2022 Binghamton University Research Annual Report

Binghamton University’s vibrant research community is going to play a huge role in bringing battery manufacturing to New York. That is the exciting outcome of the Build Back Better Regional Challenge. The U.S. Economic Development Administration’s announcement will be a boost for the upstate New York economy, and it marks a significant milestone on our campus as well. New Energy New York, launched in collaboration with partners focused on issues such as battery R&D, supply chain and workforce development, instantly became our largest-ever research initiative.

The news, which we received last fall, followed a year full of encouraging developments.

• Binghamton was again labeled “R1 — very high research activity” in an updated list released by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education.

• Our total research expenditures topped $50 million for the first time in 2021-22. That was a long-held goal and we’re eager to continue building on the growth we’ve seen lately. We’re on track to grow research expenditures for the foreseeable future and expect to approach $60 million in 2022-23.

• Four of our faculty researchers received National Science Foundation CAREER Awards, highly competitive grants for early-career scientists that will help them to establish innovative lines of inquiry.

What’s next? We’re continuing to build capacity for students to participate in research from their earliest days as undergraduates. We’re supporting entrepreneurs through a suite of programs at our downtown business incubator and beyond. And we’re investing in research infrastructure that will enable studies in fields ranging from physics to neuroscience and from nursing to mechanical engineering.

S3IP, A NEW YORK STATE CENTER OF EXCELLENCE AT BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY

Center for Advanced Microelectronics Manufacturing

Center for Autonomous Solar Power

Center for Energy-Smart Electronic Systems

Center for Heterogeneous Integration Research in Packaging

Integrated Electronics Engineering Center

NorthEast Center for Chemical Energy Storage

FEDERALLY DESIGNATED RESEARCH CENTERS AT BINGHAMTON

Center for Energy-Smart Electronic Systems (ES2)

A National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center

Developmental Exposure Alcohol Research Center (DEARC)

A National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism Alcohol Research Center

New York Node of the Next Flex Flexible Hybrid Electronics Manufacturing Institute

A Department of Defense Manufacturing Innovation Institute

NorthEast Center for Chemical Energy Storage (NECCES)

An Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the Department of Energy Office of Science

Bahgat Sammakia, Vice President for Research

University-led initiative wins $113M to bolster U.S. battery manufacturing, reinvigorate region

Binghamton University’s New Energy New York project will receive more than $113 million to establish a hub for battery technology innovation in upstate New York. The U.S. Economic Development Administration announced in September 2022 that the region would receive $63.7 million; the State of New York will support the project with an additional $50 million.

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer advocated for the proposal, Binghamton University President Harvey Stenger notes, and New York State Gov. Kathy Hochul offered key financial support. “Distinguished Professor and Nobel Prizewinner Stan Whittingham and our Associate Vice President Per Stromhaug had an idea they believed was crucial to our nation’s energy security,” Stenger says. “We are confident we can turn the Southern Tier and Finger Lakes regions of New York into the national hub for battery innovation, manufacturing and workforce development.”

Schumer says he expects the project to revive the region. “I am proud,” he says, “to deliver this once-in-a-generation investment for Binghamton University to the Southern Tier, America’s home for the future of battery innovation, bringing manufacturing back from overseas, and training thousands of workers for good-paying jobs building an industry that will define this century.”

The University will develop a battery technology and manufacturing center in nearby Endicott. Additional projects will support the battery industry and its supply chain.

“This will enable North America to develop batteries rather than sending our technology overseas,” says Whittingham, an inventor of the lithium-ion battery who helped lead the proposal’s development. “We can’t have a supply chain dominated by any one part of the world. We can have batteries that have ‘Made in America’ stamped on them.”

The team consulted with more than 50 companies from every part of the battery supply chain.

“Everyone we talked to has seen the importance of the project and been excited about being part of it,” Stromhaug says. “We are ready to have programs up and running quickly, with the Endicott pilot manufacturing facility open in a year or two. The program will be a magnet for the region and upstate New York, leading to high-paying jobs in development and manufacturing.”

The iM3NY factory in Endicott is one element of what will be a national hub for battery innovation and manufacturing.

From left: Per Stromhaug, M. Stanley Whittingham and Olga Petrova led development of the NENY initiative.

Artist explores deeper dimensions of climate engineering

Colin Lyons explores connections between climate engineering and alchemy in his art installations.

The assistant professor of art and design at Binghamton secured a series of artist residencies starting in spring 2022 that will take him around the world. With support from a Research and Creation grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, Lyons traveled to Frans Masereel Centrum in Belgium to work on an experimental printmaking project. He spent the summer at MacDowell in New Hampshire and ended the year on a remote island off the coast of Finland. Spring 2023 found him on a sailing vessel in the Arctic circle.

In his projects, Lyons seeks to capture the tensions and possibilities of geoengineering, which involves radical strategies that are, at present, years away from implementation. One such proposal, for example, would use high-altitude jets to spray sulfur particles into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight away from the Earth, mimicking a process seen in volcanic eruptions.

“Geoengineering has a messianic tone to it, a way of absolving us from the sins of the Anthropocene,” he says. “A lot of projects that I’m working on also have a ritual undertone, which is obviously divorced from science and engineering.”

New institute to focus on workforce development

A new Binghamton institute aims to fill a gap in workforce development that’s needed as the Southern Tier pushes to revive manufacturing.

The Institute for Workforce Development Advancement in Research and Programming (iWARP), is led by James Pitarresi, vice provost for online and innovation education.

In 2021, Binghamton University’s divisions of Research and Academic Affairs developed SPREE (Strategic Research Enterprise Evolution) to examine the new federal priorities for research funding, says Michael Jacobson, director of the Office of Strategic Research Initiatives. “Of the four SPREE subcommittees, the one that focused on climate change identified workforce development as a critical issue,” he says. “We have the technological setup, but we just don’t have the workforce to install it. And part of this, too, is to increase diversity in the workforce.”

Pitarresi and Vice President for Research Bahgat Sammakia have already met with local industry and healthcare leaders.

“Workforce development is about a broad range of things,” Sammakia says. “Part is for engineering and manufacturing; we’re already talking with industry about how to bring their workers up to date and how to prepare them. These meetings we are having with the community are about understanding what the local and national needs are and how we can help people get ready.”

He notes that several colleges on campus already have significant individual efforts in workforce development. They hope to enable these programs to grow and support each other.

Pitarresi expects to offer flexible, online courses that can be adapted for different industries. “Say someone in manufacturing needs a program on blockchain and we are able to develop a course for them, and then, someone in the healthcare industry needs a similar program,” he says. “We need to build our programs in a modular fashion that allows us to take our basic blockchain program and pull the pieces we don’t need, add some new pieces and remix it for different industries. That’s the philosophy.”

Colin Lyons’ artistic projects have taken him around the world.

James Pitarresi

Language-learning startup forges international connections

Marisol Marcin found inspiration to start a business at the height of the pandemic. As academia adapted to virtual classrooms in 2020, the Binghamton University lecturer recognized that she already knew how to leverage videoconferencing to help students develop language skills.

When Marcin worked in Binghamton’s Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, she developed a partnership with the prestigious Instituto Caro y Cuervo in Colombia. Binghamton students practiced their language, and the students at Caro y Cuervo experienced Spanish spoken as a foreign language.

“I truly believe that the best way to learn a language is by using it, and it’s about being creative in using technology to connect people,” says Marcin, who holds a master’s degree in integrating technology in the classroom from Walden University and a doctorate from Binghamton’s Translation Research and Instruction Program. “Language is for usage. It’s not about how many questions you can answer correctly or how many words you have memorized.”

As a committee member tasked with revising New York State standards for world languages, Marcin sees the dire need for public school language instructors. She created Lenguas Club (which translates to Languages Club) to help classroom teachers accomplish their goals while increasing students’ proficiency. Her program immerses students in Spanish language and culture by involving them in virtual small group conversations led by a native speaker.

Marcin gained strategic guidance from the Binghamton Accelerator Program, offered by the Division of Research’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Partnerships. She then participated in the regional National Science Foundation I-Corps Program to determine potential customers and explore business models.

In 2022, Lenguas Club began its first pilot with high school students in the Binghamton City School District. As the business grows, Marcin hopes to offer languages besides Spanish and English.

ORGANIZED RESEARCH CENTERS

Center for Advanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging Science (CAMRIS)

Binghamton Biofilm Research Center (BBRC)

Center of Biomanufacturing for Regenerative Medicine (CBRM)

Center for Cognitive Applications (CAPS)

Center for Collective Dynamics of Complex Systems (CoCo)

Center for Development and Behavioral Neuroscience (CDBN)

Center for Healthcare Systems Engineering (CHSE)

Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity (CIAC)

Center for Imaging, Acoustics and Perception Science (CIAPS)

Center for Integrated Watershed Studies (CIWS)

Bernard M. & Ruth R. Bass Center for Leadership Studies (CLS)

Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CEMERS)

Center for Research in Advanced Sensor Technologies and Environmental Sustainability  (CREATES)

Center for Writers (CW)

Center for Translational Stem Cell and Tissue Engineering (CTSCTE)

Public Archaeology Facility (PAF)

Roger L. Kresge Center for Nursing Research (KCNR)

Tick-borne Diseases Center

INSTITUTES FOR ADVANCED STUDIES

Center for Israel Studies (CIS)

Center for Korean Studies (CKS) Human Rights Institute (HRI)

Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities (IASH)

Institute for Asia and Asian Diasporas (IAAD)

Institute for Evolutionary Studies (Evos) Institute for Justice and Well-Being (IJWB)

Watson Institute for Systems Excellence (WISE)

The Binghamton University/Harriet Tubman Center for the Study of Freedom and Equity

Marisol Marcin brings technology to language immersion.

Binghamton researchers win NSF CAREER Awards

Four assistant professors at Binghamton University received CAREER Awards from the National Science Foundation in 2021-2022. The prestigious five-year grants of roughly $500,000 support earlycareer researchers who have the potential to serve as academic role models.

The projects supported by this year’s CAREER awardees will address pressing challenges related to batteries, cloud computing, nanobots and soft electronics.

Chemist Hao Liu will continue his research into sodium-ion batteries.

Lithium-ion batteries power smartphones and tablets, laptops and electric cars. But the silvery metal lithium isn’t so easy to obtain. Sodium-ion batteries are an affordable and promising alternative.

“It’s very cheap and much more abundant than lithium,” Liu explains.

Batteries of this type would be a boon for the growing renewable energy sector, since the forces that generate power are intermittent.

“The sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow, and this requires energy storage on a much larger scale,” Liu says.

Computer scientist Seunghee Shin conducts research that may reduce the communication time between smart devices and the cloud.

His idea is to shorten the distance between devices and the information they need by creating memory caches along the route, which would make cloud-based programs run faster. The innovations rely on technology such as SmartNICs and non-volatile memory, or NVM.

A network interface card, or NIC, is a hardware component that connects a computer to a network, almost always using Ethernet. NVM can retain stored information in memory chips even after the power is removed.

“We’ve never used the SmartNIC this way,” he says. “I just decided to test one to see what would happen. So everything is a challenge.”

Kaiyan Yu, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, hopes to advance nanorobots. Because of the size involved current techniques cannot independently manipulate large numbers of nanoscale objects precisely (the way you might see in a sci-fi movie).

Yu will study ways to overcome these limitations. She hopes to manipulate micro- and nanoparticles with controlled three-dimensional poses and characteristics into functional devices, interconnects and other useful components for a variety of applications, such as building nanorobots that can deliver drugs to cells.

“Right now, because of manufacturing limits, it’s really hard to build this kind of nanorobot with a lot of sensors, strong actuators and on-board batteries, and also have them communicate with each other,” Yu says.

Mechanical engineer Pu Zhang conducts research that could advance soft electronics, devices that can bend or stretch without breaking. One challenge is finding materials that are highly conductive like metals yet remain super-stretchable.

Zhang has an intriguing solution to the problem: Use liquid metal networks in rubber that can deform easily while remaining highly conductive.

The project will build on experiments that Zhang has done on gallium-indium alloy, which has a melting point around 15 degrees Celsius (60 degrees Fahrenheit). That means it is liquid at room temperature. Using a fabrication process Zhang developed, he was able to produce liquid metal network composites with an ultra-low amount of liquid metal, but still maintain high electrical conductivity.

Hao Liu

Seunghee Shin

Kaiyan Yu

Pu Zhang

Office of the Vice President for Research

Binghamton University

PO Box 6000

Binghamton, NY 13902-6000

binghamton.edu/research

Binghamton retains place on list of elite research institutions

Binghamton University kept its place among the elite schools labeled “R1 — very high research activity” in a 2022 list released by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. President Harvey Stenger notes that Binghamton was first named an R1 school in 2018-19. “Staying on the list,” he says, “requires a sustained, high-level effort from researchers and graduate programs across campus.”

Bahgat Sammakia Vice President for Research bahgat@binghamton.edu

Lisa Gilroy

Associate Vice President for Research lgilroy@binghamton.edu

Don Miller Assistant Vice President for Sponsored Programs demiller@binghamton.edu

Nancy Lewis

Assistant Vice President for Research Compliance nlewis@binghamton.edu

Per Stromhaug

Associate Vice President for Innovation and Economic Development per@binghamton.edu

Michael Jacobson

Director of Strategic Research Initiatives mjacobso@binghamton.edu

Rachel Coker

Director of Research

Advancement rcoker@binghamton.edu

Darcy Fauci

Director of Government Relations dfauci@binghamton.edu

On the cover: Hui Zhou, battery facilities manager for the NorthEast Center for Chemical Energy Storage, captured this image of one type of popular cathode material for lithium-ion batteries with a scanning electron microscope.