Based on our framework, we can inform them of the potential impacts of certain policies and how different users might react.”

Eventually, the research team hopes to improve how they calculate travel times to more accurately predict how curb usage could affect tra ffic delays, and consequently recommend optimal pricing strategies and space limitations to commercial curb use. Qian also hopes to incorporate data fro m additional travel modes in future studies, including public transportation , electric vehicles, and shared mobility services to paint a more comprehensive pict ure of the mobility network.

“With better technologies and curbside management strategies, there could be a win-win for cities and service operators,” said Qian. “I believe that traffic and curb usage can be efficient, reduce emissions, and improve service quality with the right approach.”

Uber and Lyft are dramatically reducing wait-time disparities for Black riders, but the impact of systemic segregation persists.

Riding-hailing app impactmitigates of discrimination

Racial discrimination against Black passengers looking to hail rides has been a problem since the taxi-cab era. A study from researchers in Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering aimed to find out whether the rise of ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft has changed that dynamic—for better or worse.

A previous study in which researchers requested rides at specific times and locations, changing only the name of the would-be passenger, showed that using a Black-sounding name results in up to double the cancellation rate as when using a White-sounding name. Yet despite that substantial difference, wait times were the same or reflected a difference of mere seconds, and the research team wanted to find out more.

They ran simulations of all the rides taken in Chicago, both before and after the Covid-19 pandemic, across a variety of days. The research estimated that at least 3% of drivers must be discriminating based on race in order to produce the cancellation disparities prior studies have observed. But it also showed that the ability of these services to rapidly rematch riders to new drivers nearly eliminates the effects of driver racial discrimination on rider wait time disparities.

“The technology is mitigating a social issue, which is pretty rare,” said Jeremy Michalek, professor of engineering and public policy (EPP) mechanical engineering and faculty lead on the study. “Discrimination is having little effect on average wait times, at least in part because these apps are able to quickly rematch when somebody cancels.”

“In the absence of these apps, certain populations having extremely long wait times could be lost because it is a hidden injustice when people just get passed by on the street,” said Destenie Nock, professor of EPP and civil and environmental engineering. “Now you can be reconnected quickly, which allows people to get to work on time, keep appointments, and be active participants in the transportation system.”

Individual racism is only one part of the equation, and the larger systemic problem of residential segregation led the team to focus on Chicago—one of the most residentially segregated cities in the United States, which also happens to make a lot of data available about ride-hailing trips.

Even when drivers treat everyone equally, Black riders in Chicago experience notably longer wait times because of where people live, the study showed. Residential patterns in Chicago are influenced by a history of discriminatory practices, including redlining, and other factors like inherited homes and wealth. Today, Black residents are concentrated in South Chicago, which is further from downtown areas, meaning fewer drivers are in the area to pick up passengers.

“This research is unique because it distinguishes between two types of discrimination,” said Anna Cobb, the study’s first author and a Ph.D. student in EPP.

The discrimination types are “direct, like when a driver cancels on a rider because of their race, and systemic, where history has informed patterns in where people live so that even when the effects of direct discrimination are small or disappear altogether, disparities can persist,” Cobb explained. “Being able to distinguish these effects can help inform how we address the disparities we observe in the real world.”

How plants can biohybridinspire systems

For plants, cleaning the air, providing food and medicines, and preserving our ecosystem is just another day’s work. In the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, however, plants are being studied in new ways to inspire future biohybrid Softbotic designs.

“Plants are a system much like planes, trains, and automobiles,” explained Phil LeDuc, professor of mechanical engineering. “We want to understand plants’ mechanical systems, especially their sensing and signaling behavior, to potentially integrate them into biohybrid systems.”

Mimosa pudica, the subject of the study published in Advanced Science, rapidly closes its leaves when exposed to touch, wind, temperature, and various other stimuli. Researchers theorize that this response is potentially an evolutionary advantage to protect against predators.

Alex Naglich, a Ph.D. candidate in mechanical engineering, observed Mimosa pudica’s responses to three different mechanical stimuli to gain a better understanding of its macroscopic behavior. To emulate a predator, Naglich cut a cluster of leaves from the plant and watched as nearby clusters folded together immediately, seemingly in self-defense. When Naglich prodded just one leaf on the plant to create a mild disturbance, like that an insect might cause, only the affected leaf folded. After repeated poking, however, the leaves folded one after another the whole way down the plant. For the final test, Naglich used an air pulse to imitate wind and found that only the leaves directly affected by the pulse of air folded.

“When mimosa folds, it’s less efficient for photosynthesis, so it makes sense why it wouldn’t want to stay folded,” Naglich said.

“If a light breeze is only hitting a couple of leaves, why hide the entire plant?”

While the “intelligent” plant’s small size, impressive power density, and high efficiency makes it a promising candidate to act as a biohybrid actuator, Naglich also believes its response system could be the foundation for improved agricultural health monitoring.

“If we can continue to explore this plant’s intelligence, its ability to distinguish against threats and respond accordingly, we could integrate it with electronics to create a biohybrid sensor and place it among crops so that farmers can be notified in real time when there’s a disturbance in the field.”

Moving forward, the lab plans to explore how Mimosa pudica’s physical structure plays a role in its behavior.

“When it comes to biohybrid robotic research, there are a lot of naturally occurring mechanisms that could advance the field, and we just haven’t looked into them yet,” said LeDuc. “Plants are one of those complex and sophisticated systems that we need to be studying more.”

Illustration: K. Huber

Policy may strengthen EV battery supply chain

Vehicle electrification is an important pathway to reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. The supply chain for electric vehicle battery materials relies heavily on China, a dependency that can leave the U.S. vulnerable to supply chain disruptions and geopolitical shifts. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) offers meaningful incentives for building batteries in the U.S. and diversifying the supply chain, but some loopholes exist.

A study from researchers in Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering analyzed how much impact the IRA is likely to have on incentivizing vehicle electrification and reducing supply chain vulnerabilities. Anthony Cheng, Ph.D. student in Engineering and Public Policy (EPP); Erica Fuchs, professor in EPP; and Jeremy Michalek, professor in EPP and mechanical engineering and director of Carnegie Mellon’s Vehicle Electrification Group, contributed to this research.

The total credits offered through the IRA would enable a manufacturer to receive more in tax credits than the total cost of battery production but qualifying for the full range of credits would be difficult, Michalek explained.

In particular, the 30D New Clean Vehicle Credit, which offers $7,500, can only be claimed on vehicles for which U.S.-designated “Foreign Entities of Concern”—including China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea—played no role in the supply chain, Michalek said.

In a related study, EPP researchers analyzed the extent to which electric vehicle supply chains are vulnerable to disruptions, with a focus on China. That study found that for virtually all chemistries, the entire supply chain would be

profoundly affected if China’s exports were disrupted.

At the same time, another study by EPP researchers found that electric vehicle manufacturing stimulates the job market, as these vehicles require more jobs per vehicle produced than their conventional counterparts.

The new 30D credit offers a major incentive for automakers in the U.S. and allied countries to focus on their own production means and find ways to develop alternatives to Chinese materials in the supply chain, Michalek explained.

However, a major loophole exists in that the restriction on Chineseorigin materials only applies to vehicles sold. An automaker can avoid the restriction by leasing vehicles and instead claiming the 45W Commercial Clean Vehicle Credit, which is currently worth the same amount as the 30D credit. And a supply chain’s flexibility for diversification does not always line up with its credit eligibility. Notably, lithium iron phosphate batteries have more potential to reduce supply chain vulnerabilities and qualify for incentives, but they have smaller total available incentives than nickel- and cobalt-based batteries.

The study found that the IRA primarily incentivizes downstream battery manufacturing diversification, whereas the impact on upstream supply will depend on how automakers respond to Foreign Entities of Concern and leasing rules.

If enough automakers successfully pivot toward a more lease-heavy business model to skirt the restrictions, the policy may need to evolve in order to remain effective, Michalek said, noting that researchers at Carnegie Mellon will continue to monitor the impact and outcome.

Multi-sized robots for multiple tasks

From miniature robots that crawl through pipes to quadrupedal robots that walk like a dog, Carnegie Mellon engineers are building robots of wideranging sizes to help us. Our researchers are fabricating micro swimming robots assembled from DNA nanostructures for medical applications, while wearable robotic systems can impact human mobility. Robots that walk, run, jump, roll and even fly can be used to maneuver through debris after a disaster or traverse over unstructured terrain like the moon. Finding inspiration from natural organisms, our faculty and students are fabricating robotic sensors and actuators from novel materials, resulting in robotic systems that are as robust and adaptable as animals. Our robotics work is being applied in areas like manufacturing, healthcare, disaster recovery, agriculture, and other fields where robots can alleviate mundane or risky tasks, all serving to give us more control of our time and activities.

Micro, modular, and mobile

New research enables enhanced production of modular microrobots built using DNA

When robots are made out of modular units, their size, shape, and functionality can be modified to perform any number of tasks.

At the microscale, modular robots could enable applications like targeted drug delivery and autonomous micromanufacturing; but building hundreds of identical robots the size of a red blood cell has its challenges.

“At this scale, robots are not big enough to hold a microcontroller to tell them what to do,” explained Taryn Imamura, a Ph.D. candidate in Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “Active colloids (the robots) have what we call embodied intelligence, meaning their behavior, including the speed at which they travel, is determined by their size and shape. At the same time, it becomes more difficult to build microrobots that have the same size and structure as they get smaller.”

As published in Advanced Materials Technologies, Imamura has found a way for researchers to control the size and structure of active colloids while yielding over 100x the amount created by earlier fabrication methods. She accomplishes this, with support from undergraduate student researcher Nicholas Chung, by using physical templates to filter the size of the robotic components and create complex assemblies with fine control over body plan and module arrangement.

“By leveraging material properties of the templates, we’ve addressed manufacturing challenges so that we can produce these structures in bulk and study how these robots behave at the population level,” Imamura said. “We hope to use this technology to answer many outstanding questions about the dynamics and functionality of colloidal microrobots.”

Imamura, co-advised by Rebecca Taylor and Sarah Bergbreiter, was able to increase the number of microbots assembled without compromising control over microstructure geometry by using materials with high surface energies, such as polycarbonate and polystyrene, for the templates and microspheres. This finding will lead to the assembly of more complex microstructures like microbots for targeted drug delivery and micro rotors for microfluidic mixing.

The team’s active colloids are also linked together using compliant DNA nanostructures—an innovation that makes them flexible, agile, and responsive to signals in their environment. Using biopolymers like DNA to construct these

robots also lets researchers add sensors already available in the DNA nanotechnology literature to the robots to make a micro-mobile lab.

“We’ve shown that the DNA in our microrobots lets them perform specific actions —like controlled disassembly —when exposed to different stimuli,” she explained. “We can imagine one of these microswimmers carrying a drug to a specific part of the body, and once it reaches its destination, the microswimmer receives a signal to disassemble. Once this happens, the microswimmer won’t move any further and the drug will stay in its destination.”

Typically, DNA nanotechnology can only be studied using expensive equipment. In this case, because the DNA is attached to micron-scale particles, researchers can observe any nanoscale phenomenon, such as the DNA structures changing shape, in real-time by observing changes in the active colloid’s movement under a microscope.

“Beyond creating populations of active colloids that are the same shape, same size, and flexibly linked, we’ve lowered the barrier of entry to this research,” Imamura said. “I believe that getting more researchers from diverse backgrounds working on these complicated problems will help us go further, and by making this research more accessible, our work will help propel the field forward.”

Sea slugs: what can we learn from them?

Aplysia californica, or more commonly, sea slugs, are a fascinating organism utilized in research. Because of their relatively small nervous system composed of large individual neurons, neuroscientists have been able to identify distinct named neurons and can measure their activity while the animal moves around. Of particular interest is the animal’s feeding structure, which allows the animal to interact with the environment.

In collaboration with researchers at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), the CMU Biohybrid and Organic Robotics Group led by Vickie Webster-Wood, is studying the sea slug feeding structure, both in robots and in simulation. This research is part of a multinational research collaboration studying neuromuscular systems with the support of the National Science Foundation NeuroNex Network.

“From a mechanical engineering standpoint, the system is fascinating because there are no bones—it’s just muscle attached to muscle,” said WebsterWood, associate professor of mechanical engineering. “There’s a big gap in our understanding of the mechanics, the force capabilities, and the dynamics of individual muscles within the structure.

Out of the 10 to 12 identified muscle groups in the feeding structure, only one had a model so far. In their most recent collaborative work, now published in Biological Cybernetics, the CMU BORG collaborated with the Chiel lab at CWRU and focused on creating a model of the I3 muscle, which plays a key role in retraction of the grasper within the feeding apparatus.

Ravesh Sukhnandan, a Ph.D. student in Webster-Wood’s lab and first author of the paper, was responsible for most of the data fitting and analysis for the model. “This project was a great opportunity to dive deeper into the biology and function of muscle,” said Sukhnandan. “The knowledge gained from this project will help us to develop better computational models of Aplysia’s feeding behavior, as well as design more realistic Aplysia-inspired soft robots.”

Moving forward, the team hopes that their work will open up numerous possibilities for basic neuroscience research. Understanding the mechanics to establish a high-fidelity model of the sea slug feeding system will enable researchers to perform more controlled, targeted experiments. Additionally, as soft-body robots are becoming an increasingly promising field of study, Webster-Wood believes that learning about physical muscle will help in the design and mechanics of future soft robots.

“On the longer horizons, my goal is to create sustainable, completely biocompatible, biodegradable robots,” said Webster-Wood. “So, the more we can understand about the neuromuscular systems in existing animals, the better we’ll be able to design biohybrid robots of our own.”

The team of researchers included Carnegie Mellon University’s Vickie WebsterWood and Ravesh Sukhnandan; Case Western Reserve University’s Qianxue Chen, Jiayi Shen, Samantha Pao, Yu Huan, Gregory P. Sutton, and Hillel J. Chiel; and University of Lincoln’s Jeffrey P. Gill.

It’s

it’s

an ant…

DOWNSIZING TO A SMALL SCALE HAS BENEFITS

a robot… it’s Picotaur! The unrivaled micro robot

Picture this: hundreds of ant-sized robots climb over rubble, under rocks and between debris to inspect the damage of a fallen building before human rescuers explore on-site.

Downscaling legged robots to the size of an insect enables access to small spaces that humans and large robots cannot reach. A swarm of small robots can even collaborate like their insect counterparts to haul objects and protect one another. Picotaur, a new robot from the labs of Sarah Bergbreiter and Aaron Johnson, is the first of its size that is able to run, turn, push loads and climb miniature stairs.

“This robot has legs that are driven by multiple actuators so it can achieve various locomotion capabilities,” said Sukjun Kim, a recent Ph.D. graduate advised by Bergbreiter. “With multiple gait patterns it can walk like other hexapod robots, similar to how a cockroach moves, but it can also hop from the ground to overcome obstacles.”

The 7.9 mm robot was 3D-printed using two-photon polymerization, a process previously successful in building various small-scale robotic systems in the lab such as microbots, microgrippers, microswimmers, and microsensors.

“Using this process, we were able to miniaturize the two degree of freedom linkage mechanism that allows Picotaur to clear step heights and easily alternate between walking and jumping,” said Bergbreiter, a professor of mechanical engineering.

Kim tested Picotaur’s ability to push loads by creating a miniature soccer field. He found that the robot has enough force to push the ball and then turn, reorient itself, and follow the ball into the net.

“Historically, microfabrication technology was limited in manufacturing microscale devices in two-dimensional spaces, like for the semiconductor industry,” said Kim. “But now we have this capability to expand the design

space from 2D to 3D. We can apply this process to create other small-scale robotic systems for various applications, for example, microgrippers for grasping and delivering small objects for surgical applications and microscale manufacturing applications.”

Because microrobotics is still in early development, there are challenges yet to overcome before we see fully integrated robots in the field. For example, the team hopes to explore adding solar cells to the top of the robot so that it can be powered without tethers.

“Now that we see and accept larger robotic systems in the world, I hope that with this work people can imagine small-scale robots working around us and understand that that future is not too far off,” Kim said.  “We can start thinking about where micro-robots would be useful and even find applications we haven’t thought of yet.”

Revolutionizing robot dexterity

Carnegie Mellon University will be a core partner in a multi-institutional collaboration that has received $26 million from the National Science Foundation to launch an Engineering Research Center (ERC) dedicated to revolutionizing the ability of robots to amplify human labor.

Nine Carnegie Mellon University faculty members with expertise in Softbotics, engineering, computer science, psychology, and other fields will help develop highly dexterous robotic hands, user-friendly interfaces, and accessible training materials to empower diverse workforces to implement robotic solutions quickly and reliably.

The NSF grant will fund the center across five years, with the ability to renew for another $26 million for an additional five years. It marks the first ERC led by Northwestern. Core partners include Carnegie Mellon University, Florida A&M, and Texas A&M, with additional faculty support from Syracuse University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Called Human AugmentatioN via Dexterity (HAND), the ERC will build robot hands with the ability to assist humans with manufacturing, caregiving, handling precious or dangerous materials, and more. The center aims to build technological tools that are versatile and easy to integrate, creating robots capable of intelligent and versatile grasping, fine motor skills, and hand-eye coordination.

An expert in Softbotics, Carmel Majidi, professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon, will lead the research thrust focused on developing robust, mass-manufacturable robot hands that achieve breakthrough capability via soft-yet-durable sensing skins, advanced actuators, and novel designs optimized for versatility and robustness.

“It’s an exciting time for Softbotics,” said Majidi. “We will be solving major challenges to build the artificial muscles, responsive skin-like material, and motor-powered tendons needed for user-friendly robots with dexterous capabili ties to empower tomorrow’s workforce.”

This research is an extension of his 2020 moonshot project, Intelligent Symbiotic Systems. “Our moonshot project was all about creating a paradigm in bio-inspired engineering in which autonomous robotic functionality with integrated sensing, actuation, learning, decision making, self-repair, and energy storage is intrinsically achieved at the materials level with limited dependency on traditional motors or electronic hardware. These novel materials are critical to the development of lightweight yet mechanically robust and versatile robot hands,” said Majidi.

Other CMU collaborators include Gary Fedder and Alaine Allen from the College of Engineering; Roberta Klatzky from the Department of Psychology and Human-Computer Interaction Institute; Nancy Pollard, Oliver Kroemer, and Melisa Orta Martinez from the Robotics Institute; and Katharine Needham from the School of Computer Science.

The interdisciplinary team will work to ensure that new robotic hands are inexpensive, easy to operate without expertise, robust, durable, and mass-manufacturable. Potential outcomes will include increased worker productivity, improved job opportunities, reshoring of manufacturing, reduced supply chain vulnerability, enhanced food safety, improved quality of life, and democratization of the benefits of robotics.

“NSF’s Engineering Research Centers ask big questions in order to catalyze solutions with farreaching impacts,” said NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan. “NSF Engineering Research Centers are powerhouses of discovery and innovation, bringing America’s great engineering minds to bear on our toughest challenges. By collaborating with industry and training the workforce of the future, ERCs create an innovation ecosystem that can accelerate engineering innovations, producing tremendous economic and societal benefits for the nation.”

Robotics for environmental innovation

When researchers need to collect data about a work site’s soil quality, they can run into problems. Using excavators to access sites can be expensive, and they may have limited ability to collect samples. Once an excavator does return a scoop of soil, scientists must still collect soil samples by hand for analysis at an off-site commercial lab. In short, their work is often dirty, dangerous, and expensive.

But what if they could run a robot the size of a small dog along the same route? As it navigates to the site its wheels pass over stones and other obstacles. Once it takes a sample, its sensor can analyze it in real time, allowing its artificial intelligence-enhanced algorithms to determine where the best location is to take the next sample. When it is done, it navigates back to the researchers. This time, it searched out and measured the presence of chloride in the soil to test for salt concentrations, though in the future, it will be able to sense other substances.

This robot is part of a multi-year project conducted by an interdisciplinary team of Carnegie Mellon researchers, led by Greg Lowry and Aaron Johnson and in collaboration with Chevron. They seek to understand how robotics and artificial intelligence can help engineers address environmental challenges.

The team has effectively created a new field at the junction of environmental engineering and robotics. Engineers have been increasingly applying robotics to agricultural research and to monitor different environments, such as underwater and aerial imagery. However, Johnson, associate professor of mechanical engineering, said that this team’s focus, which specifically applies robotics to monitoring affected soils, is unique.

“This is often where the exciting research happens, in this intersection of two fields,” he said. This robot and research published in the Journal of Environmental Management, stand as “proof-of-concept” for the project which shows that these fields are complementary. Specifically, the team has sought to answer questions such as: how can we go from a certain study objective to a specific assisting robot? Is it even possible to take a sensor out to a site with a robot?

The authors detail a method of designing robots so that other teams can follow in their footsteps to meet their own objectives. Johnson and Lowry suggest using four design components to guide decisions: sensing, which quantifies a substance in a sample; sampling, which extracts and processes samples; mobility, which moves the robot around the site; and autonomy, which determines relevant locations and how best to navigate to them.

“Other parts of the project include looking at the exploration algorithm to improve the autonomy, trying out different sensors, different locations, and applying the same strategies to different problems,” Johnson said.

The project has taken several years of research, as well as dealing with limitations within a worldwide pandemic, to get to this stage. It has involved personnel with a wide range of experience, from undergraduates to postdoctoral

researchers. They have also partnered with HEBI Robotics, which has developed a “ruggedized” version of the robot that was featured in the paper.

“We are now looking to move beyond this proof-of-concept stage into more concrete objectives and demonstrations,” said Lowry, professor of civil and environmental engineering. Currently, the team is focusing on the autonomous systems and algorithms component: the robot determines the best location to take its next sample by understanding the results it has taken so far. This process is called adaptive sampling.

Vivek Thangavelu, a postdoctoral researcher in Johnson’s laboratory, is working on adjusting the adaptive sampling networks to handle different situations. Currently, the robot works best when it is mapping out a single, distributed area that is affected, but it is not as effective when substances are concentrated in multiple smaller “hotspots,” a scenario sometimes found at affected soil sites. In practice, before engineers begin their study, they do not know how the substance of interest is distributed at the site, so the robot must be able to deal with all manner of environments and parameters.

“How do you categorize those kinds of environments?” Thangavelu said. “How do you say, ‘Okay, we have an algorithm, but when does it work and when does it not work?’”

As the project develops, the team will apply the advances they have made to other research goals, such as helping farmers determine how much fertilizer to use, where to use it, and to identify invasive plant species.

Thangavelu enjoys the applicability of the work, as well as its relevance to current environmental issues. “I enjoy working in a field related to the environment. We have to think about problems with respect to how to deal with the effects of climate change.”

Illustration: K. Huber

I Hubs: A step towards a hydrogen future?

n a recipe for a net-zero future, hydrogen is sometimes considered the secret ingredient. A team of Carnegie Mellon researchers is moving beyond the hype to analyze the realities—and risks—of using hydrogen as part of our energy and manufacturing systems.

“Many businesses and communities across the United States are putting their chips on hydrogen hubs,” says Valerie Karplus, a professor of engineering and public policy and associate director of the Scott Institute for Energy Innovation. “To realize their potential, hubs will need to navigate the tricky balance between maintaining the financial incentives necessary for early market development while upholding their commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

In the wake of $8 billion in federal funding that has helped regional stakeholders start up hydrogen hubs across the United States, Karplus and Granger Morgan have summarized the two types of risks associated with early investment in hydrogen systems: economic, that maintaining hubs won’t be financially viable; and environmental, that hubs won’t reduce greenhouse gases at a sufficient level, or that their use will exacerbate local pollution.

Karplus and Morgan, a professor of engineering and public policy, point out that in the effort to curb the effects of climate change, hydrogen offers many advantages, but it is not a panacea. A crucial step to making it a viable energy source is finding a production method that reduces greenhouse gas emissions and has increasingly favorable economics. They suggest that starting with hubs can address many of the economic risks, but regulation is required to address the environmental risks.

“The bottom line is that hydrogen would be very useful if we could get it without environmental consequences,” said Morgan. Hydrogen can still indirectly contribute to greenhouse warming, and this puts particular pressure on making sure that transport, storage, and sequestration are handled properly.

“Hydrogen is the lightest molecule, so it leaks very easily,” said Morgan. “Building a hydrogen system that doesn’t leak is really tough and takes a lot of attention.”

As Morgan notes, hydrogen leaks are difficult to detect, and its presence extends the atmospheric lifetime of methane, a greenhouse gas that’s 40 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

Morgan and Karplus’ research, which appears in the journal Risk Analysis, includes a set of design principles to help hydrogen hubs capitalize on their potential.

Recommendations include streamlining the regulatory requirements for hydrogen hubs, combined with efforts to engage with end users and address their concerns about the social and economic equity of new infrastructure appearing in communities.

Beyond financial viability and climate mitigation, how hydrogen development affects workers and communities will shape its broader growth prospects. A hydrogen economy could provide a new source of employment in parts of the country that are already being hard hit by a decline in manufacturing or fossil energy production, given similarities in skills requirements. At the same time, a shift to hydrogen-based ironmaking processes for steel production could improve air quality and reduce associated negative health impacts to communities.

Advanced chip designs from Carnegie Mellon Engineering research initiatives.

Beyond computersiliconchips

While silicon-based chips have driven technological breakthroughs since the 1950s, today’s demands from artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) expose their limitations. AI applications often face an “energy and latency crisis,” as vast amounts of time and energy are consumed moving data between computing units and memory—a problem known as the “memory wall.” At the same time, the benefits of shrinking silicon transistors have slowed, creating a “miniaturization wall” that necessitates new approaches to chip design and manufacturing.

Tathagata Srimani, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, focuses on augmenting silicon with transformative technologies to create faster, more efficient computing systems.

As a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, he specializes in ultra-dense 3D integration of heterogeneous logic and memory. By using technologies such as carbon nanotube transistors (CNFETs), resistive RAM (RRAM), and monolithic 3D integration, his designs vertically stack and densely integrate logic and memory in 3D. By integrating logic and memory layers with fine-grained 3D connections, such designs significantly reduce data transfer distances and associated energy costs, offering substantial performance gains over traditional 2D silicon-only chips across a wide range of abundant-data applications, like AI.

“My research is about creating transformative NanoSystems by seamlessly integrating diverse nanomaterials and technologies for logic, memory, and sensing,” Srimani explains. “My work has demonstrated how such integration can lead to unprecedented gains in energy efficiency and throughput.”

Historically, these NanoSystems were limited to academic prototypes due to challenges in scalability and manufacturability.

“My work has focused on transitioning key technologies from ‘lab-to-fab,’” Srimani says. “This effort required addressing issues across the technology stack—from material and device engineering to system design and architecture—resulting in scalable, manufacturable solutions within industrial silicon fabs.”

Srimani’s work has successfully translated CNFET technology and its 3D integration on silicon to U.S. fabs, including SkyWater Foundry and Analog Devices.

“While building 3D NanoSystem chips with carbon nanotube transistors served as a case study,” Srimani notes, “the insights gained are applicable to a wide range of emerging technologies and NanoSystems.”

Building on this work, Srimani’s newly formed NEXUS (Nanoelectronics EXpeditions for Ubiquitous Systems) Research Group, seeks to augment 3D NanoSystems by incorporating a wider gamut of materials and technologies, including magnetics and semiconducting oxides. His team is also focused on tackling critical challenges related to power delivery and thermal management within such 3D NanoSystems.

To complement foundational material and technological advances, Srimani plans to create co-design frameworks that derive system architecture and technology targets based on application-specific energy and throughput needs. From an application standpoint, he aims to expand beyond traditional AI applications, exploring paradigms like probabilistic computing for complex optimization, developing hardware solutions powered by heterogeneous integration.

Beyond research, Srimani is committed to shaping the next generation of engineers. He teaches advanced courses in semiconductor devices and computing hardware design, including practical, hands-on experiences like “Hacker Fab,” where students build a semiconductor fabrication facility from scratch.

“Teaching and fostering a robust semiconductor ecosystem is as important as developing transformative technologies,” he notes.

Building space habitats that humansupport life

CMU TEAM SUPPORTS A NASA PROJECT THAT’S DEVELOPING DEEP SPACE HABITATS BY PROPOSING FRAMEWORKS FOR ENVIRONMENTAL CONTROL AND LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEMS THAT CAN SUSTAIN HUMAN LIFE ON MISSIONS TO THE MOON OR MARS.

As humans look to expand space exploration and reach further destinations, the facilities and resources they need to survive become more complex. Missions to the Moon or Mars require environmental control and life support systems (ECLSS) for astronauts that function more autonomously given the extreme, restrictive, and unfamiliar conditions presented by deep space travel.

Currently, experts on Earth operate ECLSS on the International Space Station, analyzing data collected from systems onboard that meet the metabolic and environmental needs of the crew by providing a breathable atmosphere, potable water, and food and waste management. Because these technologies and databases are neither well integrated nor fully available onboard, the habitat is highly dependent on communications with and expertise from ground control crews.

“It’s easy to forget how much our so-called autonomous technologies rely on support and intervention by knowledgeable humans within a relatively short communication range, especially when things go wrong,” said Mario Bergés, professor of civil and environmental engineering and lead of the HOME project’s Carnegie Mellon University research team.

As one of the final installments in their five-year NASA-funded project Habitats Optimized for Missions of Exploration, or HOME, a team of researchers propose using AI-enabled digital twins to integrate dissimilar ECLSS information models and move these systems closer to autonomy. This transformation would enable the habitat to interpret its own data, answer queries, and inform decisions using mission control knowledge accessible within the smart habitat itself.

In a study published in the Journal of Aerospace Information Systems, the team introduces their vision for a digital twin framework, consisting of the physical ECLSS assets, which includes its material components and behaviors, and a supervision agent, namely a human or software onboard to perform analysis and execute control inputs. Unlike the current system on the International Space Station, where mission control on Earth handles supervision, this framework enables the agent to operate independently of ground support.

The digital twin itself is characterized by robust information and simulation models which work together to process detailed semantic information about the system and inform, predict, and modify its current and future behaviors. Using data, sensing, and AI, the digital twin is constantly informing and updating itself based on the most recent data it collected, ensuring the system is always current.

The supervision agent uses the models to complete a decision-making loop, informing the habitat and its occupants how to act in the face of anomalies or fault detection.

“While much of the work out there on digital twins is focused on bespoke models created from scratch, we envision a digital twin framework that ties together multiple existing digital representations of the habitat and its subsystems through a federated framework, while keeping them consistently updated via sensing and actuation loops,” said Bergés. “This approach should be more scalable and easier to adapt to different habitat conditions and designs.”

The study was conducted in collaboration with CMU’s Burcu Akinci, head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Ph.D. students Nicolas Gratius, Zhichen Wang, and Min Young Hwang. Other research institutions included Western New England University, University of Colorado Boulder, and University of California Davis. CMU’s contributions feed into NASA’s larger multi-university Space Technology Research Institute to advance the design of autonomous systems for space habitats.

How melanin influences clinical oxygen measurements

Obtaining accurate clinical measurements is essential for diagnosing and treating a wide range of health conditions. Regrettably, the impact of skin type and pigmentation is not equally considered in the design and calibration of non-invasive oxygen-monitoring medical technology.

A Carnegie Mellon University study explored the influence of melanin on nearinfrared spectroscopy (NIRS), a tool that leverages light-tissue interaction to measure changes in hemoglobin concentration and oxygenation. Its results emphasize the importance of advocating for adjustments in light-based imaging devices like NIRS to ensure precise, outcomes for patients with all skin types.

Concerns around the effectiveness of oxygenation measurements for people of color date back to the 1990s. The issue drew more attention during COVID-19, when pulse oximeters, which have a similar principle but different function from NIRS, failed to provide accurate readings for individuals with darker skin pigmentation globally. Melanin has the potential to reduce light intensity, light sensitivity, and signal-to-noise ratio, resulting in a variability of clinical measurements.

“If the appropriate amount of oxygen isn’t being delivered to the tissue from your bloodstream, this could cause bodily harm or damage to the tissue,” explained Sossena Wood, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at CMU. “Being able to properly diagnose a patient, especially in the case of skin tone and other physiological differences, is critical. Readings from NIRS and other diagnostic tools influence how medical professionals apply the different interventions available, and it could mean the difference between minor or more invasive courses of action. Getting it right is important to everyone.”

A study published in the Journal of Biomedical Optics’ Special Issue on Pulse Oximetry: 50 Years of Inventions and Discoveries in Biomedical Optics utilized a NIRS forehead probe to measure hemoglobin and tissue oxygenation changes in 35 healthy participants with varying levels of melanin. Representing the first significant statistical measurement of its kind, researchers investigated the correlation between melanin concentration, determined using a colorimeter, and several key metrics from the NIRS signal, including signal-to-noise ratio. They found that in healthy individuals, melanin significantly impacts the signal-to-noise ratio and measured arterial oxygen saturation in each channel.

“Many of the devices used today were designed or calibrated on patients with fairer skin. We proved that the incorporation of a colorimeter is necessary, a device that can make objective and accurate measurements, based on a variety of melanin categorizations. From there, we can build better hardware and improve accompanying algorithms so that a true assessment is available for everyone,” says Wood.

As a next step, the group plans to expand its research to unhealthy patients facing acute respiratory issues using pulse oximeters, in partnership with Carnegie Mellon Africa.

“Ultimately, I hope we can propel the technology to be better,” said Wood. I have had family members impacted by these devices not working as appropriately as they should and I’m passionate about finding better solutions.

Battling chronic pain with noninvasive focused ultrasound

As part of his lab’s committed focus to improving noninvasive technology solutions for human health, Bin He is collaborating to develop noninvasive neuromodulation strategies to serve as an alternative to pharmaceuticals for combating chronic pain.

Chronic pain impacts an estimated 20 percent of the world population and persists as a frustrating symptom for innumerable health issues, from sickle-cell disease to arthritis.

As part of his lab’s committed focus to improving noninvasive technology solutions for human health, Bin He of Carnegie Mellon University is developing noninvasive neuromodulation strategies to serve as an alternative to pharmaceuticals for combating chronic pain. In a promising development, the He group’s latest work demonstrates the effectiveness of a novel technology that is able to stimulate and modulate specific brain circuits with sub-millimeter spatial precision and successfully suppress pain hypersensitivity.

“We demonstrate, for the first time, in a series of rigorous preclinical studies, that precise focused ultrasound neuromodulation at multiple brain targets can significantly change pain-associated behaviors,” articulated He, professor of biomedical engineering. “There is an urgent clinical need to develop nonpharmacologic and non-invasive neuromodulation strategies to treat pain, and Carnegie Mellon University is at the forefront of this emerging field.”

The study, published in Blood, involved 130 animal subjects and more than five years of meticulous research. As a next step, the group plans to conduct clinical testing in humans with their novel technology in the near future.

“The impact of this work extends across healthcare and also the medical device industry,” He expressed. “With 1.5 billion people suffering from chronic pain, this technology has meaningful societal impact. It can be generalized to treat various pain types and is equitable in terms of cost and portability.”

This work was supported in part by the National Institute of Health HEAL Initiative, National Institute of Health BRAIN Initiative, National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, and National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and National Cancer Institute.

Medication is the go-to treatment for pain, while severe chronic pain conditions are often treated with opioids, which bear many side effects and also raise concerns of addiction, misuse, and even overdose. In juxtaposition, the technology He’s group is developing and evaluating, transcranial focused ultrasound (tFUS) modulation, is safe, reversible, and noninvasive. Among the canon of non-invasive neuromodulation approaches, tFUS also demonstrates exceptional advantages in modulating brain activities with high spatial specificity and deep brain penetration.

The work is a result of multidisciplinary collaboration, especially with Professor Kalpna Gupta’s group at the University of California, Irvine. CMU collaborators include the first authors Min Gon Kim, BME postdoc and Kai Yu, BME research scientist; Chih-Yu Yeh, BME Ph.D. student; Yunruo Ni and Xiaodan Niu, former BME graduate students. Co-authors at the University of California, Irvine include professor Kalpna Gupta, Raghda Fouda, Donovan Argueta, and Stacy Kiven. Co-authors at the University of Pittsburgh include professor Kang Kim, and Qiyang Chen.

At-home dental exams

NOVEL TOOTHBRUSH DESIGN COULD SERVE POPULATIONS THAT DON’T HAVE ACCESS TO DENTAL CARE

Dental hygiene is an important component to the overall health of a person. Early detection of dental disease is crucial in preventing adverse outcomes. While X-rays are currently the most accurate gold standard for dental disease detection, they are not accessible to many around the world. Carnegie Mellon College of Engineering researchers have teamed up with the University of Pittsburgh School of Dental Medicine to create a dental health sensing system that uses off-the-shelf electric toothbrushes for dental condition detection.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, as of 2024, approximately 57 million Americans live in a dental health professional shortage area and about 67% of those shortage areas are in rural communities. By offering an electric toothbrush that can perform at-home dental self-examinations, the hope is to provide dental care to millions of people who would otherwise not receive it.

The ToMoBrush (Tooth Monitoring Brush / Tomorrow’s Toothbrush), explores the potential of using an off-the-shelf electric toothbrush with minimum hardware modification for dental health sensing to enable regular, at-home dental self-examinations. Rather than viewing a toothbrush purely as a cleaning instrument, ToMoBrush leverages the fact that an electric toothbrush emits acoustic signals

that are generated by rapid automatic bristle vibrations. When the brush is in contact with a tooth, the tooth also vibrates along with the toothbrush and produces distinct acoustic signals depending on the condition of each tooth.

“Dental disease is a major public health challenge that can cause pain and infections which may lead to problems with eating, speaking, and even social interaction,” explains Kuang Yuan, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering. “We explore a low-cost solution for dental health monitoring that patients can use regularly in the comfort of their homes.”

The team developed a data-driven signal processing pipeline to detect and discriminate different dental conditions, such as cavities, plaque, and food impaction, as well as variations in electric toothbrushes, such as brand, battery charge, and bristle formation. To tackle these variables, the team model the vibration system including toothbrush, tooth resonance, as well as brushing strength and movement. Researchers propose an algorithm to separate these different factors and extract clean tooth resonance signatures based on a key observation. Though these factors share the same frequency band, their rates of change across the frequencies are different. By adapting a technique that is widely used in speech processing to separate the glottal excitation and vocal tract resonances,

the team proposes converting the signal into the cepstrum domain where these distinct behaviors are easily separable.

“After obtaining the tooth resonance signature, we further developed a feature selection algorithm to select regions of signature that are specialized for detecting three different dental conditions,” explains Yuan. “We can perform health detection by comparing the signatures with prior healthy reference measurements.”

The team believes such a system can supplement the dental healthcare system even for those with access to professional dental care, by providing early warnings of potential issues in between the dental visits.

The paper, “ToMoBrush: Exploring Dental Health Sensing Using a Sonic Toothbrush,” by Kuang Yuan, Mohamed Ibrahim, Yiwen Song, Guoxiang Deng, Suvendra Vijayan, Robert Nerone, Akshay Gadre, and Swarun Kumar was presented at the 2024 Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing / International Symposium on Wearable Computing in Melbourne, Australia.

Yuan is advised by Swarun Kumar, the Sathaye Family Foundation Career Development Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Evolution of tooth cleaning: From ancient tools to the ToMoBrush that cleans and offers self exams.

Department of Energy early career awards

Carnegie Mellon faculty members Carlee Joe-Wong and Thomas O’Connor have received Early Career Program Awards from the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science. The Early Career Program was established in 2010 and is a highly competitive funding opportunity for researchers in the early stages of their careers. Awardees receive support that enables them to pursue their own independent projects in disciplines the DOE Office of Science has a particular interest in, such as computing research and various energy and environmental sciences.

Carlee

Joe-Wong’s project focuses on designing algorithms that can schedule and place scientific computing workloads in heterogeneous supercomputing clusters.

Joe-Wong, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, began investigating this topic due to the ever-growing range of computational science applications that must run on increasingly complex computing systems. This diverse range of applications has resulted in a number of challenges, thereby significantly delaying crucial scientific data from being processed.

Joe-Wong’s algorithm project differs from prior research by specifically focusing on the hidden similarities in the job structure and performance of these heterogeneous workloads and machines. Joe-Wong will track the similarities over time, analyzing patterns between the machines and the various computing jobs they run. Joe-Wong’s method

is a new approach to this topic, as previous studies generally assumed that the job similarities were known.

“Computing jobs are becoming ever more complex and important, and I’m excited to work on making them easier to run in heterogeneous clusters,” said Joe-Wong.

Thomas O’Connor, an assistant professor in materials science and engineering, applies simulations and high-performance computing to understand the molecular-scale behavior of polymers and soft materials. O’Connor’s Early Career Award will fund work focused on understanding the molecular origins of selfhealing behavior in sustainable polymers. Selfhealing polymers are plastics that have the potential to significantly reduce the amount of plastic waste we produce due to their unique ability to self-repair damage. However, the materials are difficult to design because of a lack of fundamental understanding of the molecular processes that drive self-healing.

O’Connor’s group will combine molecular simulations and self-healing experiments to identify these molecular mechanisms in a diverse class of polymers called thermoplastic elastomers.

“We are used to treating plastics as disposable, but they are the one type of material that can heal damage on their own. We want to harness that ability in order to make plastic components robust to wear and tear, and to reduce the amount that end up in landfills,” said O’Connor.

INSIDE THE COLLEGE

All in the family

Chemical engineers take a repurposed approach to problem solving

To meet climate change goals, we need to rapidly develop and broadly deploy new technologies that will transform the chemical process industry. Conventional process design approaches are too slow and too expensive.

Research from Carl Laird and Georgia Stinchfield offers a solution inspired by a product development approach long used in the automotive industry: product family design.

“With product family design, you simultaneously consider a large number of product variants that target different customer needs while exploiting opportunities for sharing common components across these products,” explains Laird, a professor of chemical engineering.

An automotive company may sell 20 different sedans, yet those 20 sedans share one common frame and only two different styles of steering wheel.

Laird and Stinchfield, along with collaborators, are advancing product family design and adapting these ideas for chemical process development.

Process Families for Deployment of Carbon Capture Processes using Machine Learning Surrogates,” at the 33rd European Symposium on Computer-Aided Process Engineering (ESCAPE 33) in June 2023. Together with collaborators Bashar Ammari, Joshua Morgan, John Siirola, and Miguel Zamarripa, they received the Best Oral Presentation award.

The process family approach is particularly beneficial when we need to deploy a large number of chemical processes to meet a goal, as is the case for green energy and decarbonization.

“We need to deploy thousands and thousands of carbon capture processes across the nation for a variety of different use cases, and it does not make

concentrations and flow rates associated with the gas into the system.

A conventional design approach would require 63 unique regenerators and 63 unique absorbers for the 63 process variants. Using a process family design approach, Laird and Stinchfield were able to design all 63 variants using only three unique regenerators and three unique absorbers, saving on engineering design costs and opening the door for manufacturing standardization.

“WE NEED TO DEPLOY THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF CARBON CAPTURE PROCESSES ACROSS THE NATION FOR A VARIETY OF DIFFERENT USE CASES, AND IT DOES NOT MAKE SENSE TO USE THE TRADITIONAL CHEMICAL ENGINEERING APPROACH WHERE EVERY ONE OF THOSE INSTALLATIONS WOULD BE DESIGNED UNIQUELY. THAT’S NOT GOING TO BE EFFICIENT ECONOMICALLY OR FOR DEPLOYMENT.”

While conventional process design approaches treat each new installation independently, process family design reduces engineering design costs, standardizes manufacturing, and decreases time to market, while still providing enough variety for deployment in different use cases.

Laird and Stinchfield, a Ph.D. student, propose an optimization-based approach that simultaneously determines the optimal platform, or catalog of shared components, and designs a family of processes that use those components.

They presented their work, “Optimization of

- CARL LAIRD -

sense to use the traditional chemical engineering approach where every one of those installations would be designed uniquely,” says Laird. “That’s not going to be efficient economically or for deployment.”

In one case study, Laird and Stinchfield designed a family of 63 process variants for a range of solvent-based carbon capture systems. They designated two common parts in the system architecture, the regenerator and the absorber. Each process had different carbon dioxide

To solve these optimization problems, Stinchfield is using a specific type of optimization called mixed-integer linear programming (MILP). MILP was pioneered for use in chemical engineering by Ignacio Grossmann in Carnegie Mellon’s Department of Chemical Engineering. The process systems group at Carnegie Mellon frequently tackles engineering challenges using advances in operations research. Here, Stinchfield was able to map her optimization problem to the P-median problem, a classic problem in operations research, for which efficient computational strategies are available.

“In current work, we are advancing our ideas to address national scale challenges and solve very large versions of the problem. We are using what I learned during my summer at Livermore to make the problem scalable,” says Stinchfield, referring to a summer internship at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. There, she learned decomposition techniques that she and Laird have adapted to further their research and solve large-scale process family design problems.

New leader for Chemical Engineering

After an extensive internal and external search, Carl Laird has been selected as the next head of the Department of Chemical Engineering. The appointment took effect January 1, 2025. Laird is a professor of chemical engineering and has been serving in the role of interim department head of Chemical Engineering since January 2024.

Laird brings extensive leadership experience, an open leadership style, and a vision to advance the department in scholarly research, excellence in world-class education, and growth in international impact and recognition.

Laird, who obtained his Ph.D. from the department in 2006, has a strong record of scholarly activity, authoring over 100 journal and conference publications. His portfolio includes high-impact work in the areas of public health, critical infrastructure, energy systems, large-scale optimization, and machine learning, some of which has been recognized with several national and international awards. These include the Carnegie Mellon College of Engineering 2024 Steven J. Fenves Award for Systems Research, the INFORMS Computing Society Prize in 2019, the Outstanding Young Researcher Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (CAST Division) in 2015, the Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software in 2010, and the National Science Foundation Early Career Development award.

Ph.D. research entrepreneurialprovides training

For Nader Rezazadeh, his research is as much about people as proteins. He is working to improve the prognosis for diabetic patients with chronic wounds. In a diabetic chronic wound, the normal healing process stalls. Left untreated, they can lead to amputation, with a significant mortality rate post-operation.

Rezazadeh, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Chemical Engineering, and his advisor Phil Campbell wondered if they could change that story. “What if we could develop a novel product to change this horrific fate for the diabetic patient who is struggling

with a chronic wound?” asks Rezazadeh. They are collaborating with NeuEsse Inc., a Pennsylvania startup that is developing plant-based technology to treat chronic wounds. Rezazadeh and Campbell, a research professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, are using soy protein isolate to develop a novel bioactive scaffold as a wound dressing. They chose soy protein because it is a cheap, scalable, and plant-based material that reduces disease transmission risks. It also interacts with human cells to support skin cell growth, movement, and regeneration.

Rezazadeh is co-electrospinning soy protein and

therapeutic agents into nano-sized bioactive fibers for advanced wound dressings. The therapeutic components—extracellular vesicles and growth factors derived from mesenchymal stem cells—are signaling entities in the body. The wound dressing gradually releases them into the wound, where they stimulate cells to reduce inflammation and promote faster skin and tissue regeneration.

To determine the best composition of soy protein and signaling entities and to optimize the fabrication process, Rezazadeh draws on his chemical engineering training. He is studying the mechanisms of binding and releasing, including hydrophobic interactions and electrostatic interactions, along with polymer chemistry and fluid dynamics. He wants to find the optimum point for loading the highest amount of signaling entities in the soy protein fibers while achieving a prolonged and controlled release rate.

An additional challenge is that the bioactive agents need to retain their functionality when they are released into the wound. Rezazadeh must load them into the soy protein fibers without damaging their structure and functionality.

Soy protein offers another advantage as a natural polymer: it is biodegradable. Traditional wound dressings must be removed and changed, which can reinjure a chronic wound and lead to scarring. The novel biodegradable dressing that Rezazadeh and Campbell are developing with NeuEsse permits new applications directly onto previously applied material, significantly lowering the risk of pain, reinjury, and scarring during treatment.

Rezazadeh is also working on technology that could lessen pain and infection in patients with advanced-stage chronic wounds by allowing for touch-free application of wound dressings. With NeuEsse, he is developing a prototype for a portable electrospinner. The device will enable on-demand, in situ applications of the wound dressing, with the goal of speeding up the healing process.

To make the technology more scalable for industry, the team is again turning to soy protein. They want to develop a sustainable green source for isolating extracellular vesicles as potent signaling entities. The current method of extracting them from mammalian cells is expensive and time consuming. The Campbell Lab is pioneering soy

protein as a plant base from which to extract signaling entities. “Our target is to develop a sustainable way to produce not only wound dressings but also bioactive signaling entities, like extracellular vesicles, for other regenerative medicine applications,” Rezazadeh says.

His research is a precursor of his career plan: to use his training in chemical engineering and biomedical engineering to develop novel products that address global healthcare challenges.

Rezazadeh’s goal is to found his own startup, and he chose a Ph.D. program at Carnegie Mellon University because of its support for student entrepreneurs.

Within the chemical engineering and biomedical engineering departments, Rezazadeh has found the research community to be open with advice and access to equipment. Adding his collaboration with NeuEsse, Rezazadeh says, “I think I could only get these opportunities at CMU.”

PH.D. STUDENT IS USING SOY PROTEIN ISOLATE TO DEVELOP A BIODEGRADABLE DRESSING TO IMPROVE THE PROGNOSIS FOR DIABETIC PATIENTS STRUGGLING WITH CHRONIC WOUNDS.

INI celebrates 35 years of innovation

It all started with a call from Bellcore in 1988. They saw a need for specialized education that could bridge the gaps between computer scientists and communications engineers as the transformative power of the internet began to take shape.

Marvin Sirbu, then a faculty member in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy, submitted a proposal to Bellcore to design the country’s first graduate program in information networking. The CMU proposal was chosen from among several peer institutions to build the program, and the Information Networking Institute (INI) was born.

What began with the Master of Science in Information Networking (MSIN) has now grown to five master’s degrees, three certificates, two campuses, and nearly 3,000 alumni around the world.

SINCE 1989, THE INI HAS BEEN MELDING COMPUTER SCIENCE AND COMMUNICATIONS

ENGINEERING TO PRODUCE ALUMNI WHO ARE INCREDIBLY CAPABLE OF TAKING ON THE CHANGING SHIFTS OF THE TECH INDUSTRY.

Alex Hills (left) with Dena Haritos Tsamitis, current INI director, and Marvin Sirbu, INI founder, at the INI’s 15th anniversary celebration.

“Since its founding, the INI has always been responsive to the needs of the market and the strategic goals of the university,” said Dena Haritos Tsamitis, director of the INI and Barbara Lazarus Professor in Information. “We have sustained a remarkable trajectory of growth while also leading efforts to build an inclusive and supportive culture for all within the field of engineering.”

Tsamitis celebrated her 20th anniversary as director last year. Under her leadership, the INI has expanded its offerings across multiple continents. Today, INI students can pursue degrees in information networking, information security, AI and security engineering, and mobile and IoT engineering.

EXCELLENCE IN SECURITY

The INI’s second graduate degree—the Master of Science in Information Security Technology & Management (now the M.S. in Information Security or MSIS)— was built to meet a critical need for cybersecurity engineers in federal service, highlighted by 9/11. It continues to be a cornerstone of CMU’s international reputation for excellence in cybersecurity. Just last year, the MSIS ranked #1 on Fortune’s list of top master’s in cybersecurity in the U.S.

The MSIS serves as the foundation for two of CMU’s federal designations as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity, which allow the university to participate in several federal programs. One of these is the National Science Foundation’s CyberCorps Scholarship for Service (SFS), a competitive federal scholarship program that supports aspiring national security professionals.

“Although information security was not our original focus, it has grown to become a vital part of our work,” said Tsamitis. “Three of o ur five programs center on security, and our security courses are some of our most popular electives.”

GLOBAL IMPACT

The INI was the first department to bring CMU master’s degrees to a global audience. Through a partnership with Athens Information Technology (AIT), the INI launched the Athens MSIN program in 2002.

“From inception to launch, we brought the MSIN to Athens in about 12 months,” said Tsamitis. “We established a new paradigm for hybrid distributed education that allowed us to deliver courses taught in Pittsburgh to students in remote locations, directly connecting the global programs with our main campus.”

The success of this program led to further partnerships in Japan and Portugal during the mid-2010s. In sum, over 300 INI students graduated from global programs.

The INI designed and built state-of-the-art distributed education centers (DECs) to support these global programs, pre-dating the Zoom classrooms of the pandemic by nearly 20 years.

Although the INI does not currently host any global degree programs, the DECs continue to support students across all programs at the INI, with INI students at Carnegie Mellon University in Silicon Valley (CMU-SV) synchronously taking courses taught from Pittsburgh and vice versa.

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

“Our 35th anniversary is a moment to reflect on how far we have come and consider what’s next,” said Tsamitis. “Our commitment to supporting students is as strong as ever. We will continue responding to global market forces and capitalizing on new opportunities to bring a life-changing CMU education to students of all backgrounds.”

New EPP suite reflects collaborativedepartment’s spirit

Engineering and Public Policy has always been a department driven by collaboration and societal impact, and its innovative new space in Wean Hall was designed with these values at the forefront.

“The common denominators are collaboration and community,” said Peter Adams, EPP’s department head. “It’s more inclusive, because now we’ve got this space where everyone can mix together and build community across cohorts.”

The department’s strong sense of community was on full display at an open house event for the new space on October 25, as Dean William Sanders noted in his remarks that day.

“Something I love about EPP is that everyone was invited,” Sanders said. “It’s really one big family — undergrad and graduate students, faculty and staff. The desire to bring together STEM expertise with policy requires deep collaboration. You know how to do that, and it requires good spaces for collaboration.”

EPP’s commitment to inclusivity and innovation extended to the design process as well. Carnegie Mellon aimed to complete a large-scale design project using 100% minorityowned contractor firms.

To that end, the Campus Design and Facility Development team worked with economic development organization BEAM Collaborative.

“BEAM's role on the project was to help CMU identify and solicit small DBE firms, with a focus on Black-owned subcontractors,” said Alex Homyak, the design team’s contracts and procurement manager. The team successfully achieved a majority, with 72% of the businesses that worked on this space being minority-owned.

BEAM also supported the Waller Corporation — the project’s construction manager and a Black-owned business – and its subcontractors by producing cost estimates, scheduling, and additional logistical support throughout the renovation project, Homyak explained.

The Campus Design and Facility Development team had unique challenges to tackle, from process delays stemming from the Covid-19 pandemic to unexpected architectural elements.

“With any project in an existing building, you open walls and you find things you’re not expecting to find,” said Penny

Stump, principal project manager. “Abandoned pipes, abandoned electrical—we found a bunch of pipes where we’d planned to put a glass wall, so then it becomes ‘do we move the wall, move the pipes, what do the pipes actually do?’ They weren’t on any drawings. It’s challenges like that that make it fun but complicated.”

The collaborative efforts to solve these problems paid off and led to a unique space that feels open and full of light while honoring the building’s historic design.

“PWWG, the architect, did a really good job of keeping the original intention behind Wean, which is a Brutalist concrete based building,” Stump said. “But they also removed enough concrete and added a lot of glass so it felt more open.”

“It’s a modern space in a concrete structure, and a complete new style,” said Andrew Reilly, senior director of engineering and construction. “It went extremely well. I don’t think we have that anywhere else in the building — it raises the bar of what spaces can be in Wean.”

The fourth-floor suite sits directly below EPP’s fifth floor offices in Wean, creating an expansive and cohesive home for a department that was previously spread across campus. There are meeting rooms, dedicated PhD student desks, and hoteling offices, and at the heart of the expansion is a spacious lounge area where students, faculty, and staff can read, eat lunch, and interact.

Four of the new meeting rooms have specific dedications, made possible by the generosity of donors, and were revealed during the open house event.

The Granger Morgan Conference Room, made possible by an anonymous donor, honors Morgan’s decades of leadership as a founding department head and professor in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy.

The Patti Steranchak Group Work Room honors the assistant to the department head, who has spent the majority of her career supporting EPP and has been with the department since shortly after its inception. This room was made possible by the generosity of Steranchak’s EPP friends.

Mark’s Meet-Up was made possible by the generosity of alumnus Mark Sin.

The Sutanto Group Work Room was made possible by the generosity of alumnus Andre Sutanto and his family.

Photographs by Ed Massery

Blending the virtual and physical worlds

Technological advancements of the past few years have brought new norms to civil engineering and academia.

Students are increasingly interested in online education and enjoy the convenience of completing courses at their own pace. At the same time, civil engineers parse through an array of new tools, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and digital twins, that are set to transform the field as they know it.

But when remote learning and civil engineering intersect, how are concepts that are—literally—concretely rooted in society’s physical structures translated to asynchronous forms of thinking and learning?

When instructors in Carnegie Mellon’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering set out to develop their new online certificate program, AI Engineering – Digital Twins and Analytics, these were the challenges they were tasked to solve. For a program designed for practicing engineers looking to upskill, remote learning was necessary to make the curriculum flexible to a full-time work schedule. Additionally, because a physical counterpart is so crucial to a digital twin’s virtual model, they needed to capture the substance of real-world data in a remote setting.

“Digital twins are very new to our field so there isn’t a lot of precedent set on how to teach them, especially in an online class,” said Mario Bergés, professor of civil and environmental engineering. “A key process in digital twin modeling is closing the loop between simulating the behavior of an infrastructure system and actually controlling it in the real world. Because of this, we felt strongly that we needed to give students the opportunity to interact with a physical structure instead of just models.”

To accomplish this, the team enlisted help from an undergraduate student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering to construct a testbed that bridged the gap between the virtual and physical environments. Consisting of a train locomotive equipped with sensors navigating tracks that traverse a bridge, the 20-foot scaled-down model sits in a Carnegie Mellon lab but is continuously streamed to the classroom web portal.

Students can log-in from their computers, input the variables they’d like to test—such as speed of the vehicle or the sampling rate—and watch the train run live from wherever they may be. The data from the test is sent directly to their email, where they can analyze their results and adjust as needed, identifying problems like abnormal vibration patterns between the train and tracks that could indicate defective railway sections and use control algorithms to stabilize motion and maximize passenger comfort.

“A problem we see in digital twin adoption is that most people are only dealing with one aspect of them. They differ from standard modeling technologies in that the virtual and physical environments are constantly informing and improving on each other,” said Bergés. “The testbed will give students their own physical structure to manipulate and ensure they understand how each aspect of the digital twin is integrated.”

Bergés and Pingbo Tang, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, emphasize these points in the online certificate courses, Principles of Digital Twins and Digital Twins and AI for Predictive Analytics, first teaching students how to use digital twin models, then how to

Student tests various bridge thicknesses, materials, and loads.

capture and analyze the data they generate. Both courses use the train testbed as an integrated project on which to apply the course material. Students who complete the program are equipped with new AI skills to bring back to their organizations and make better engineering decisions.

Though originally built to advance digital twin education, the testbed has also proved useful in active department research projects and is directly applicable to work being done in the industry, explained Katherine Flanigan, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering.

“The testbed serves as an active research site, offering a scaled-down, hands-on environment to test, collect, and analyze data, and to make informed decisions to improve our infrastructure systems,” Flanigan explained. “With this at our disposal, we can explore new configurations safely and conduct experiments at a much faster rate than would be possible in real-world settings.”

Faculty look forward to using the testbed in the lab and classroom, setting a new standard for how civil engineers integrate cutting-edge technologies into their field.

Side-view schematic of the testbed, vehicle, and pulley system.

The testbed’s train car is equipped with sensors for data collection.

CMU-Africa will expand digital public infrastructure

THE UPANZI NETWORK WILL FUND RESEARCH PROJECTS IN MOROCCO, BOTSWANA, AND SOUTH AFRICA, WITH PLANS FOR ADDITIONAL PARTNERSHIPS.

Carnegie Mellon University Africa announced that it will expand its digital public infrastructure initiative across the continent. Called the Upanzi Network, this Africa-based collaboration of engineering research labs will work toward a secure and resilient digital transformation by focusing on innovation across the entire pipeline of open standard technologies for the public good.

The initiative was launched in 2021 with the creation of a research laboratory at CMU-Africa in Kigali, Rwanda. Since its launch, the laboratory has made progress in capacity building, knowledge transfer, and digital public infrastructure governance and deployment. It performs research in areas of identity, payments, cybersecurity, cloud computing, data governance, and artificial intelligence and machine learning. The Upanzi Network will expand its reach by partnering with laboratories at Al Akhawayn University (Ifrane, Morocco), the University of Botswana (Gaborone, Botswana), and University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg, South Africa). The network has plans to add additional partners on the continent.

“In order to develop digital solutions that benefit all Africans, it is essential that researchers from different African regions collaborate,” said Conrad Tucker, director of CMU-Africa and associate dean for international affairs-Africa in CMU’s College of Engineering. “There are no one-size-fits-all solutions on the continent; technologies need to be developed with local context and culture in mind.”

Each university partner lab has received a one-year seed grant for a research project related to the goals of the Upanzi Network. Projects will have impact in several sectors, including:

 Public service: A specialized lab will be created within the School of Science and Engineering at Al Akhawayn University dedicated to advancing public digital transformation. This lab will focus on the critical role that digital transformation can play in modern governance by enhancing the efficiency, transparency, and inclusiveness of public services.



 Agribusiness: Researchers in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Botswana will explore how smart Internet of Things products can make farm management more efficient. They will focus on problems that farmers face in areas such as animal health, animal security, and water management. A workshop and competition will also be conducted to develop skills and knowledge to address such challenges for the youth.



 Education: University of the Witwatersrand’s Hub for Multilingual Education and Literacies and the Games, Artificial Intelligence and Culture labs will work together to advance technology-driven multilingual learning. They will focus on using multilingual learning as a tool to address social and educational limitations, as well as promote digital transformation.

“We are excited to build this partnership between African academic institutions so that the Upanzi Network can act as a neutral, trusted party in the development and implementation of digital public infrastructure,” said Assane Gueye, co-director of the Upanzi Network and associate teaching professor at CMU-Africa.

MOROCCO

SOUTH AFRICA

RWANDA

BOTSWANA

What in the world are our students’ dream jobs?

HYDROPONICS BUSINESS OWNER • YOU TELL ME, PLEASE

• GEOTECHNICAL ENGINEER • PROFESSOR • WALT DISNEY

IMAGINEER • TISSUE ENGINEER • NOT SURE YET • AEROSPACE RESEARCHER • ONCOLOGY SURGEON • SPACEPORT DESIGNER

• ENTREPRENEUR • ROLLERCOASTER DESIGN • MUSEUM

EXHIBIT DESIGNER • AUTOMOTIVE DESIGNER • TRAFFIC ENGINEER • GREEN BUILDING DESIGNER • I DON’T KNOW

• SPACE ROBOTICIST • COMPUTER HARDWARE DESIGN

ENGINEER • PHARMACEUTICAL RESEARCHER • ENERGY

INDUSTRY CONSULTANT • CIVIL ENGINEER/CONSTRUCTION

• SOFTWARE ENGINEER • DIGITAL LOGIC DESIGNER • FILM DIRECTOR • C-SUITE EXECUTIVE • STRUCTURAL ENGINEER

• AUTOMATION ENGINEER • TECH STARTUP • BIOMEDICAL

DEVICE DEVELOPER

• HEALTHCARE EXPERIENCE DESIGNER

Carnegie Mellon Engineers find a world of opportunity!

We surveyed our junior and senior undergraduate students to find out what they’re doing now and what they plan to do with the incredible prospects they will have as Carnegie Mellon engineers.

WHAT IN THE WORLD DO OUR STUDENTS DO?

RESEARCH

INTERNSHIPS STUDY ABROAD

have been involved with research projects or plan to before they

studied abroad BACK TO SCHOOL WILL HEAD OFF TO WORK FIELD OF INTEREST

WHERE IN THE WORLD WILL THEY BE AS GRADUATES?

A engineeringbuzz-worthy design course

Civil and environmental engineering students learn the engineering design process by building habitats that protect local pollinator populations.

Many think of mason bees as pests — bothersome insects that burrow holes into your homes, decks, or wooden fences. But, if you ask Carnegie Mellon students in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, they might give you a different answer.

“They started seeing the bees as their clients,” said Katherine Flanigan, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and course instructor. In the department’s sophomore-year project course, the assignment was to design, build, and deploy homes for solitary, cavity nesting species of bees, including masons. The structures, commonly known as “bee hotels,” often look like large birdhouses with perforated fronts, made of many small holes stacked on top of each other for the bees to properly lay eggs. They provide safe and ideal conditions for the bees to reproduce, protecting species that are native to the Western Pennsylvania region and vital to the local pollinator ecosystem.

The project began with a trip to Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, a future home for one of the finished bee hotels, to learn more about the bees they were designing for. Quickly, the group realized that even the smallest stakeholders have big needs.

“Cavity nesting bees require very specific conditions to reproduce in their habitats,” said Braley Burke, integrated pest management specialist at Phipps and a client for one of the student groups. Burke recently purchased a mason bee hotel for the conservatory but found that many of these specifications often aren’t met with massmanufactured bee houses.

“From the length and diameter of their cells to the materials used, the smallest error in design

choice can enable the spread of disease, attract predators, and ultimately harm the species you’re trying to help,” she said.

Ideal bee hotels are made of untreated wood, avoiding materials like plastics, metals, and paints, with stacked, straw-like cells filling in the middle. Cells should be between three to six inches long with a 3/32- to 3/8- inch diameter hole through the center. To protect the structure from the elements, a roof or overhang may be necessary, as well as a way to remove and clean the straws to prevent the spread of disease or infestation.

On top of nature’s constraints, the groups also needed to satisfy the requirements of the other interested parties: the gardens, parks, and nature centers across Western Pennsylvania and Ohio where the bee hotels would be deployed. Different stakeholders came with their own unique needs, including shape, size, aesthetics, and level of maintenance. Divided into six teams, instructors assigned a client to each student group and challenged them with the task of creating something that balanced their stakeholder’s needs and the bee’s environmental necessities.

“We spent a month going over the engineering design process before they started building so they knew how to approach the project effectively,” said Flanigan. “They learned how engineering is applied in the real world with assignments like building a team contract, ranking stakeholder objectives, developing metrics to measure success, and producing engineering drawings.”

Once designs were approved and materials were ordered, students moved into the construction phase. Senior Project Engineer Brian Belowich, who also supervised the groups during this time, noted that many students were operating power tools for the first time. So, lessons like how to optimize their time with the tools and best use of materials to avoid waste were crucial.

“It’s exciting to watch them learn how to build something sustainably, efficiently, and safely because this is what engineering is all about: envisioning something and making it a reality,” said Belowich.

Several student groups made similar design decisions, including building removable cartridges to minimize the maintenance required to keep the structure clean, increasing the lifespan of the bee houses by years. Two teams were so enthused by everything they learned about mason bees that they integrated QR codes into the side of their hotels for visitors to scan and learn more about their local pollinators. Only one group chose to drill holes into solid wood rather than using individual straws, a preference of their stakeholder.

All groups, however, began to see their job as serving two clients: the actual organizations and the mason bees. “A rationale I started hearing often in the shop was ‘I don’t think the bees will like that,’” said Belowich.

“I loved the entirety of the design process, from learning about mason bees and client needs to creating and choosing designs,” said Samhita Gudapati, a sophomore double majoring in environmental engineering and chemistry. Her group built a hexagonal bee hotel for Phipps Conservatory.

“This class taught me valuable communication and presentation skills that I will definitely reference in internship, job, and classroom settings. But it was also just fun!”

Jonathan Subramanian, a sophomore studying environmental engineering, agreed. “The most memorable part was working with an outside stakeholder. Creating something that would be used outside the classroom by people for an extended period of time was new and incredibly valuable to me,” he said.

“This has been my favorite course so far at CMU,” Subramanian’s teammate, Nurshinta Berry, shared. Their group designed the most unique bee house. They drilled holes into solid wood over using bamboo tubes at the request of their stakeholder, Winthrop Community Garden.

“At first, we questioned the feasibility of the design. But after a lot of planning and reworking, we were able to make the client’s vision a reality, which was really exciting,” said Subramanian.

Now, as the bee hotels find their homes in gardens and parks across the region, the students’ hard work will play a meaningful role in supporting local ecosystems and benefitting both our pollinators and public spaces.

Rigorous testing and monitoring of acoustics, electrical, and software systems ensure their ongoing reliability.

Engineering beneath the surface

Sitting the edge of the pool, the Kingfisher, Carnegie Mellon University’s flagship autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), looks more like a weapon in a sci-fi movie than a sophisticated robotic submarine that maneuvers underwater with grace and purpose.

The 80-pound Kingfisher was built by the TartanAUV team, a group of mostly undergraduate students from engineering and computer science, who have been competing in RoboSub competitions since 2018. RoboSub is an international underwater robotics contest where high school, college, and graduate students showcase their skills at designing and building AUVs.

capacity for exploring; detecting and manipulating objects; and deploying projectiles underwater.

“WHAT MAKES THIS GROUP SPECIAL IS THE CURIOSITY AND PASSION THAT EACH TEAM MEMBER BRINGS. FOR US, IT’S NOT ABOUT GETTING SOMETHING TO WORK, IT’S ABOUT CONTINUOUSLY IMPROVING TO TAKE OUR VEHICLE TO NEW DEPTHS.”

Last summer the Tartan team hauled the 4-foot-long Kingfisher to the Woollett Aquatics Center in Irvine, California, to compete in RoboSub 2024, where they placed sixth in the Autonomy Challenge.

- ELENI GEORGOUNTZOSMECHANICAL ENGINEERING AND ROBOTICS DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS, TARTANAUV

Supported by RoboNation and the Office of Naval Research, the competition challenges contestants to build AUVs that perform tasks that are important to the maritime industry. During a series of trials, the robots demonstrate their

“The tasks the subs complete are relatively simple to do above water, but when you're underwater, there's a host of different challenges. Underwater, we can't use Wi-Fi. So how do you communicate with the sub? How do you tell it what to do? And then, how do you build something that does what you want? Building things to use underwater is a lot harder than building things for above water,” says Rylan Morgan, a senior in electrical and computer engineering and the lead for the electrical team. The student club has three technical divisions: electrical, mechanical, and software.

“When it comes to the physical hardware design, mechanical and electrical have a lot of crosstalk because we are building the actual sub. And we communicate with the software group because we want to design and build something that they will code for,” says Morgan.

Determined to place at the 2024 competition, the team identified features of the Kingfisher that they could improve upon. Outlined in their “RoboSub 2024 Technical Design Report,” were revisions made to the sub. The most unique update to the robot was a sphincter intake mechanism that can go around an object and close itself onto it, making it a competent “grabber” for tasks like picking up game pieces. Other updates were made to the torpedo, torpedo launcher, and dropper. A dropper is device that drops small objects at specific underwater locations.

The team tested their sub in a tank down in the depths of Newell Simon Hall, and according to Morgan, they invested a lot into enhancing the testing infrastructure. With help from their sponsors, they were able to buy new equipment, like a thermal camera and a load generator. “We also got an extremely nice oscilloscope from Teledyne LeCroy,” says Morgan. Competing in RoboSub is expensive, and to support their efforts, the team includes students who manage finance and operations, and work to secure sponsors.

“I have gained a lot of practical knowledge from RoboSub. Our team has become good friends, but the idea now is to pull more people into the group,” says Morgan. While the students enjoy the social aspects of the club, there are professional benefits. Through competing, the Navy interacts with the students and has access to their resumes.

“I think the Navy sees RoboSub as a way to see what students are coming up with, and they are finding talent and advancing the development of AUVs,” says Morgan.

“MY JOB IS TO MAKE SURE THAT WE PERFORM TO THE BEST OF OUR ABILITY IN THE ROBOSUB COMPETITION. I’M COORDINATING THE DESIGN EFFORTS BETWEEN OUR DIFFERENT SUB TEAMS AS WE ARE BUILDING A NEW FLAGSHIP VEHICLE.”

- GLEB

RYABTSEV

-

ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING, TARTANAUV

TROMBONE CHAMP CONTROLLER

The team is developing a handheld controller for the game Trombone Champ. The farther out the trombone is, the lower the note on the game.

CV ROBOTICS HAND

The purpose of this project is to build a robotic hand that can follow human hand gestures and movements through a Raspberry Pi camera. We will use OpenCv and Mediapipe for hand gesture recognition. The hand should be able to follow hand motions under the camera with some time delays.

Build18: Where creativity and engineering intersect

Build18 is the annual engineering hackathon that celebrates creativity and tinkering. Held by the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and run by students, the weeklong event provides Carnegie Mellon University students with a riskfree environment where they can pursue personal engineering projects, limited only by their ingenuity.

Originally named after the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) course prefix, Build18 signifies the start of the spring semester and a chance for students to build for fun. For one week, student teams build their projects, and the event culminates with Demonstration Day, when the teams showcase projects to the public. Build18 activities and events are funded each year by alumni and corporate sponsors, and following the demonstrations, a banquet is held for the builders, sponsors, and faculty members to celebrate the week’s achievements.

E Music? Engineering? Why not both?

leanor David almost attended conservatory instead of engineering school.

With Carnegie Mellon’s Engineering and Arts additional major she didn’t have to choose one over the other. David is studying both chemical engineering and viola performance.

In addition to all she’s learned from her viola professor, David Harding, David credits her musicianship to eurhythmics courses in the Dalcroze style at the School of Music. Dalcroze Eurhythmics, which is not offered at many music schools, is a process for awakening, developing, and refining innate musicality through rhythmic movement, eartraining, and improvisation.

David is also attuned to the rhythmic rolling of buggy wheels. Last year, she was head mechanic for Fringe buggy, and this year she is the president.

When she joined Fringe as a first-year student, David says she had “a lot of theoretical knowledge but not a lot of practical, hands-on engineering work.” She wanted to get involved with building the buggy, and the head mechanic mentored her. “They took me from having never used a power tool to being the head mechanic in my junior year,” she says. “Now I try to do that for other people.”

As a chemical engineering student in Daphne Chan’s lab, David is trying to create a microphase-separated compound by initiating polymerization reactions with UV light. Combining proteins and polymers changes the material properties of the resulting polymer, or plastic.

“Finding ways to incorporate more decomposable materials into plastics as they’re manufactured is increasingly important,” she says. “These proteins might help the plastic break down more easily in the environment.”

David has interned at Kairos Power, a nuclear energy start-up. She was on the salt chemistry team, doing analytical chemistry work to support their development of a molten salt nuclear reactor. This experience is helping her evaluate whether to pursue a master’s degree in nuclear engineering or a job in industry after graduation.

Three engineering and public policy Ph.D. students spent part of summer 2024 conducting research at the College of Engineering’s location in Kigali, Rwanda. There they collaborated with stakeholders to integrate their research with the needs of the local community and to strengthen ties between students in Pittsburgh and Kigali.

The students worked with satellite data to observe how physical features of the landscape have changed over time, especially in response to climate change. All three are advised by Paulina Jaramillo, professor of engineering and public policy.

Fidelis Bologo studies how agriculture and plant health and cover have increased or decreased over time to determine if it now takes longer for crops to grow and mature. Nana Oye Djan applies satellite data to supplement efforts that manage water resources, focusing on monitoring how freshwater lakes expand or dry up. Emily Zuetell is working to improve machine learning algorithms, which identify physical features in satellite pictures, and which do not work well on data from SubSaharan Africa, so that the data may be used to predict how floods will behave.

Nana Oye Djan, Fidelis Bologo, and Emily Zuetell in Rwanda.

Photo credit: Fidelis Bologo

Students discover tradition and future in Naval ROTC

Tuesday and Thursday mornings at 5:30 a.m., Caroline Gallotta and Joshua Malley are up, off, and working out, along with their fellow midshipmen, all members of Carnegie Mellon Naval Reserve Officers’ Training Program.

Commonly known as NROTC, it’s the long-respected program that turns students into commissioned naval officers. Since 1987, Carnegie Mellon has hosted the Steel City Naval ROTC, which include students from CMU, the University of Pittsburgh, and Duquesne University.

CMU prides itself on turning out leaders, and students in the NROTC get a double dose of leadership training. On top of their normal course load, cadets must meet naval obligations— comply with physical fitness mandates, attend weekly Naval Laboratories that emphasize professional orientation and military drills, and maintain a 2.5 GPA.

closer to graduation, they will inform the Navy which warfare area they want to pursue. While the Navy places officers where they are needed, if possible, there is a leaning to place them in positions that align with their preferences and skills.

During a summer break, Gallotta took part in Career Orientation and Training for Midshipmen (CORTRAMID) at Norfolk, Virginia. “I experienced every warfare specialty in the Navy. When I went on a five-day cruise, I found that submarine was my favorite. I was able to talk to the crew and learn what they do,” she says.

During the cruise, she gained important knowledge about herself. The Navy screens personnel to identify those who may not be suited for the psychological and physiological issues associated with serving on subs. “Submarines are very cramped, and some people find them claustrophobic, but it doesn’t really bother me,” she says.

“THE FINANCIAL SUPPORT NROTC STUDENTS RECEIVE HELPS ALLEVIATE THE FINANCIAL BURDENS OF THEIR EDUCATION. HOWEVER, IN RETURN,THE STUDENTS MUST SERVE IN THE NAVY.”

Yet Gallotta and Malley seem unflustered by their rigorous schedules, as they share a deep desire to serve in the military. Both students come from military households.

“My dad was a surface warfare officer in the Navy, and he inspired me to join the Navy,” said Gallotta, a junior in mechanical engineering. Malley’s parents were in the Air Force, and he wanted to be a pilot. He applied and got into the Air Force Academy, but a recruiter and his parents encouraged him to apply for a highly competitive Navy ROTC scholarship.

“I decided that I didn’t want to go to the Air Force Academy after all, and that I’d rather go to Carnegie Mellon for the education here. Then the Navy offered me a full scholarship, and I went with the Navy. I ended up really enjoying myself at CMU,” says Malley, a senior in electrical and computer engineering.

The financial support NROTC students receive helps alleviate the financial burdens of their education. However, in return, the students must serve in the Navy, and Gallotta and Malley have given great thought to the possible career paths available to them.

Through coursework and summer trainings with the Navy, they gain exposure to warfare communities, including aviation, surface warfare, submarines, and Marines. Thoughtfully exploring these areas is important, because when students get

Although Gallotta won’t graduate for another year, she is pretty certain that submarines are right for her and that her background in mechanical engineering will be valuable.

“To go on the submarine, I have to learn how to operate a nuclear power plant, so things that I studied will be helpful," she adds.

Malley, who’s a year ahead of Gallotta, prefers to become a surface warfare officer with a nuclear focus. He sees himself starting out on a conventional ship and then eventually attending Naval Nuclear Power School in Charleston, South Carolina.

“I’ve questioned if I’m going to use my electrical and computer engineering degree in the military, but if I go to nuclear school, the rigors of my education here, with the math and physics, will be good background. Electrical engineering is very difficult and so is nuclear engineering,” says Malley.

“I like the idea of going to nuclear school. The experience of living in South Carolina and studying something that is unique and top secret, that is alluring to me,” he says.

Malley finds travel enticing, too. “It would be awesome to get stationed in Spain or Japan or some other country besides the U.S., but I’d probably be happy anywhere if I am on my career path. The best ship is your ship, right?”

Joshua Malley (left) and Caroline Gallotta

ALUMNI 5

Toy power

Alumna designs toys to teach kids about engineering

It wasn’t until after Natha (Bam) Singhasaneh, MechE ‘18, spent a few years at startup companies, explored teaching, pursued a master’s, and joined a BattleBots team that she found her place at the intersection of all the above. Today, Singhasaneh is a product designer at CrunchLabs where she designs toys that inspire kids to become creative problem solvers by evoking their curiosity in science and engineering.

“I’ve always felt that being interdisciplinaryminded made all the difference in my pursuits,” she said. “I am far from being an expert in everything, but being able to look at problems from different perspectives allows me to come up with creative and unique solutions.”

As an undergraduate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at CMU, Singhasaneh was a researcher in Aaron Johnson’s Robomechanics Lab. There she drew inspiration from mountain goat

hooves to study the underlying principles behind optimal surface grip and compliance for legged robots to improve their ability to maneuver steep and uneven surfaces. With minors in robotics and business and a special interest in entrepreneurship, Singhasaneh went on to work in consumer product development at two different startups.

“Working in a startup environment was a good learning experience because I had the opportunity to do not just engineering, but also user research,

marketing, business planning, and more,” she said. “I learned that being able to view a product in a holistic way is critical towards success. For example, it doesn’t matter how well you hone your product; if it doesn’t address a real need, no one will buy it. And as an engineer, it’s very easy to be focused on asking ‘how.’ But sometimes, it’s also important to take a step back and ask ‘why.’”

Like many during the Covid-19 pandemic, Singhasaneh was furloughed, but it didn’t slow her down.

“There was a math school across the street from my apartment, and I went up to their door and asked if they needed teachers. That job made me fall in love with working with kids.” Singhasaneh explained that when working with students as young as six years old you have to challenge your assumptions of what they know and empathize with them.

“Their mental model of the world is completely different from our own,” she said. “Although teaching wasn’t always easy, receiving a message from a student at the end of class expressing his or her love for math made it all worthwhile.”

With a newfound appreciation for interdisciplinary thinking, Singhasaneh enrolled in MIT’s Integrated Design and Management program

where she practiced human-centered design and had her first experience designing toys.

“We didn’t start out the project knowing that we were going to design a toy. Instead, we found through research that a toy was the right solution to the problem we were trying to solve. This was when I started seeing toys as a medium that has great potential to communicate and bring about mindset and behavioral change.”

She dove deeper into her passion for creating meaningful experiences for children in her master’s thesis: Climate Change Conversations with Children: Making Sustainability Meaningful, Tangible, and Actionable. Utilizing human-centered design, she engaged various stakeholders to develop a framework for communicating sustainability to young children.

“When it comes to toys and play, the best kind is when you’re just having so much fun that you don’t even know you’re learning,” she said. “We called this ‘Sneaky Learning.’”

After designing a toy called the RumbleBug for a class project, Singhasaneh spent a summer in San Francisco interning at IDEO’s Play Lab as a toy inventor where she further gained exposure to the toy industry.

“The toy space is a really fun space to be creative in,” she said. “Empathy is at the heart of it because you have to put yourself in the kids’ shoes. However, you also have to be mindful about what parents want their kids to gain from playing with the toys. Parents don’t want just another piece of plastic glitter, they want to see value in it.”

It was around this same time that a friend talked her into joining a BattleBots team where she learned a lot about hands-on engineering, design iteration, and the value of failure. “It’s rewarding to see many young kids get excited watching robots fight and grow curious about engineering.”

At her current role as a product designer at CrunchLabs, Singhasaneh is using toys to inspire and teach kids about science and engineering.

One toy she designed allows kids to build their own treasure chest with a unique combination code that can only be opened with a corresponding key.

“To me, to play means to explore without a purpose, and to engage in activities without fear of failure— even an expectation of it. And play is not just for kids! We shouldn’t be afraid to play and explore because it’s by doing that that we garner new perspectives, fail in unexpected ways, and are propelled to create change and bring new things to the world.”

Astronaut alumnus experiments in zero-gravity

Kartik Chaudhari is an alumnus from the Information Networking Institute (INI), where he graduated in 2021 with a MS in Information TechnologyMobility. This degree has gone on to serve him in the pursuit of a truly unique job—astronaut.

Chaudhari is currently working for the National Research Council of Canada as an Astronaut Systems Trainee. His job is to research how objects move in zero-gravity to better track and predict their paths. This research can prevent catastrophes in real spacecrafts.

People use items on a spacecraft just as they would in a kitchen or a bathroom on Earth. The only difference is, without gravity, the items can end up floating away. “You have walls and walls of computers and very, very sensitive instruments around you,” explains Chaudhari. “If I let [an item] refloat, I do impart some velocity to it. So, it might take two or three hours to drift and hit something. But it will eventually.”

Although items tend to move slowly, even a gentle bump from a mundane object could be disastrous in space. “[Hitting] the wall is fine. If it goes and hits the ventilation system, now all of a sudden, you’re jeopardizing eight lives,” Chaudhari emphasized. Although Chaudhari’s team is ready to go to space, the experiments need to take place in zerogravity scenarios on Earth first. That’s where highaltitude flights come in.

Calculating the physics and training a machine learning algorithm on trajectories of objects is hard enough. But Chaudhari doesn’t just run the numbers; he goes up in the craft to run the experiment himself. As the payload specialist for this experiment, he must be the one both to oversee the experiment and perform it. Zero-gravity is a very

unnatural state for the human body to be in, so “it just takes a lot of getting used to. And your body is constantly rejecting the environment.”

Chaudhari mentioned that his background taking computer hardware and AI engineering courses really served him in this role. He was one of the first students to begin taking these at CMU and is thankful that he was able to do so. He recalls a rapid prototyping class where teams of students worked with sensor technology. They extracted data from those sensors to be able to give patients with Huntington’s disease a better life. “We actually worked with hospitals around the world, with proper clinics, doctors, and hardware engineers with those sensors, which is pretty important,” adds Chaudhari. “That kind of sensor interaction and all, you don’t learn it otherwise.”

Looking to the future and thinking about the possibility of getting up into space, Chaudhari says it is still a long shot. “We launch around four people per year to space, roughly. So, even if you come down from a few thousand people to a few hundred people, and from those few hundred people to that four, is always a challenge.”

But Chaudhari is happy just to be working on interesting projects in the company of fellow astronauts who have repaired the Hubble space telescope and hold the record for longest spacewalk. He says he is the only person on his team with an information transfer background working on how information interacts with hardware directly. He thanks INI, the College of Engineering, and CMU for making his path possible.

Alumni entrepreneurs put innovation into action

Carnegie Mellon’s College of Engineering is a community of makers, driven to build the products, innovations, solutions, and companies that will change the world for the better. For many of our alumni and students, entrepreneurship is fundamental to their work and why they chose to earn their engineering degree from CMU.

Rohyt Belani (INI ‘02)

MAKING CHANGE FOR YOUNG FOUNDERS

“CMU gave me the resilience and confidence to build something of my own.”

That ‘something’ was PhishMe, a cybersecurity company he co-founded, grew, and sold to private equity giant BlackRock for $400 million in 2018. PhishMe was rebranded Cofense, and Belani stayed on as CEO for several years, continuing to expand the company’s impact—serving nearly half of Fortune 1000 companies. That’s quite a legacy for Rohyt Belani, but he isn’t stopping there. His new venture, Litmus Advisors, provides startup consulting to young entrepreneurs launching companies of their own.

Belani describes the process of growing, selling, and ultimately stepping away from something he created as an “emotional roller coaster,” so he knows firsthand what his clients are going through—the passion, the challenges, the grueling hours, the ups and downs. For Belani, starting Litmus Advisors is a way to give back and shift his focus after years of being a CEO.

“I wanted to take a step back and help young cybersecurity and technology entrepreneurs who are getting started. It’s very rewarding to watch them grow,” Belani says. While he’s enjoying the flexibility of consulting, he doesn’t think it will be too long before he’s back in the startup game himself. “I can’t sit still,” he says, smiling.

Suprita Shankar (EPP ‘14)

MAKING TECHNOLOGY SMARTER WITH DATA

After earning her master’s degree from CMU, Suprita Shankar joined the startup Lattice Data, which specialized in using AI to convert unstructured data (such as data generated as emails, social media, multimedia content, and raw data from sensors and connected devices) into structured datasets. The company caught the attention of Apple, which bought Lattice for $200 million in 2017, bringing Shankar along with the acquisition. With Apple, she leveraged her skills to build machine learning models for Siri Knowledge, helping make Apple’s signature digital assistant smarter.

After brief stints with two other startups, Shankar returned to Apple in 2024 as a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, continuing to improve technology used by billions of people every day. When she looks back on her time at CMU, what stands out most are the relationships that grew out of her program.

“At CMU, I made good friends who I am still in touch with, including someone who became my mentor and even spoke at my wedding,” she said. “Coming to CMU, you learn so much because you’re surrounded by incredibly bright people.”

Kwaku Jyamfi (EPP ‘20)

MAKING CLEANER, CHEAPER ENERGY A REALITY

“I have to create value for our customers and be able to communicate that value to every stakeholder for Farm to Flame. The Engineering & Technology Innovation Management program was very important for me. It taught me how to combine a good business model with the technology model.”

Kwaku Jyamfi came to CMU with an inspired idea: creating a cleaner, cheaper alternative to dieselpowered generators. Jyamfi’s company, Farm to Flame Energy, has commercialized a generator that transforms plant-based agricultural waste such as corn stalks into renewable energy. One Farm to Flame generator can power three homes, a commercial building, or a mid-sized farm. As Farm to Flame expands its market reach internationally,

Jyamfi’s company has garnered attention from major corporations and government agencies, nonprofits and NGOs. Through numerous awards, partnerships, contracts, and investments, Farm to Flame is poised to be a major player in the race toward renewable energy.

“We see provision of renewable power generation as the most important problem to solve in our modern time,” Jyamfi says.

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Alumna takes on toxic chemicals at women’s health organization

Women in STEM have been a large influence on Amy Dale’s career. From the mentors she was inspired by, to her current work at the Silent Spring Institute, women-led work has always been a constant.

“I think of my grandmother, who first introduced me to the fields of ecology and computational science—subjects that have formed the cornerstone of my career,” Dale (CEE’15) recalled. “At CMU, it was my doctoral advisor, Elizabeth Casman, who transformed me from a naive undergrad into an expert in my field of study.”

Dale completed her graduate work at Carnegie Mellon’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, earning both her master’s and Ph.D., with a dual focus in engineering and public policy during her doctorate. After graduation, Dale completed postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the mentorship of Dr. Susan Solomon. She then worked as a scientific consultant for five years before joining Silent Spring Institute as deputy director.

Silent Spring Institute is a nonprofit research organization that investigates the environmental risk factors for breast cancer, specifically the role of cancer-causing chemicals in our everyday products and environments. The organization is named in honor of biologist, writer, and environmental activist

Rachel Carson and is composed primarily of women scientists working to address women’s health issues and prioritize disease prevention.

Silent Spring’s scientists share their science with advocates, lawyers, and legislators to help strengthen policies and protect the public from dangerous chemicals. In addition, the institute partners with communities impacted by pollution and engages the public through tools like their Detox Me app to help people reduce harmful exposures and live healthier lives.

“It’s an incredible feeling to work at an organization where everyone, from our scientists to our accounting staff, is united in the pursuit of a powerful shared vision,” said Dale.

With her transition to the nonprofit sector, Dale continues to apply the knowledge she gained from CEE courses such as Fate, Transport & Physicochemical Processes of Organic Contaminants in Aquatic Systems and Integrated Environmental Modeling to Silent Spring’s work on synthetic chemicals in the environment. Her education, she says, provided her with a crucial foundation to advance her professional career.

“Because of the skills and training I received at CMU, I’ve been able to apply this valuable knowledge to dozens of real-world cases of environmental pollution across the country,” Dale said. “My hope for my career is to continue to leverage that knowledge to help make the world a healthier place.”

Amy Dale

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OUTSIDE OF THE LAB

Regulating temperature in large buildings is essential to both ensuring comfort of those using the space, as well as maximizing the building’s energy efficiency. HVAC systems often struggle to balance these needs, but machine learning models can be helpful in improving efficiency. Research underway in civil and environmental engineering aims to improve the accuracy of predicting the real “comfort zone” for most people in a building.