As we bring you this issue of Illinois Tech Research, I want to pause and reflect on the remarkable journey that we are sharing together. Our magazine is more than a collection of stories—it is a window into the energy, creativity, and ambition that define research at Illinois Tech.
Every page reflects the spirit of inquiry that drives our faculty, students, and partners to ask bold questions and pursue solutions with global impact. From pioneering advances in materials science and artificial intelligence, to tackling challenges in health, energy, and sustainability, our community is united by a shared belief: that knowledge must serve humanity.
We recognize that breakthroughs do not happen in isolation. They grow out of collaboration, resilience, and the commitment to push beyond the boundaries of what is known. This year, we are especially excited to share news of our growing partnerships with FermiForward and SmartUSA. These collaborations connect our researchers with national and global leaders, opening new pathways for innovation and expanding opportunities for our students. Together, we are accelerating progress in areas that matter most: from advanced technology development to workforce training and real-world impact.
This magazine is for you—our university community, peers, partners, alumni, and supporters. You are part of this story, too. Your engagement, curiosity, and encouragement strengthen our mission and inspire us to keep reaching higher.
As you explore these pages, I invite you to see not just the research, but the people behind it: innovators who embody the values of Illinois Tech. Together, we are building a future that is more just, sustainable, and connected.
Thank you for being with us on this journey.
With gratitude and anticipation,
Jeff Terry Vice Provost for Research
RESEARCH2025
FIXING CALIFORNIA’S WATER WOES
Professor Igor Cialenco is developing
14
18
HACK-PROOFING THE GRID
Illinois
SURVEYING THE SKAI
Disinfection Innovation
A How-To on Maintaining Building
Marking Nuclear History
Women Working Together
A Host of Fine Fellows
Transforming Data Interaction Eco-Friendly Metal Mining Applying Law to Cutting-Edge Tech Revolutionizing Monte Carlo Methods Climate-Adaptive Buildings
The Great Migration’s Effect on
and elevators to
Assistant Professor Emily Leiner is strengthening Illinois Tech’s astronomy program by allying with major research institutions across the globe. Her latest alliance lets her contribute to a space survey conducted by the Rubin Observatory in Chile. 10 2 20
Statement
Professors Kenneth Tichauer and Jovan Brankov are developing
Joohee
Professor Igor Cialenco is photographed standing next to Lake Michigan in Chicago.
Fighting Infection with Far-UVC Light
Beacon Technology Solutions, with collaborators at Illinois Tech, has been awarded a grant to support a novel study on how Far-UVC technology can help mitigate the spread of infectious diseases in public spaces. The grant was awarded through the Illinois Innovation Vouchers Program, which fosters research collaborations between small- and medium-sized enterprises and Illinois’ world-class universities.
Beacon’s flagship product is a wall-mounted smart disinfection device that uses Far-UVC 222nm light, which has been shown to disinfect up to 99.99 percent of viruses, bacteria, and mold in bench-scale tests. Far-UVC light is a narrow subset of the UVC spectrum (100–280 nm) that has been shown to effectively inactivate pathogens—including coronaviruses and influenza—without penetrating the outer layer of human skin or eyes, making it safer for occupied environments.
The joint research project will combine computational fluid dynamics simulations with experimental measurements to understand how bench-scale results translate to real-world environments by analyzing airflow patterns, aerosol distributions, and their interactions with Beacon’s Far-UVC field.
—Simon Morrow
Women Working Together
“A lot of the stories that we’re seeing in gender equity research [seem to show] that women aren’t getting a fair shake at things,” says Chicago-Kent College of Law Assistant Professor Jordana R. Goodman. “Female attorneys and female inventors both independently are less likely to get a patent granted than their male counterparts.”
According to the World Economic Forum, only 17 percent of inventors holding international patents in 2022 were women.
An Open Textbook on Facade Maintenance
Illinois Tech Professor of Civil and Architectural Engineering
Jamshid Mohammadi and Associate Teaching Professor Edoarda Corradi Dell’Acqua together with Paul V. Galvin Library, have received funding from the Illinois State Library/Secretary of State Open Educational Resources Grant to write an open textbook on building envelope management.
Paul V. Galvin Library staff Stephanie Fletcher, head of discovery, metadata, and technical services, is the principal investigator.
The exterior of a building is called its envelope or facade. A number of catastrophic building facade failures in recent years, such as the Surfside condo collapse attention to the need for improved methods in facade evaluation
In 2020 the United States Patent and Trademark Office determined that only 21.8 percent of patent attorneys nationwide were women.
Goodman’s most recent research, conducted with Mike Schuster, associate professor in the legal studies program at the University of Georgia’s Terry School of Business, examines what happens when those two groups of underrepresented women— inventors and patent attorneys—work together.
“We’re finding that if a female attorney works with a female inventor, there’s a mitigating effect,” Goodman says. “That means that negative effects associated with being a woman and interacting with the patent office seems to be reduced if two women are working together.”
The paper, “The Patent Trifecta: Gendered Interactions of Inventors, Attorneys, and the USPTO in Patent Prosecution,” recently won the Best Paper Award at the Gender and Research Conference at Indiana University’s Kinsey-Kelley Center for Gender Equity in Business.
—Tad Vezner
and maintenance, particularly in medium to high-rise buildings. Mohammadi and Corradi Dell’Acqua collaborate on a building envelope rehabilitation graduate course and have noticed a stark lack of resources available for guiding their students in learning. They will spend the next couple of years developing the textbook, will test it out in the course, and will make the book available to the public on a Creative Commons license.
—Simon Morrow
May the Memories Be with You
For Star Wars fans, Disney World’s Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser offered a dream come true: a fully immersive, two-day adventure aboard the Halcyon. Though often called “the Star Wars hotel,” it was more than just a stay—it was a live-action roleplaying experience blending storytelling, gaming, and fan culture.
After launching in 2022, the experience ended in September 2023, leaving behind a passionate fanbase.
Illinois Tech Professor of Digital Humanities and Media Studies
Carly Kocurek—a cultural historian specializing in games and new media technologies—is preserving its legacy through a new documentary titled: Halcyon Daze: The Final Voyages of Disney’s Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser
Collaborating with director and four-time Halcyon guest Carrie Coaplen, the film explores both the ambitious scale of the project and the emotional bonds it created.
With a nearly $5,000 price tag and little official memorabilia, the experience has lived on through fan art and memory. Kocurek sees the documentary as both preservation and inspiration, urging people to explore future immersive entertainment.
—Tom Linder
Edoarda Corradi Dell’Acqua
Jordana R. Goodman Jamshid Mohammadi
Illustration of building facades (Credit: Edoarda Corradi Dell’Acqua)
Carly Kocurek at Halcy-Con, where she and her colleagues presented footage and held a panel about their upcoming documentary Halcyon
Armour Reactor Receives Historic Landmark Status
On April 18, 2025, Illinois Tech’s Armour Research Foundation Reactor joined the ranks of fewer than 100 sites across the United States have earned Nuclear Historic Landmark status from the American Nuclear Society, becoming the first privately built and operated nuclear research reactor honored.
Constructed in 1956 with support from 25 major industry partners, including IBM, Caterpillar, and U.S. Steel, the reactor— nicknamed the atomic furnace—marked a turning point in nuclear history. Nuclear research was now a publicly-celebrated pursuit of knowledge instead of a secretive wartime practice.
For more than a decade, the atomic furnace contributed to advancements in agriculture, food safety, chemistry, and medicine. Its unique design—using liquid Uranium-235 fuel— prioritized safety in an urban environment.
“The story of the Armour Research Foundation Reactor reflects both the optimism and the challenges of embracing new technologies,” says Jeffrey Terry, vice provost for research
The Base of a Good Diet
What’s the best diet? A five-year, $200, million NIH-funded study called The Nutrition for Precision Health is using artificial intelligence to answer that on a person-by-person basis, developing personalized nutrition plans based on how individual bodies respond to food.
Center, Illinois Tech will serve as a clinical site for the collection of biospecimens to study the metabolic responses of participants who consume test meals. The participants wear monitors and follow customized diet plans created in the Center for Nutrition Research’s Metabolic Precision Nutrition Production Kitchen.
A Host of Fine Fellows
A significant number of Illinois Tech faculty have been honored with fellowships at major academic and scientific organizations over the years. Typically, such fellowships are awarded to less than 1 percent of the members of such organizations. Here is a list of Illinois Tech faculty members who have been awarded fellowships during the 2024–25 academic year:
Henry R. Linden Professor of Engineering Hamid Arastoopour, the director of the Wanger Institute for Sustainable Energy Research (WISER), was awarded the 2024 Particle Technology Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. The award citation recognizes Arastoopour as “a pioneer in the development of computational fluid dynamics-based models for fluid-particle systems for scale-up and design of energy and sustainability related processes.”
Illinois Tech Associate Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Scott has been elected an associate fellow of the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics in its Class of 2026. Dawson’s most recent research relates to fluid mechanics and aerodynamics, in particular coming up with simple models for highly complex fluid and aerodynamic flows.”
Research Professor of Chemistry James Kaduk was selected as a fellow of the Council of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences “for achievements in advancing materials analysis using powder diffraction and for service to the crystallography community through leadership and education.”
College of Architecture
Associate Professor Sean was the 2024–25 Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro Member of the Institute for Advanced Study’s School of Historical Studies. He will focus on completing a book about the architecture, landscapes, and art created for the 1972 Summer
Illinois Tech is part of a 14-institution consortium collecting data from 8,000 participants across the country. As part of the Illinois
The data is then sent to a centralized database, where AI and machine learning models will generate predictive modeling algorithms that unveil diet-specific information so the right diet can be advised on an individual level.
“With the amount of detailed data we will have on people under different conditions, we will be in a position to develop virtual people based on real people’s dietary responses to test diet-related hypotheses,” says Britt Burton-Freeman , director of Illinois Tech’s Center for Nutrition Research and professor and chair of the university’s Department of Food Science and Nutrition. “AI can run simulations to understand how these virtual people respond to different dietary patterns, which will provide insight for individualized recommendations.”
—Tom Linder
Chicago-Kent College of Law
Associate Clinical Professor Jamie Franklin has been selected as an academic fellow of the National Civil Justice Institute. Fellows are selected to keep the organization apprised of the latest legal trends and to assist it in maintaining a dialogue with the country’s courts and law schools.
Carrie Hall was selected as a fellow of American Society of Mechanical Engineers for her research and education in automotive powertrain dynamics, including the modeling and control of engine systems using advanced combustion modes and the use of alternative liquid and gaseous fuels.
Chun Liu, professor and chair of the Department of Applied Mathematics, was among 25 researchers recently selected to enter the 2025 Fellows Program of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics. SIAM highlighted Liu’s contributions to the theory and applications of nonlinear partial differential equations in the fields of biophysics, complex fluids, and materials sciences.
Professor of Physics and Materials Science and Engineering Jeff Terry was named a fellow of the AVS: Science and Technology of Materials, Interfaces, and Processing, formerly the American Vacuum Society. He was recognized “for pioneering inventions and significant contributions advancing the study of nuclear materials physics including the development of artificial intelligence analysis tools for materials characterization analysis.”
James Kaduk
Jamie Franklin
The Armour Research Foundation Reactor being utilized at Illinois Tech.
Jeff Terry
Smart Helmets to Stop Heat Stroke
Developing a heat-stroke detention system for construction workers netted the runner-up prize at the SAS Institute’s annual SAS Innovate 2025 global hackathon for a team of recent Illinois Tech graduates.
Narges Hosseinzadeh (M.S. AMAT ’23), and Irina Klein (M.S. AI ’23) teamed with BeeInventor through team mentor Sou-Cheng Choi, research associate professor of applied mathematics at Illinois Tech. The high-tech Internet of Things company brought in Dr. Jeffrey Li for his medical expertise.
The heat stroke prevention system collects and analyzes real-time weather data and sensor data, which is collected by construction workers’ helmets.
The sensors measure workers’ physiological factors such as heart rate and core body temperature.
“By combining mathematical modeling, machine learning, and computer vision, we’re able to develop predictive analytics and real-time monitoring systems that can help prevent accidents and protect workers’ lives,” Sharp says.
—Casey Moffitt
Finding a Long-Sought Answer in Fundamental Physics
At the Neutrino 2024 conference in Milan, Fermilab’s NuMI Off-axis
ν e Appearance (NOvA) experiment presented its results with double the data from its previous report—bringing it closer to the precision needed to confirm the ordering of neutrino masses. This puts the team well on its way to meeting the high threshold of certainty required to declare a discovery, ruling out
The NOvA team—which includes Illinois Tech physics department faculty members Professor Emiritus Dan Kaplan, Professor and Department Chair Pavel Snopok, Associate Professor Yagmur Torun, and alumni Robert Chico (PHYS ’25) and Yiding Yu (PHYS ’24)—fired a beam of neutrinos through the Earth from Fermilab in Illinois to a massive detector in Minnesota, collecting data for more than a decade. Their latest findings continue to favor the normal ordering, where two light neutrinos and one heaver neutrino exist.
Confirming this would help answer a number of questions in particle physics, including whether neutrinos are their own antiparticles.
While a declaration of discovery has not yet been made by NOvA, the experiment is slated to continue through 2027. By then, the team hopes to double its current antineutrino data set and maximize the experiment’s sensitivity.
—Tom Linder
TRANSMITTING SAFETY
Professor of Law Cathay Y. N. Smith discusses the impact of copyright law
Associate Professor Maurice Dawson discusses the role that disinformation plays in political campaigns as it relates to cybersecurity.
Associate Professor Mohammad Asadi highlights how his research will efficiently transform energy use away from fossil fuels.
Illinois Tech faculty members (from left) Daniel Kaplan, Pavel Snopok, Yagmur Torun, and alumnus Yiding Yu at the NOvA Far Detector in Ash River, Minnesota.
2025 global hackathon for a team of recent Illinois Tech graduates.
Frank Gunsaulus Faculty Fellow Boris Pervan explains how CARNATIONS helps protect the world's navigational systems.
Automated Aircraft
By Simon Morrow
Boris Pervan, Frank Gunsaulus Faculty Fellow in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and director of the Center for Assured and Resilient Navigation in Advanced Transportation Systems (CARNATIONS) at Illinois Tech, and Samer Khanafseh, research associate professor at Illinois Tech, are partners on a new $6 million NASA-funded project working on safe, scalable, and seamless surface navigation for uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS).
This project, funded through NASA’s University Leadership Initiative, aims to fill in gaps to get closer to UASs that can fully takeoff, land, and taxi at commercial airports.
The project has two main goals: to develop standards for what requirements UASs should be expected to meet to safely and reliably navigate in a commercial airport environment and to develop technological solutions that can meet these requirements.
Pervan and Khanafseh will focus on the technological side, working on a solution that utilizes their shared expertise in global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), such as GPS.
This project overlaps with a number of other projects that they have worked on, including advanced receiver autonomous integrity monitoring for the Federal Aviation Administration and a project developing precision landing for aircraft and drones for the United States Navy.
“It’s kind of a fusion of these two ideas that we’ve worked with before, which makes us the right people to be doing it,” says Pervan.
Some aspects of automated aircraft navigation are already fairly advanced. With current state-of-the-art technology, as long as both the aircraft and airport have the right equipment, autopilot systems for flying and landing are already widely used.
“It’s funny, you’d think that the hard parts would be the flying part and the landing part, but for UASs it’s actually the surface navigation,” says Pervan.
This comes down to taxiing requiring a much higher level of precision and the fact that there are many potential sources of interference in the airport environment, both in terms of barriers or objects that could be in the path of a moving UAS and a greater number of interference sources and blockages to the GNSS signals.
Pervan will approach this issue by using receivers that take in signals from multiple satellite constellations, broadcasting at two frequencies in order to lessen the impact of measurement errors.
“With that redundancy, we think we can unlock that centimeter-level positioning,” says Pervan.
Pervan says he expects that the technology that they develop to have potential broader uses, such as simplifying autopilot landing technology for commercial aircraft.
This project is in collaboration with Ohio University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, Stanford University, Tufts University, Reliable Robotics Corporation, Veth Research Associates, and the Boeing Company.
Boris Pervan
Frank Gunsaulus Faculty Fellow in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Director, CARNATIONS iit.edu/directory/people/boris-pervan
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Boris Pervan
CALCULATING A FIX FOR WATER
working to help California’s agriculture industry redistribute the dwindling natural resource.
, professor of applied mathematics at Illinois grant along
probability at University of California, Santa Barbara, to develop
in parts of the world unless an equitable and adaptive water
‘‘To be clear, our goal is not to ‘gamify’ water allocation or to support financial trading of water. Rather, we set out to develop a mathematically rigorous analysis of water allocation and price formation.”
—
Professor of Applied Mathematics Igor Cialenco
type of water trading system before it becomes policy.
Studying different ways water markets might behave over time, water users will be able to make an informed decision whether to plan for multiple years at once or adjust their plans as they go. Comparing different mathematical approaches can help solve these complex planning problems.
been extensively studied by resource economists, hydrologists, mathematical theory to describe desirable water allocations.” California is among the first states to shift toward regional which mandated the creation of Groundwater Sustainability
The model works well for short periods, and work continues to improve it to handle longer time periods. Other improvements include using machine learning and neural networks to quickly estimate outcomes rather than implementing brute-force calculations and developing methods to find stable solutions with multiple water users.
Cialenco and Ludkovsky attracted more than 300 people at a mini-symposium based on their work at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics’s 2025 Conference in Financial Mathematics and Engineering (SIAM FM25). Contributions from Michael Kralis (Ph.D. MATH 3rd Year) earned him top prize at a College of Computing poster session.
SGMA provides a multi-decade contour of how much water is available to consume and the majority of the new groundwater management agencies provide rule-based individual pumping
different stakeholders, and extensive policymaking. The modeling framework must be stochastic, dynamic, and optimal. He says that the aim of the framework is to develop the fundamentals of these new water markets, leveraging methods from stochastic
“To be clear, our goal is not to ‘gamify' water allocation or to support financial trading of water,” he says. “Rather, we set
Cialenco says the biggest challenge is to develop models that are relevant to policymakers and stakeholders, based on existing
how water markets might work. Further development will be needed to handle real-world complexity that includes many participants over many years to predict user behavior in a new
“We are thrilled to be at the forefront, pioneering this area of research and laying the foundation for future studies,” Cialenco says. “A diverse group of graduate and undergraduate students will be involved in all aspects of the project, from calibrating models using real data, developing a computationally feasible algorithm to solve complex control problems, and studying what is the impact of cooperative/non-cooperative between stakeholders in achieving more sustainable management practices. Initially, we will focus on California groundwater management, thanks to the availability of rich datasets. However, the developed method can also be applied to other affected aquifers, as groundwater depletion is a universal problem that we aim to address through scalable and adaptable solutions.”
Disclaimer: Research reported in this publication is supported by the National Science Foundation under Award Number DMS-2407549. This content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Science Foundation.
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Igor Cialenco
Professor of Applied Mathematics
iit.edu/directory/people/igor-cialenco
LOW LIGHT CANCER FIGHT
By Simon Morrow
Professor of Biomedical Engineering Kenneth Tichauer and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Jovan Brankov at Illinois Tech have been awarded $2.5 million in funding by the National Institutes of Health to develop an imaging system that will provide the head and neck cancer surgery team at University Medical Center
Groningen, led by Dr. Max Witjes, professor of head and neck oncology at UMCG, with a much more efficient way to check if all cancer has been removed during a surgery.
We’re giving the surgeon the answer right then and there while the patient is still on the surgical table, offering great promise for reducing the need for repeat surgeries and enhancing treatment outcomes,” says Tichauer.
A first prototype of the system—which was funded by several seed grants—was tested on six patients. The impressive results of those tests enabled the team to secure NIH funding to redesign the imaging system. The group now
The team also plans to develop machine-learning algorithms to enable automated detection and localization of insufficient surgical margins to quickly and unequivocally indicate if the cancer has been completely removed.
“These days machine learning and AI methods are a big boom, especially in medical imaging. It’s like a gold rush. It’s something
Kenneth Tichauer Professor of
Jovan Brankov
Jovan Brankov Kenneth Tichauer
By Simon Morrow
BE T TER VISION FOR AUTONOMOUS CARS
llinois Tech Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Joohee Kim and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Ken Choi have been awarded $1.6 million in funding over 4.5 years from HL Mando for a project developing control systems for autonomous vehicles.
Kim will be working on developing artificial intelligence models that will be able to take in information from cameras and a light detection and ranging (LIDAR) sensor and use it to assess road conditions, such as whether the road is wet or dry and detecting the presence of hazards such as ice, potholes, or objects on the road. She will also be using generative vision language models to generate synthetic data that can improve the models where photo data is lacking.
Choi will be developing computing hardware that is optimized to run the AI models, which is expected to offer an 83 percent decrease in power consumption compared to running the models on more generalized hardware such as a graphic processing unit.
The AI models will be developed in three stages. First Kim will use a camera-based classification model. This involves taking photos of road surfaces in many conditions and using it to train
“The objective is to predict the condition of the road and use this to improve the safety of autonomous cars,” she says.
Next the model will be extended to what is needed in real life. The front-facing camera on an autonomous vehicle sees much of its surroundings beyond just the road and needs to both identify the road and evaluate its condition. This will be done with a camera-based segmentation model, which adds an additional layer of interpretation to the camera-based classification model.
This model will be based on Kim’s previous work developing real-time segmentation of driving scenes, such as identifying roads, pedestrians, cyclists, cars, and more.
Finally, Kim aims to address road surface conditions that may not be easily identifiable through a photo.
“It is quite difficult to identify potholes and bumps using only camera images, especially in bad weather conditions such as
Associate Professor Joohee Kim and Professor Ken Choi have been awarded $1.6 million in funding over 4.5 years developing control systems for autonomous vehicles.
rain, storms, ice, or snow,” she says.
For this, Kim will use data from a LIDAR sensor, which offers more 3D information. These data will be integrated into the overall AI model, making it a multimodal segmentation model. The LIDAR sensor will offer a greater understanding of road surface features identified by the camera-based part of the model.
Since a foundation of the AI model is interpreting photo data, Kim is also considering how to improve that data set. Most large-scale photo data sets of roads are dominated by photos of dry and sunny road conditions, leaving the most important road conditions that the model needs to learn about in the minority.
To improve the quality of the AI model prediction, she will utilize generative vision language models to create images of road surfaces under the conditions where photo data is lacking.
“A lot of research has been done to use generative vision language models to generate more realistic synthetic data so that we can use these types of augmented data sets for various vision applications,” she says.
Once the AI model is developed, it will need computing hardware to run on. Its complexity means that trying to run it on standard out-of-the-box hardware would be too slow for the needed application.
“Big vendor companies such as NVIDIA, Intel, Microsoft, and Google provide some general solutions for hardware design, but these are far from the optimal for this specific application,” Choi says.
He says designing custom hardware that is optimized for the models that Kim develops will improve processing speed and reduce power consumption, making it more useful for application in an actual autonomous vehicle.
Choi’s focus is on developing hardware that doesn’t require a lot of power to run, offering energy savings. He says the main challenge for this project will be managing the use of multiple sensors, and he plans to achieve this using field-programmable gate arrays, which are integrated circuits with the flexibility to be customized to desired specifications.
“We want to optimize fully based on the algorithm,” says Choi. This project is being conducted in collaboration with 10 other research institutions and companies.
Joohee Kim
Ken Choi
technologies have created more entry points to electric power systems. Interruptions to electricity services due to cyberattacks happen globally on a regular basis, impacting everything from streetlights, trains, and elevators to hospitals and airports.
“Electricity is a very critical component of developed countries and societies, so we need to do everything that we can to protect it,” says Robert W. Galvin Electricity Innovation Endowed Chair
who is leading the 2MC project.
Shahidehpour also serves as director of Illinois Tech’s Robert W. Galvin Center for Electricity Innovation and associate director of (WISER).
He will use his expertise in microgrid technology to explore ways to identify sections of the grid that are being attacked by cyber intrusion and apply methods such as watermarking.
This new approach will allow microgrid operators to introduce pertinent mitigation strategies, meaning that even if an attacker gains entrance to one area, they will have limited ability to make the virus spread in the broader electric power systems.
Potential entry points to the grid are now ubiquitous; even a streetlight with a wireless sensor could be hacked.
“Basically, if you can control it wirelessly, an attacker can potentially access it, too,” says Shahidehpour.
The work done through 2MC will aim to create boundaries or virtual fences around sections of the grid, represented by
microgrids, making it easier to control what goes in and comes out. The team, which includes Illinois Tech Assistant Professor Ren Wang (serving as the co-principal investigator of 2MC) and other power grid and cybersecurity experts from the Galvin Center at Illinois Tech, University of Illinois Chicago, and Commonwealth Edison Company, will be developing software and solution strategies that can be used at both the device level and microgrid level to achieve this security.
The 2MC project also includes an advisory board representing 30 cybersecurity experts from national laboratories, and midwestern universities and industries. The advisory board guides the mission of 2MC to develop strategies that will minimize cyber intrusions at the microgrid level.
Shahidehpour has already created an existing sophisticated simulation of Illinois Tech’s campus microgrid and the team will be utilizing it to test the software that it develops.
Firewalls are already in use, preventing many attempted
‘‘Basically, if you can control it wirelessly, an attacker can potentially access it, too.”
—Robert W.
Galvin Electricity Innovation Endowed Chair Mohammad Shahidehpour
attacks, but Shahidehpour says it’s critical to continue development as cyber attackers get “smarter and smarter and smarter,” in constant search of vulnerabilities in electric power systems.
The team will also develop training for grid operators and other educational materials, including courses that will be implemented in Illinois Tech’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
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Mohammad Shahidehpour
Robert W. Galvin Electricity Innovation
Endowed Chair
iit.edu/directory/people/mohammad-shahidehpour
Mohammad Shahidehpour
y taking a small step to join the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Discovery Alliance in spring 2024, Illinois Tech’s burgeoning astronomy program has taken a giant leap forward.
Leading the charge is Assistant Professor of Physics Emily Leiner
“The LSST Discovery Alliance is a network of universities and other institutions that have come together and formed a nonprofit organization that directs a lot of scientific programming for the LSST survey,” says Leiner. “It really opens up options for our students to be involved in a wider network of astronomers and astrophysicists who are affiliated with the [Vera C.] Rubin Observatory and LSST.”
The LSST survey—conducted by the 8.4-meter Rubin Observatory in Chile that achieved first light in June 2025— studies dark energy and dark matter, maps objects within our solar system, and detects transient events such as supernovae. The telescope photographs the entire sky every few nights, generating a massive amount of data for members in the alliance to analyze.
“The Rubin Observatory is going to generate terabytes of data every single night that needs to be analyzed,” says Leiner. “One of the really important things is having tools in place for people to actually use that data and training people how to use these tools. That’s one of LSST’s big missions.”
Studying transient events, one of the LSST survey’s goals, is a large part of Leiner’s research. Leiner is particularly interested in the interactions within binary star systems, which in some cases lead to the two stars merging together in an explosive event.
While extremely bright supernovae are the most well-known type of transient event, there are many explosions taking place across the universe that aren’t as bright, but still provide significant insight into stellar evolution.
“Some of these mergers are hard to see because they are fainter, so we can’t see tons of extragalactic sources,” says Leiner. “We’re going to detect a lot of these fainter transients that we haven’t detected very many of. We haven’t imaged very many of those kinds of events. It’s really going to be very exciting.”
Processing the massive flow of data presents a major
‘‘It’s really exciting for us as an institute that we’re entering some of these really big collaborations in the astronomy world.”
—Emily Leiner
challenge—and artificial intelligence is poised to play a key role.
In September 2024, Illinois Tech was also announced as a satellite partner in the SkAI Institute for AI in Astronomy that aims to create innovative AI tools for astronomy research. The SkAI Institute has received a $20 million National Science Foundation grant that is meant to accelerate astronomy’s data-driven revolution.
Having only started its astrophysics program in 2016, Illinois Tech’s membership in both the LSST Discovery Alliance and the SkAI Institute marks a new phase for the young program as the study of the universe continues to evolve.
“It’s really exciting for us as an institute that we’re entering some of these really big collaborations in the astronomy world,” says Leiner. “We are this nascent program that’s just sprung up—two faculty [members]. I think it’s really amazing that we’re able to get our students involved in the wider astronomical community.”
Emily Leiner Assistant Professor of Physics
iit.edu/directory/people/emily-leiner
Philip R. Troyk
Illinois Tech Assistant Professor of Physics Emily Leiner [left] and a graduate student set up live solar observation demonstration for undergraduate students.
By Casey Moffitt
The National Science Foundation has granted Illinois Tech researchers $4 million to explore a new vision in managing the increasing complexity and scale of data in modern scientific pursuits.
TRANS FORMING DATA INTER ACTION
and reproducible way to document data analysis steps compared to complex code.
ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY METAL MINING
Xian-He Sun Ron Hochsprung Endowed Chair of Computer Science, and Antonios Kougkas, assistant research professor of computer science, are receiving the bulk of a $5 million NSF grant to pursue IOWarp, with $1 million going to contributors. IOWarp aims to reduce the amount of data that needs to be transferred through optimization techniques and data transformation, as well as provide a unified platform that can handle a wide range of data sources and formats, simplifying data management for scientists.
“I’m particularly energized by how IOWarp isn’t just another generic data platform,” Kougkas says. “It’s been carefully designed through direct collaboration with scientists across diverse fields such as materials science, cosmology, and biomedicine. This means we’re not just building technology in isolation. We’re creating solutions that directly address the complex challenges scientists face in their daily work.”
The new system has the potential to ease data management in three main ways. It addresses challenges in managing diverse data types and formats that are required across different workflow stages of modern scientific pursuits. It also aims to reduce the amount of data transferred through various mechanisms.
IOWarp features a new natural language interface driven by WarpGPT, a suite of AI technologies being developed by the team to assist scientists in exploring data dynamics using natural language. WarpGPT makes complex analyses and explorations as easy as asking a question, which democratizes data access and analysis by reducing coding barriers, unlocking complex insights, automating data management, and creating a more transparent
“IOWarp’s natural language interface is not just a tool—it’s a vision for the future of scientific data management,” Kougkas says. “By enabling scientists to interact with their data in a way that feels natural and intuitive, it empowers them to unlock the full potential of their research and accelerate discoveries that benefit us all.”
Another key differentiator is IOWarp’s novel data representation termed “content,” which acts like a universal adapter to streamline and simplify data management. It does this by taking data from different sources, such as complex scientific instruments or simulations, and transforms it into a standardized format that any application can understand. It also reduces data bottlenecks and allows researchers to ask complex questions in natural language rather than code.
Sun and Kougkas are working with researchers at the University of Utah on IOWarp, as well as the HDF Group, which will help build the software.
Disclaimer: Research reported in this publication is supported by the National Science Foundation under Award Number 2411318. This content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Science Foundation.
Xian-He Sun
Ron Hochsprung Endowed Chair of Computer Science
iit.edu/directory/people/ xian-he-sun
Antonios Kougkas
Assistant Research Professor of Computer Science
iit.edu/directory/people/ antonios-kougkas
By Simon Morrow
Illinois Tech Professor of Chemical Engineering
Sohail Murad has received $450,000 in funding from the United States Department of Energy for a three-year project using computational methods to assess the feasibility of a new method for extracting high value metals such as lithium, vanadium, manganese, and arsenic from wastewater.
“Most of the critical metals that are being used in U.S. manufacturing of products such as batteries and semiconductors are being imported from China and Russia,” says Murad.
These products are considered essential to the U.S. economy and national security, so it is critical to find ways to manufacture them domestically.
It is well known that these metals exist in certain wastewater streams, including those from oil industry processes in places such as the Permian Basin in the southwestern U.S.
“If we remove all the lithium just from the Permian Basin waste stream, that would be enough to satisfy the industrial needs of the U.S. many times over,” says Murad.
Manganese and lithium are present in sea water, meaning the wastewater from desalination plants could also be a potential source. Aqua mining—by extracting the metals from these streams—is also expected to be more environmentally friendly than traditional mining.
So far, the low concentration of the metals in available water sources has made it difficult to efficiently extract them.
Some people have tried increasing the concentration through boiling, but this requires high cost and energy input. Murad’s project proposes what he believes is a more effective way to do this using reverse osmosis, a process already used in water desalination.
“People have talked about getting these critical metals from waste streams, but they have never suggested the combination of methods that we are using,” he says.
Murad will be doing molecular simulations, which are well-developed models, as proof of concept. He’ll be exploring using a zeolite membrane, which is cheap, naturally available, stable in a range of pH levels and temperatures, and something that his previous work has shown provides high selectivity for water desalination.
While low flux rates have prevented zeolites from being used in commercial desalination, the metals that Murad is looking to extract are already very expensive, so there is more room to increase the extraction cost compared to desalination, where the product is water. The national security interest means that there are additional larger picture considerations beyond cost as well.
“We think that we’ll be able to figure out whether our method is feasible or not, and then the next stage will be to find experimental partners to see if we can do a demonstration unit,” says Murad.
Disclaimer: “Research reported in this publication was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under Award Number DE-SC0025289. This content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the U.S. Department of Energy.”
Sohail Murad, “Exploring the Feasibility of Aqua-Mining for Recovery of Critical Metals Using Computational Molecular Modeling,” U.S. Department of Energy; Award Number DE-SC0025289.
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Sohail Murad Professor of Chemical Engineering
iit.edu/directory/people/sohail-murad
Sohail Murad
Applying Law to Tech’s Cutting Edge
By Kayla Molander
Law dealing with are more complex.”
Cambridge Handbook of Emerging Issues at the Intersection of Commercial Law and Technology Press 2025), was co-edited with University of California, Davis School Professor of Law Stacy-Ann Elvy. The pair decided to collaborate on the book after recognizing that gaps in legal knowledge created gaps in laws governing new technologies.
have an expertise in commercial law. A commercial law expert doesn’t necessarily have an expertise in privacy or intellectual property and so forth,” says Kim. “Yet the issues that we’re confronting require expertise in these different areas of law and an understanding of how these areas of law intersect and interrelate."
Entrepreneurship and Applied Legal Technology, was eager to work with experts across disciplines. She recruited Illinois Tech Associate Professor of Behavioral Design contribute a chapter, “Behavioral Implications and Emerging Legal Issues in Innovative and Digital Product Design” which explains how design can affect social interactions and privacy.
Revolutionizing Monte Carlo Methods with Machine Learning
Nancy Kim
Nancy Kim Professor of Law, Michael Paul Galvin Chair in Entrepreneurship and Applied Legal Technology
Nathan Kirk
By Casey Moffitt
Kirk
By Casey Halas
InJuly 2024 Illinois Tech College of Architecture Assistant Professor Youngjin Hwang along with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Associate Professor Alexandros Tsamis and Professor Theodorian Borca-Tasciuc, received a United States patent for a novel climate-adaptive, dynamic, opaque-building-envelope system called HydroSIP. This system is designed for application across all opaque building elements, including exterior and interior walls, roofs, foundations, and floors. Through a unique, double-sided hydronic layer—which transfers heat through flowing water—embedded within the building envelope, the system can adapt its thermal resistance based on changes in climate.
Creating A ClimateAdaptive Building System
“This means there are hydronic loops on both the exterior and interior surfaces of the envelope,” says Hwang. “These double-sided layers can be coupled to flow water within this closed circuit, thereby directly transferring the heat from one side to the other. Or the hydronic circuit can be decoupled and each layer on the building’s surfaces can work individually.” The system is also made for harvesting energy. Due to the hydronic layer on the exterior surface of the building wall, it can directly harvest solar energy from the exterior surface—becoming an active, flexible component of energy management, rather than simply an insulated barrier between inside and out.
In the description of their patent, the team highlights that the building industry consumes nearly 40 percent of the U.S.’s primary energy and is thus a significant contributor to carbon emissions. They go on to describe that the opaque building envelope affects 25 percent of total building energy use, which translates to 10 percent of the U.S.’s primary energy use. This data suggested to Hwang and his partners that advancing opaque envelope technologies could play a significant role in reducing energy use in buildings.
With the patent secured, Hwang and his team have been collaborating with students, faculty, and researchers across both Illinois Tech and Rensselaer to work on validating the system, including testing a prototype of the technology in a room-sized artificial weather chamber. The weather chamber is designed to simulate 95 percent of the U.S.’s history of weather data, allowing the team to test the dynamic performance of the proposed system across various climates.
If the proposed system works as intended, Hwang says, buildings will essentially have the ability to automatically adapt to the weather changes and, in turn, reduce heating and cooling energy use, therefore reducing the overall impact of the building industry on the built environment.
By Scott Lewis
For employees seeking a better work-life balance and employers needing to attract and retain talent, individualized work arrangements—known as idiosyncratic deals, or i-deals—are a potential win-win solution. In an i-deal, an employee and supervisor negotiate a customized arrangement for the employee, such as shifting work hours to allow flexibility for family responsibilities.
When it comes to securing an i-deal, though, is the playing field level for all employees who want to negotiate one? The answer to that question goes beyond just the employee and supervisor involved, says Illinois Tech Professor of Management Smriti Anand, whose research on i-deals has been published in a variety of scholarly journals over the past 15 years.
Her latest paper, “Understanding I-Deals through the Social Ledger Lens: The Role of Trust and Hindrance Networks,” published in the Academy of Management Journal, investigates whether and how the web of social networks within work groups at a company or organization can be either an advantage or a barrier to accessing i-deals.
Anand and her research co-authors analyzed data from two surveys in which they asked restaurant and retail employees to identify which co-workers are central to the social networks in their work group— specifically, which co-workers they view as trustworthy collaborators and which ones they see as roadblocks to getting work done.
▶ Individuals who are central in trust networks are more likely to receive i-deals, while those who are central to hindrance networks are unlikely to receive them.
▶ The advantage of being in trust networks is significantly greater when a work group has more hindrance networks than trust networks, which suggests that work group dynamics can make or break an employee’s chances of getting an i-deal.
▶ In securing an i-deal, the negative effect of being viewed as a hindrance carries more weight than the positive effect of being seen as trustworthy.
According to Anand and her co-authors, this research provides practical insights for managers regarding the composition of work groups, employee training that builds more trust ties in the workplace, and strategically utilizing i-deals to improve the performance of employees who are otherwise considered to be difficult to work with.
Youngjin Hwang College of Architecture Assistant Professor arch.iit.edu/people/youngjin-hwang
Most work groups have several positive “trust” networks of people who are viewed as trustworthy collaborators, as well as several negative “hindrance” networks of people who are seen as difficult to work with, Anand says. The research group’s analysis indicates that both how an individual is viewed by co-workers and the overall balance between trust and hindrance networks within a work group affect the granting of i-deals. Key findings include:
Smriti Anand Professor of Management iit.edu/directory/people/smriti-anand
Smriti Anand
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Youngjin Hwang
THE ARCHITECTURAL INFLUENCE OF MARGINALIZED COMMUNITIES
By Tad Vezner
Geechee people of the Lowcountry in South Carolina and Georgia, and the Tainos of the Caribbean.
As part of the Rowe Fellowship, Maubert is teaching a seminar exploring the impact of the Great Migration on Chicago public housing, ranging from its architecture to culture and public policy. The Great Migration saw hundreds of thousands of Black people from the South migrate to northern cities such as Chicago in pursuit of jobs and better lives as their rights were weakened in the South. Her time as a Rowe fellow is building upon her previous work, including her 2023 exhibitions of “Queen of the Swamp,” which highlighted “how Miami’s Black and Indigenous communities instigated Miami’s original architecture, infrastructure, and present culture,” Maurbert says.
“With this ongoing design and research, I will continue developing a body of work that draws upon my existing practice in Miami, affirming how public policy has changed the American landscape, comparing different Black material cultures across the diaspora,” Maubert says.
for the rest of my life,” she says.
The Jeanne and John Rowe Fellowship was established in 2022 to support promising faculty at the beginning of their careers.
Fellows spend two years teaching while pursuing a funded research project intended to advance the study of the built environment across a number of issues, ranging from architecture, urbanism, and landscape architecture, to structures, building systems, professional practice, and more.
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Jeanne and John Rowe Fellow College of Architecture
