MEMS Brochure 2020

2020

Washington University in St. Louis McKelvey School of Engineering

Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science

Our faculty and students, defined by their expertise in fundamental mechanical engineering and materials science, have opportunities to exploit the interfaces between disciplines. These areas of convergence take advantage of WashU’s traditional strengths and culture of collaboration.”

— Philip Bayly, The Lee Hunter Distinguished Professor and department chair

Jubel Hall is the new home to the Department of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science.

15,600

square feet of research space

45%

of undergraduate mechanical engineering students minor, double major or have dual degrees, often in a nonengineering area

4:1 PhD students to tenured/tenuretrack faculty ratio

2

McKelvey School of Engineering

100% of PhD students are fully-funded

WashU MEMS

17

Academic Programs Undergraduate programs:

10

t e n ur e d / t e n ur e -t r ac k faculty

» Mechanical Engineering » Aerospace Engineering *

ful l-time t each i ng & research facu lt y

» Energy Engineering * » Environmental Engineering Science * » Materials Science & Engineering *

Students

» Mechatronics *

fa l l 2019

247

» Nanoscale Science & Engineering * » Robotics *

under g r aduat e

* minor only

Graduate programs: » PhD in Aerospace Engineering

199 m ast er ’s

68

do cto r al

» PhD in Mechanical Engineering » PhD in Materials Science (IMSE) » MS in Aerospace Engineering » MS in Mechanical Engineering » MS in Materials Science & Engineering » MEng in Mechanical Engineering

24%

in c r e as e in r esearch e xp e n dit ur e s (f y18 to f y19)

Facilities

275M

$

invested in new and renovated Engineering space since 2000

5,600 a lu mni wo r l dwi d e

7.4M

$

r es ea r ch awa r d s ( f y 19)

A new academic building, Jubel Hall, features a 3,350 square-foot makerspace.

McKelvey Hall, which will open in early 2021, will expand collaborative opportunities among computational researchers across the entire school.

Department of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science

3

MEMS Research Research areas

Advanced Materials Materials enable all technology, from biotech to clean energy to defense. Materials scientists and engineers combine novel synthesis strategies, advanced characterization techniques, computational tools and data science methods to investigate the relationship between a material’s structure, the way it is manufactured, and the properties it exhibits. Using these models, researchers are designing and developing new materials to enable breakthroughs in tissue engineering and disease detection, solar cells and batteries, and aerospace structures and engines.

4

McKelvey School of Engineering

Biomechanics & Mechanobiology Mechanical force is a critical component of all biological systems, providing cues to sculpt the shape and form of plants and animals, to enable cells to migrate or differentiate in response to physical changes in their environment, and to modulate the function of single molecules. Researchers in MEMS are developing and using these tools and techniques to understand and modify biological systems in biology and medicine.

Thermal-Fluids in Energy, Aerospace and Biomedicine Application of the principles of thermal-fluids to develop solutions for renewable energy, energy storage and harvesting, electronics cooling, and efficient, safe, and sustainable transportation; creation of micro-/nanofluidic technologies to understand and control multiphase processes like condensation and evaporation, and biofluidic processes involving molecules, cells and tissues.

New faculty

Research news

Matthew Bersi Assistant Professor Bersi joins McKelvey Engineering from Vanderbilt University, where he was a postdoctoral research scholar in biomedical engineering and a member of the cardiovascular research training program in the division of cardiovascular medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Bersi’s research interests are focused on using experimental and computational approaches to better understand the relationship between biomechanics and inflammation in soft tissues. To date, he has investigated the role of the immune system in hypertension, cardiac fibrosis and vascular injury and has developed tools to assess the mechanical properties of single cells using micropipette aspiration and mathematical modeling. While focused primarily on cardiovascular disease, this multiscale approach has applicability to understanding injury and disease processes in multiple tissues and organ systems.

Institute of Materials Science and Engineering The Institute of Materials Science and Engineering (IMSE) brings together more than 150 faculty and student researchers from engineering, the physical and natural sciences, and the medical school to discover new materials, to understand how they behave, and to envision innovative applications. IMSE supports extensive shared user facilities for micro/nanofabrication and materials characterization.

Researchers one step closer to bomb-sniffing cyborg locusts In a pre-proof published online Aug. 6 in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics: X, researchers showed how they were able to hijack a locust’s olfactory system to both detect and discriminate between different explosive scents — all within a few hundred milliseconds of exposure.

They were also able to optimize a previously developed biorobotic sensing system that could detect the locusts’ firing neurons and convey that information in a way that told researchers about the smells the locusts were sensing.

Previous work led to the discovery that the locust olfactory system could be decoded as an ‘or-of-ands’ logical operation. This allowed researchers to determine what a locust was smelling in different contexts.

With this knowledge, the researchers were able to look for similar patterns when they exposed locusts to vapors from TNT, DNT, RDX, PETN and ammonium nitrate — a chemically diverse set of explosives.

Researchers uncover how cells interact with supporting proteins to heal wounds The team, led by Delaram Shakiba, a postdoctoral fellow from the NSF Science and Technology Center for Engineering Mechanobiology (CEMB) in the McKelvey School of Engineering, discovered the way fibroblasts, or common cells in connective tissue, interact with the extracellular matrix, which provides structural support as well as biochemical and biomechanical cues to cells.

The team uncovered a recursive process that goes on between the cells and their environment as well as structures in the cells that were previously unknown.

Results of the research are published in ACS Nano July 28, 2020. Senior authors on the paper are Guy Genin, the Harold and Kathleen Faught Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and Elliot Elson, emeritus professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics at the School of Medicine.

“Clinical efforts to prevent the progression of fibrocontractile diseases, such as scarring and fibrosis ,have been largely unsuccessful, in part because the mechanisms that cells use to interact with the protein fibers around them are unclear,” Shakiba said.

Department of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science

5

Research news

Plants model more efficient cooling method Patricia Weisensee, assistant professor, initially planned to establish a pattern on a surface that would both repel liquid, similar to the lotus leaf, or pin droplets, similar to the rose petal, to influence wetting during droplet impact, such as during rain. Like the lotus leaf, when water impacts a repellant or superhydrophobic surface, droplets easily rebound, similar to rain on treated windshields. In heat transfer and evaporation, these superhydrophobic surfaces are very inefficient due to a short contact time between the water and the surface. Conversely, when liquid comes in contact with a hydrophilic surface that can be wetted, it spreads over the surface, forms a liquid puddle and takes a long time to evaporate.

Weisensee wanted to create a surface with both repelling and wetting properties that would create small sub-droplets, combining the advantages of both types of surfaces: droplet pinning and evaporation on the wetting surface without the risk of flooding the entire repelling surface. She then observed their behavior to learn more about evaporation as a cooling method for thermal management of high-tech electronic devices.

Results of her work were published online Dec. 20 in Langmuir.

6

McKelvey School of Engineering

Protein’s role in immune system after heart attack to get a closer look Matthew Bersi, assistant professor, received a three-year, $750,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study the role of the cadherin-11 protein in the mechanical injury of blood vessels after a heart attack and how cells respond to promote disease. The grant is a continuation of NIHfunded mechanobiology research he began as a postdoctoral researcher at Vanderbilt University.

Previously, Bersi found in a mouse model that blocking activity of the cadherin-11 protein after a heart attack had a beneficial effect in the heart — the heart was not as damaged as it would have been with the protein, but had a detrimental effect on the remodeling of blood vessels.

“In the early work, we found that by modulating the activity of this protein, we’re affecting the immune system, and that change in the immune system is causing the disease to be worse in the vasculature,” Bersi said. “Now, we’re investigating the mechanisms behind that to identify new directions in the treatment of this pathology. Our hypothesis is that we would alter the immune activity contributing to the disease and reduce the vessel remodeling.”

Federal funding for rapid COVID-19 test goes to McKelvey Engineering researchers Professor Srikanth Singamaneni and his team have developed a rapid, highly sensitive and accurate biosensor based on an ultrabright fluorescent nanoprobe, which has the potential to be broadly deployed.

Called plasmonic-fluor, the ultrabright fluorescent nanoprobe can also help in resource-limited conditions because it requires fewer complex instruments to read the results. The National Science Foundation has awarded Singamaneni and his team a $100,008 grant toward developing a COVID-19 test using plasmonic-fluor.

Singamaneni hypothesizes their plasmonic-fluor-based biosensor will be 100 times more sensitive compared with the conventional SARS-CoV-2 antibody detection method.

Increased sensitivity would allow clinicians and researchers to more easily find positive cases and lessen the chance of false negatives.

MEMS innovation

st. lo u i s i s t he

No. 2 city fo r sta rt u ps (Forbes)

WashU and St. Louis resources and accelerators:

Student organizations for MEMS students

» Arch Grants

American Society of Mechanical Engineers

» Cambridge Innovation Center St. Louis

American Institute of Aeronautics Astronautics

» Cortex Innovation Community

Design/Build/Fly

» Discovery Competition

Engineers Without Borders

» Office of Technology Management

WashU Racing (Formula SAE) WashU Rocketry

Mentoring programs

Taylor Tuleja BS in Mechanical Engineering MS in Aerospace Engineering Class of 2019 Member of Design/Build/Fly

» Skandalaris Center​for Interdisciplinary Innovation & Entrepreneurship » Sling Health Network

Mentor Collective

» T-Rex Technology Incubator

Deloitte Mentor Program

» Venture Cafe

Regional Business Council

“We had one of the riskiest and most complex designs at competition; we tried to incorporate thrust vectoring into our aircraft, which no one else attempted. I think we placed so high on the report because of the complexity of our design, and I think the judges were impressed by how incredibly advanced our analysis of design was.”

The Boeing Co. WashU Engineering Mentor Program Women & Engineering Department of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science

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WashU MEMS outcomes

t o p co m p ani e s :

What do recent BS graduates do after graduation?

Baker Hughes GE

Accenture bioMerieux The Boeing Co. Burns & McDonnell Engineering Cummins Inc.

70.3%

2%

entered the wo rkfo rce

volu nt e e r , oth e r

Direct Color Systems Emerson Climate Technologies Inc. Epic General Motors Johnson Controls

in te r ns h ip, co- o p, r e se a r c h

6%

Dewberry

L’Oreal USA Inc. NASA McKinsey & Co.

21.8% co ntinued educatio n

MIT Lincoln Laboratory Northrop Grumman Corp.

Patriot Machine Inc. Peace Corps Purdue Orbital Sider + Byers Sitton Energy Solutions SpaceX Spartan Light Metal Products

Average starting salary for 2019 BS graduates

$72,833

Stryker Tesla Texas Instruments United Technologies Corp.

Visa Inc. t o p gradu at e s cho o l s : Carnegie Mellon University

Leadership

Cornell University Duke University Georgia Institute of Technology

Philip Bayly

Harvard University

The Lee Hunter Distinguished Professor and department chair

Purdue University

pvb@wustl.edu

Massachusetts Institute of Technology University of Michigan University of Pennsylvania University of Washington

Department of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science mems.wustl.edu • #WashUengineers