Director's Message:
I hope the start of Autumn has you energized! As I fondly look back over a very nice summer here in Chicago and see the start of a new quarter and recent articles mentioned here in this newsletter, I am excited at the possibilities about to unfold. I see groundbreaking science and engineering in human health, materials that enable this that are engineered at the molecular level, modeling and deciphering data processing in organisms, outreach to future scholars, engineers, scientists, and inspirational leaders and networks which work together, lowering barriers and getting to the grand challenges. On top of these developments, we also have a new Dean of the PME, Professor Nadya Mason, who succeeds founding Dean Matt Tirrell. She officially starts October 1st and we are all excited at the transition and curious about the directions she will take us in!
The end of August saw the completion of the annual Science and Engineering Industry Expo - a very lively and successful talent recruitment forum, followed by Industry Networks Day (pictures here), a convening of creative and inspirational industrial innovation leaders, faculty, postdocs, students, and other curious folk. Outcomes from these events were very satisfied attendees with new ideas, contacts, friends, and directions for exploration. Keep an eye out for the Science and Engineering Industry Expo and Industry Networks Day 2024 in this newsletter starting in the Spring edition!
Being able to communicate highly technical ideas to broad audiences is a critical skill as many of you have noted! While the PME culture and environment has been set up to integrate this practice, we also have highly capable staff who help refine the soft skills that give our students uniquely added dimensions. We have also just started our third cohort for the Communications skills for Industry Positions program (CSIP) at the PME. This is a 5-week workshop for senior PhD students and postdocs which provides frameworks, networks of experienced and friendly advisors, and bandwidth, to refine and deliver a research pitch that is accessible to a broad industrial audience. The participants are judged by a panel of industry leaders as a capstone project and come away from this workshop with a more impactful elevator pitch as well as a better understanding of why that is. If there is interest in learning more about this, please feel free to reach out to me.
Collaborations and partnerships start with small steps - meeting a student, faculty, staff member, or an unexpected industry peer; discovering mutual interests and finding resonance; building relationships, trust, and champions with short term wins, and building a culture of innovation as part of the local ecosystem. I'm here to plant the seed - and to present interesting and unique opportunities that I've discovered myself. With your curiosity, I know we can make this a mutual win. I'll leave here with the group picture from Industry Networks Day 2023!
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Felix Lu
Director of Corporate Engagement
The Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering
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Recruiting Advanced-Degree Talent at PME
From immunoengineers, materials scientists, computational experts, and quantum engineers, PME offers a wealth of advanced-degree talent pools with extensive technical and professional training. If you are interested in recruiting PME master’s students, PhD students, and postdocs, please reach out directly to Briana Konnick, PME’s Director of Career Development (bkonnick@uchicago.edu). Some common opportunities for engagement include:
- Host an on-campus or virtual information session
- Share jobs and internships
- Interview trainees on-campus or virtually
- Host a coffee chat or roundtable discussion for more informal engagement
Allow us to create tailored offerings that meet your hiring objectives. Reach out today to set up a meeting!
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Industry Networks Day - cohosted with the UChicago MRSEC brought in a number of industry speakers and panelists to discuss Innovation Ecosystems. Collaborations, bottlenecks, and how the Space economy might jumpstart new areas were discussed. Some of the highlights are shown below. I hope you can join us for Industry Networks day 2024!
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UChicago/Argonne and PME technological strengths (from a faculty survey) |
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Environment fate of materials and sustainability
Sensing technology and sustainability
Polymer circularity
Resource recovery
Critical material supply chain
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Green batteries
Critical materials life cycle analysis
AI/Machine Learning applied to sustainability
Carbon capture
Solar Technology
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A new type of vaccine developed by researchers at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) has shown in the lab setting that it can completely reverse autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis and type 1 diabetes — all without shutting down the rest of the immune system.
A typical vaccine teaches the human immune system to recognize a virus or bacteria as an enemy that should be attacked. The new “inverse vaccine” does just the opposite: it removes the immune system’s memory of one molecule. While such immune memory erasure would be unwanted for infectious diseases, it can stop autoimmune reactions like those seen in multiple sclerosis, type I diabetes, or rheumatoid arthritis, in which the immune system attacks a person’s healthy tissues.
The inverse vaccine, described in Nature Biomedical Engineering, takes advantage of how the liver naturally marks molecules from broken-down cells with “do not attack” flags to prevent autoimmune reactions to cells that die by natural processes. PME researchers coupled an antigen — a molecule being attacked by the immune system— with a molecule resembling a fragment of an aged cell that the liver would recognize as friend, rather than foe. The team showed how the vaccine could successfully stop the autoimmune reaction associated with a multiple-sclerosis-like disease.
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Hubbell’s work has revolutionized the fields of nanoscale bioengineering and regenerative medicine, exemplifying the spirit of innovation and excellence that the Kabiller Prize represents. He also has demonstrated a commitment to advancing scientific discovery for the betterment of humanity.
“Receiving the Kabiller Prize in Nanoscience and Nanomedicine is a true honor,” said Hubbell, the Eugene Bell Professor in Tissue Engineering at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. “I undertake research in nanomedicine from an engineering perspective, diving deeply into the biology with the hope and goal of improving lives. Together with my colleagues and students, I am confident we will continue to make advances.”
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Inverse vaccines are opposite of the vaccines we have come to know. Instead of giving a shot to rev up the immune system, these vaccines give orders to stop the immune response to certain cells.
Chicago area doctors believe with the inverse vaccine, they may have found the key to disabling some of the most debilitating autoimmune diseases.
Dr. Jeffrey Hubbell is an immuno engineer with the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering
“A regulatory vaccine, an inverse vaccine, revs up regulatory mechanisms to protect your own cells,” he said.
Think of it as the opposite of a typical vaccine. Researchers at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering have figured out a way to tell the immune system which cells in the body to leave alone. In other words, mark healthy cells otherwise destroyed by multiple sclerosis, Type 1 diabetes or celiac disease.
“These diseases like auto immunity and allergy are usually treated by broad immune suppression, which has its downsides,” Hubbell said. “It would be fantastic to develop an approach that could do it in a very specific way so you leave the rest of immunity intact.”
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Vaccines aimed at dampening the immune response could revolutionize the treatment of autoimmune diseases
How do these vaccines work? Let’s start with a little immunology 101. We tend to think of our immune system as a beefy bodyguard, fighting off pathogens that seek to harm us. But it has another, equally important job. “Mostly our immune system ignores stuff that it’s being exposed to all the time,” says Megan Levings at the BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute in Vancouver (and a member of Anokion’s scientific advisory board). That includes “all the food we eat, all the bacteria that live on our bodies, all the funguses and mold in the environment.”
The capacity to ignore—known as immune tolerance—isn’t passive. The immune system learns which things are dangerous and which are not, and stores that memory in specialized cells. When the system makes a mistake and flags a harmless protein as dangerous, the mixup can cause serious problems—allergies, autoimmune diseases, and other types of immune disorders.
With traditional vaccines, the goal is to deliver a foreign substance in a way that raises alarms. That’s why vaccines are often combined with ingredients called adjuvants, which provoke a stronger immune response. (mRNA vaccines don’t need adjuvants because the immune system already sees genetic material as a threat.) With inverse vaccines, also called tolerogenic vaccines because they provoke tolerance, the goal is to train the immune system to recognize that a particular target is harmless.
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When she arrived in Beijing as a new university student, Prof. Yu-Ying He was struck by the contrast to the rural area where she grew up, and especially the amount of pollution in the air, a major issue during that time.
“It constantly made me think about how different environments can lead to differences in our health, even when we’re working with a very similar genome,” she said. “It made me wonder how the biology works when we’re exposed to certain chemicals or radiation or even biological factors, like a virus. These things can put an imprint on our bodies, but we don’t always know what the long-term effects will be.”
These questions drove He to pursue her PhD in chemistry, seeking to understand how differences in the air and water of different environments and radiation can affect change at the molecular level.
“Of course, a lot of toxins are chemicals,” she said, “So that gives me some advantage when looking into biochemical interactions and working to improve our understanding of environmental health in a broader sense.”
Now, as a professor of medicine at the University of Chicago, He investigates how environmental exposures to toxins can trigger changes in a cell’s epitranscriptome, rendering it more vulnerable to cancer. While some may be familiar with the epigenome, which encompasses the modifications that influence how DNA is transcribed, the epitranscriptome is a map of the modifications made to the RNA within a cell, which can affect how and which proteins are produced.
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Chibueze Amanchukwu, a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering focusing on electrochemical energy storage and conversion, has been awarded the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2023 Early Career Research Program. The awardees will receive five-year grants to investigate quantum field theory and electrochemical energy storage.
Amanchukwu will receive $1M over five years to study how modulating the electrolyte behavior and solvation controls the electrocatalytic conversion of carbon monoxide to valuable fuels and chemicals. Success in this work will provide a pathway for clean energy deployment and will transform future chemical manufacturing.
His research group broadly combines data science, computation, and experiments to address challenges facing batteries and electrocatalytic conversions.
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At UChicago Charter Schools’ Woodlawn campus, 20 rising 6th and 7th grade girls from the South Side recently wrapped up a two-week STEM camp. Campers practiced coding and quantum computing, learned the fundamentals of cryptography, applied algebraic reasoning, and taste tested astronaut ice cream, among other STEM-centric activities. The experience and several others like it were made possible, in part, by a new fund and a broader University of Chicago effort to make the sciences more inclusive.
Led by UChicago in partnership with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Argonne National Laboratory, and Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory and coordinated by UChicago’s Office of Civic Engagement (OCE) and the Office of Science, Innovation, National Labs, and Global Initiatives (SING), the Inclusive Innovation initiative aims to engage local students, educators, and workers and connect them to the city’s growing scientific ecosystem, thereby helping to generate a diverse talent pipeline in the sciences and spur economic growth on the historically under-resourced South Side. The annual $150,000 Inclusive Innovation Fund is one way the initiative is starting to lay a foundation for positive impact.
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UChicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) professor Aaron Esser-Kahn is taking his years of research on vaccine adjuvants — ingredients that help boost the immune response in vaccines — and combining it with the expertise of Inimmune Inc., a biotech company developing the next generation of immunotherapies.
With the help of faculty across UChicago, the team aims to create a flu vaccine that has fewer side effects, making it safer for vulnerable populations. The new five-year contract will fund the research necessary to prepare the vaccine for human clinical trials.
“We’re doing the work to make it clear that we could reduce side effects substantially,” Esser-Kahn said. “Our goal is to make a safer flu vaccine for the elderly, and we need to make the case for why ours would be better than others.”
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Structure of polyelectrolyte complexes could lead to better drugs and technology, say UChicago scientists
For years, we’ve known that a special kind of molecular assembly known as a “polyelectrolyte complex” helps your cells keep themselves organized. These complexes are very good at forming interfaces to keep two liquids separated: your cells use them to create compartments. These abilities have led scientists to consider them for technological applications, including filtering water, better batteries, and even underwater glue, as well as for better pharmaceutical drugs.
But for decades, no one knew exactly how the regions looked inside a polyelectrolyte complex. There are positively charged and negatively charged chains, but how do they line up? Were they arranged in neat alternating lines, or more like what a Russian scientist termed “scrambled eggs”?
A new study from the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering has laid out the internal structure of polyelectrolyte complexes for the first time.
“Knowing the molecular structure means you can synthesize them and prepare them more precisely, which creates opportunities for applications,” said study co-author Juan de Pablo, the Liew Family Professor of Molecular Engineering and senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory.
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Born in the small Panamanian city of Santiago, Carlos Medina Jimenez knew from an early age that in order to become the type of engineer he wanted, he’d need to journey far from home. That dream led him 2,400 miles north to the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME), where he’s now tapping into one of engineering’s most mercurial and sought-after materials—zwitterionic polymers.
Its name drawn from the German word for two (Zwei), zwitterionic polymers are a type of polyelectrolyte, or charged polymer, that are unique for their ability to hold both a positive and negative charge in each piece of their molecular chain. That attribute makes the polymers particularly effective at repelling unwanted microbial organisms—a helpful feature for several industries that rely on anti-fouling technology. Potential applications include bacteria-resistant coatings for biomedical implants, dirt-repelling coatings for water desalination membranes, or hull coatings on marine vessels.
Medina, a fourth-year PhD student mentored by Professor Matthew Tirrell, was turned onto zwitterionic polymers when he joined Pritzker Molecular Engineering. To him, the material presents a tempting intellectual challenge, one that—if he can solve it—might unlock profoundly beneficial technologies for society at large.
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In his lab at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, professor, protein engineer and computational biologist Juan Mendoza researches the immune system to engineer cancer treatments. It’s work he came to a little later in life — and it’s in a field he said his immigrant parents couldn’t have imagined for their son as they raised him in California.
“I never knew science could be a career because my parents were from a small farming town, don’t speak English,” Mendoza said. “It was just not a pathway that we even thought was possible.”
Mendoza started out studying biochemistry at San Francisco State University, but pivoted to a career in IT before finishing his degree. After the post-9/11 recession, Mendoza returned to pursuing a career in science, where he said support via mentorship and salaried fellowships allowed him to reach his potential.
“I remember working as a kid up through college,” Mendoza said. “And so the focus on my academics wasn’t always there. So I wasn’t the strongest student. … After coming back to finish my bachelor’s degree, I got introduced to these fellowship programs that allowed me to do research, and it paid me a salary so I could focus on my research and studies, and that made a world of difference.”
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Center aims to establish a new field of physics to understand adaptation in living matter
The National Science Foundation has awarded $15.5 million to researchers at the University of Chicago over six years to establish a new field of physics that focuses on how living matter can store, retrieve, and process information.
“We aim to establish a new field of physics that focuses on how living matter adapts to its environment on timescales ranging from milliseconds to billions of years,” said Gardel, director of the James Franck Institute and member of the Institute for Biophysical Dynamics. “This will both deepen our understanding of living systems and open opportunities for new technologies.”
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New institute will be an international hub focused on fundamental questions
Northwestern University and the University of Chicago have been awarded $50 million from the National Science Foundation and the Simons Foundation to establish the National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology or NITMB, to be based in downtown Chicago. The institute will be the first of its kind in the U.S.
Mathematics has the potential to distill biology’s complexity and predict future phenomena; the center seeks to develop and use math to investigate some of the most important fundamental questions in the life sciences.
Northwestern leads the center, with the University of Chicago as key partner. Together, the two universities will create a nationwide collaborative research community that will generate new mathematical results and uncover the “rules of life” through theories, data-informed mathematical models, and computational and statistical tools. The institute also will foster international collaborations at the interface of the mathematical and biological sciences, helping establish a vibrant worldwide research network for decades to come.
Foundational advances in biology and mathematics will lead to increased knowledge of human intelligence, advances in the biomedical sciences and better understanding of the effects of climate change upon plants and animals, among other benefits. And the institute offers bidirectional opportunities: Discoveries in biology also will motivate new developments in mathematics.
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From a jellyfish meet-and-greet to a casual chat about the origins of the universe, organizers say there’s going to be something for everyone at the South Side Science Festival.
The event brings out hundreds of University of Chicago scientists who will take over the campus offering panels, experiments and demonstrations to fascinate the whole family.
Now in its second year, Christian Mitchell, University of Chicago vice president for civic engagement, said the festival is a way for the institution to better integrate itself into the community while also allowing people who have historically felt shut out of STEM careers to see themselves in the sciences.
“We named it the South Side Science Festival for a reason — because we want to make sure that folks from the South Side come. The University of Chicago has been here for many, many years, but we’re really trying to open our arms to get more folks to see themselves in this field, to see themselves as being welcome on campus and be able to get involved with free programs that the university offers year round,” Mitchell said. “We want to make sure that folks from the South Side can get into these careers because they are the careers of the future — biotech, life sciences, quantum physics. So when folks come, they can learn about internships that they can have in STEM, they can get connected to folks who are doing and practicing the work right now.”
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Why startup founders, researchers and students say the Midwest is the premier hub for quantum—and how UChicago is playing a big role
As a postdoc at the University of Oxford in England, Mirella Koleva spent her nights and weekends developing a model that accurately predicted light-matter interactions at the quantum level.
When it was clear that the model worked and could be valuable across industries to simulate quantum-photonic devices, Koleva left academia, incorporated a business called Quantopticon and received a startup grant from the British government.
But finding additional funding proved difficult. To continue growing the business, she looked across the Atlantic Ocean to Illinois. In 2021, the company was accepted into Duality, the first accelerator in the US that exclusively supports startup companies focused on quantum technology, an area that is poised to drive revolutionary advances across multiple industries by harnessing the properties of nature’s tiniest particles.
It wasn’t a brief trip across the pond. Two years later, Koleva still lives in Chicago, and the company is in the process of moving its headquarters here.
“Chicago is the premier hub for quantum in the United States,” she said. “It’s where many of our target customers are based, and there are just more players involved in the ecosystem who want to collaborate. So, we absolutely want to have an office here.”
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Engineering the Summer is an annual series following molecular engineering students as they embark on summer internships and career experiences.
This summer, PhD student Emily Doyle, who works in Amanchukwu Lab at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME), travelled to Nairobi, Kenya for a two-week workshop. At the Joint Undertaking for an African Materials Institute (JUAMI), PME researchers and other renowned international experts participated in research talks, workshops, and collaborative project proposals.
Please tell us about JUAMI 2023 program
Over two weeks, we had talks each day focused on different topics: photovoltaics, batteries, fuel cells, electrolysis, membranes and separation technologies, nanomaterials, and life cycle analysis. This culminated in a final proposal, for which we spent the first week discussing research project ideas, entrepreneurial dreams, and outreach activities to form groups based on our different areas of interest. In the second week we built a proposal of a project that our group would work together to complete.
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Adarsh Suresh used lessons from improv to help compress his research into compelling, and very brief, presentation
Adarsh Suresh came to the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago in 2018 to work on alleviating global water stress. He also joined an improv team at the Revival in Hyde Park.
Both of these passions later came together in a somewhat surprising way.
In May, the graduate student competed in UChicago’s Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition. Inspired by his students and his improv team, he compressed years of research into a compelling three-minute presentation—and took first place among 13 entrants. He won $1,000.
The 3MT competition, which UChicagoGRAD brought to UChicago in 2018, is an ideal forum for sharing research with global impact potential because the presentations are aimed at a non-specialist audience. Students get the chance to hone their academic, presentation and research communication skills with a presentation limited to three minutes and a single slide.
Since 2021, 3MT at UChicago has been a collaboration between UChicagoGRAD and Alumni Relations and Development, and the competitions have attracted a broad audience of alumni, students of all disciplines, family, staff, postdocs, faculty, journalists and friends.
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Does your technical management want an executive understanding of Quantum Engineering and how it may benefit your company? |
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Boulder, Colorado-based Icarus Quantum is developing on-demand single- and entangled-photon generators for scalable quantum networking applications.
The first stage in creating a scalable quantum network requires the consistent generation of photons, the smallest possible quantum of light. Where do these photons come from? If you ask Poolad Imany, founder and CEO of Icarus Quantum, he’d say from devices developed by his company.
Imany’s quantum startup launched in January 2020, and its leadership team includes Shuo Sun, assistant professor of physics at the University of Colorado-Boulder, who serves as the company’s scientific advisor. Its technology can generate high-quality quantum light and entangled photons reliably and efficiently, in contrast to other generators in the market that work only a fraction of the time and limit the reach of quantum networks.
“The problem with other devices that exist today is that they work probabilistically,” said Imany, “meaning that every time that I want an entangled pair, the probability of getting an entangled pair is very low – about 1 percent. It’s a fundamental limit with these devices because if you try to increase the probability, the quality just drops. That sets a very severe limit on the reach of today’s quantum networks, limiting them to about 100 miles.
“Our devices generate quantum light on demand, or deterministically, meaning this success rate can go up and up. It’s limited by fabrication imperfections, of course, but it doesn’t have a fundamental ceiling anymore. With that, we can extend the reach of quantum networks to even intercontinental distances.”
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Discussions with leading thinkers to examine issues across academia and society
The University of Chicago was founded in 1890 upon the idea that freedom of expression is vitally important to discovery and rigorous scholarly inquiry. For generations, UChicago community members have taken on the challenging work of upholding this vital academic principle as an essential part of UChicago culture, solidifying the University as a leading global advocate for the advancement of free expression.
This fall, the University of Chicago will build upon its historic commitment to free expression by launching the Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, which aims to promote the understanding, practice and advancement of free and open discourse throughout the University and beyond, while addressing present-day challenges.
A two-day event at the David Rubenstein Forum on Oct. 5-6 will celebrate the opening of the Forum on Free Inquiry and Expression. It will feature a series of intellectual discussions among leading thinkers across diverse fields who will examine issues around free expression—at UChicago and across academia and society more broadly. All the daytime events will be webcast on the Chicago Forum website.
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A new type of chemistry performed at very cold temperatures on very small particles enables quick, precise reactions.
For the first time, researchers have observed "quantum superchemistry" in the lab.
Long theorized but never before seen, quantum superchemistry is a phenomenon in which atoms or molecules in the same quantum state chemically react more rapidly than do atoms or molecules that are in different quantum states. A quantum state is a set of characteristics of a quantum particle, such as spin (angular momentum) or energy level.
To observe this new super-charged chemistry, researchers had to coax not just atoms, but entire molecules, into the same quantum state. When they did, however, they saw that the chemical reactions occurred collectively, rather than individually. And the more atoms were involved, meaning the greater the density of the atoms, the quicker the chemical reactions went.
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A graphene-based sensor uses AI to detect tiny levels of harmful bacteria and heavy metals
Hundreds of thousands of people die from drinking unsafe water every year, according to the World Health Organization. For example, diarrhea transmitted from bacterial contamination is estimated to cause over 500,000 deaths annually. Toxic heavy metals in drinking water, such as arsenic, lead, and mercury, also pose huge health risks. And climate change will only exacerbate the risks of water-related diseases, according to the WHO.
Sensors that can accurately and quickly detect such contaminants could prevent many waterborne illnesses and deaths. Now, engineers have developed a path to mass-manufacture high-performance graphene sensors that can detect heavy metals and bacteria in flowing tap water. This advance, reported in Nature Communications, could bring down the cost of such sensors to just US $1 each, allowing people to test their drinking water for toxins at home.
The sensors have to be extraordinarily sensitive to catch the minute concentrations of toxins that can cause harm. For example, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration states that bottled water must have a lead concentration of no more than 5 parts per billion.
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A new method called ‘skeletal editing’ offers a hugely simplified way to alter matter, paving the way for world-changing innovations in personalised medicine and sustainable plastics
Ask Mark Levin what excites him about his work, and the associate professor of chemistry at the University of Chicago could double as a poet. “We’re one of the only fields of science that at its core is about making things that have never existed anywhere else in the universe, and would never have existed if we didn’t intervene,” he enthuses. “We get to manipulate matter at the atomic level to shape it to whatever purpose we can think of.”
Some of those things that would never have existed are of immense value to humanity. From synthetic dyes to celluloid, materials to medicines, synthetic chemistry has made our world a richer place, and helped us live longer to enjoy it.
With enough effort, today’s chemists can synthesise almost any molecule imaginable, but their methods are limited, relying on the molecular building blocks available and potentially requiring many steps. “The approach that has been adopted to do this is to add other chemical groups to the already existing molecule, which changes it only on its periphery,” explains Prof Richmond Sarpong, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Directing light from place to the place is the backbone of our modern world. Beneath the oceans and across continents, fiber optic cables carry light that encodes everything from YouTube videos to banking transmissions—all inside strands about the size of a hair.
Prof. Jiwoong Park, however, wondered what would happen if you made even thinner and flatter strands—in effect, so thin that they’re actually 2D instead of 3D. What would happen to the light?
Through a series of innovative experiments, he and his team found that a sheet of glass crystal just a few atoms thick could trap and carry light. Not only that, but it was surprisingly efficient and could travel relatively long distances—up to a centimeter, which is very far in the world of light-based computing.
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The latest updates and ways to engage:
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Articles of interest to our corporate affiliates, but not associated with the University of Chicago |
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The U.S. government is planning to crack down on power plants’ greenhouse gas emissions, and, as a result, a lot of money is about to pour into technology that can capture carbon dioxide from smokestacks and lock it away.
That raises an important question: Once carbon dioxide is captured and stored, how do we ensure it stays put?
Power plants that burn fossil fuels, such as coal and natural gas, release a lot of carbon dioxide. As that CO₂ accumulates in the atmosphere, it traps heat near the Earth’s surface, driving global warming.
But if CO₂ emissions can be captured instead and locked away for thousands of years, existing fossil fuel power plants could meet the proposed new federal standards and reduce their impact on climate change.
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Here’s how to change that.
A critical technology area promises to transform nearly every industry dependent on speed and processing power, from agriculture and financial services to health care and defense: quantum information science and technology, or QIST. QIST is an interdisciplinary field studying how to apply the laws of quantum physics to various forms of information processing, including computation and messaging. Quantum technologies’ promising but unknown potential has led the Biden administration to rank U.S. leadership in this area among its highest priorities, but the United States currently lacks access to the talent required to maintain competitiveness. The United States’ QIST talent shortage is a national security risk—and the White House has no solid plan to fill critical vacancies.
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By Justin Worland, Senior Correspondent
I’m coming to you from Paris this week where I’ve been participating in the ChangeNow climate solutions conference. You’ll be hearing more from the conference—TIME is a media partner—in future columns. Today, I want to share some of what I learned in Brussels earlier this week meeting with European Union officials and private sector voices in the bloc’s de facto capital.
The E.U. is in the middle of implementing its Green Deal program with a wide range of implications for how the world tackles climate change. Perhaps nothing is of more obvious import to global business leaders than the bloc’s coming climate disclosure rules, which are scheduled to be finalized next month. The rules will start in Europe, but will soon affect companies around the globe.
That will likely include more than 3,000 U.S. and 1,300 Canadian companies, according to an analysis shared with me by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), an international standards organization whose work has informed the new E.U. directive. Any company that isn’t paying attention risks being left unprepared.
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Investment in clean energy technologies is significantly outpacing spending on fossil fuels as affordability and security concerns triggered by the global energy crisis strengthen the momentum behind more sustainable options, according to a new IEA report.
About USD 2.8 trillion is set to be invested globally in energy in 2023, of which more than USD 1.7 trillion is expected to go to clean technologies – including renewables, electric vehicles, nuclear power, grids, storage, low-emissions fuels, efficiency improvements and heat pumps – according to the IEA’s latest World Energy Investment report. The remainder, slightly more than USD 1 trillion, is going to coal, gas and oil.
Annual clean energy investment is expected to rise by 24% between 2021 and 2023, driven by renewables and electric vehicles, compared with a 15% rise in fossil fuel investment over the same period. But more than 90% of this increase comes from advanced economies and China, presenting a serious risk of new dividing lines in global energy if clean energy transitions don’t pick up elsewhere.
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A “more is merrier” approach to computer chip making would create the vibrant and fast breakthroughs that America needs to succeed
Making the next generation of computer chips demands the care, on an industrial scale, of making a gourmet meal. The finest ingredients, techniques, tools and, of course, the sharpest minds, must whip together something transformative. In kitchens missing just one, the meal falls short.
In that regard, the Department of Commerce will soon command a feast of sorts, doling out $11 billion for research and development under the CHIPS Act to revive America’s sluggish chipmaking industry—now making only 12 percent of chips worldwide. In passing CHIPS, America asserted a bold desire to return to the forefront of chipmaking. Between desire and doing, however, lies a profound gap. It will not be easily spanned.
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The US is spending billions to boost semiconductor manufacturing. For the new plants to crank out silicon chips, they need to source millions of gallons of ultrapure water.
Building a semiconductor factory requires enormous quantities of land and energy, then some of the most precise machinery on Earth to operate. The complexity of chip fabs, as they are called, is one reason why the US Congress last year committed more than $50 billion to boost US chip production in a bid to make the country more technologically independent.
But as the US seeks to boot up more fabs, it also needs to source more of a less obvious resource: water. Take Intel’s ambitious plan to build a $20 billion mega-site outside Columbus, Ohio. The area already has three water plants that together provide 145 million gallons of drinking water each day, but officials are planning to spend heavily on a fourth to, at least in part, accommodate Intel.
Water might not sound like a conventional ingredient of electronics manufacturing, but it plays an essential role in cleaning the sheets, or wafers, of silicon that are sliced and processed into computer chips. A single fab might use millions of gallons in a single day, according to the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET)—about the same amount of water as a small city in a year.
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Bacterial life is astonishingly varied. These single-celled organisms come as spheres, rods, spirals and corkscrews. A few are a centimetre long; most are tens of thousands of times smaller. They have been found on Mount Everest, in Antarctica, and deep within Earth’s crust. And yet virtually every bacterial species ever found shares one trait: its members do not like living alone.
Matthew Fields, a microbiologist at Montana State University, reckons that most of the bacteria living on the planet exist in colonies. Known as biofilms, these slimy aggregates are held together by strands of DNA, proteins and other molecules recycled from the cells of dead neighbours. Such sociability is ancient. Some of the oldest known evidence of life on Earth are fossilised biofilms known as stromatolites. A group of stromatolites in Western Australia are thought to be 3.5bn years old.
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A slowdown in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation would have disastrous effects
ASK A CLIMATE scientist about possible “tipping points” and you are likely to hear about AMOC. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is a stream of water which, as it flows from the southern to the northern (hence “meridional”) part of the Atlantic, grows cooler and saltier. Eventually it sinks to the ocean floor, 3km down, and flows back (hence “overturning”) across the abyssal plain. Mounting evidence suggests that the system that helps distribute heat around the world is weakening. Why do scientists find this so worrying?
AMOC is something of a poster child for tipping points, which are notional thresholds beyond which systems that have been responding gradually and incrementally to global warming undergo sudden and dramatic changes. One reason for this is its sheer power and the scope of its influence. The rate at which it transfers heat towards the pole—about one petawatt, or 1,000 terawatts, roughly 60 times the rate at which humans produce energy by burning fossil fuels in factories, furnaces, power stations, cars, aircraft and everything else—accounts for about a quarter of all the northward flow of heat from the tropics. At least half of the water that gets into the ocean depths does so in the North Atlantic.
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Overuse is draining and damaging aquifers nationwide, a New York Times data investigation revealed.
Global warming has focused concern on land and sky as soaring temperatures intensify hurricanes, droughts and wildfires. But another climate crisis is unfolding, underfoot and out of view.
Many of the aquifers that supply 90 percent of the nation’s water systems, and which have transformed vast stretches of America into some of the world’s most bountiful farmland, are being severely depleted. These declines are threatening irreversible harm to the American economy and society as a whole.
The New York Times conducted a months-long examination of groundwater depletion, interviewing more than 100 experts, traveling the country and creating a comprehensive database using millions of readings from monitoring sites. The investigation reveals how America’s life-giving resource is being exhausted in much of the country, and in many cases it won’t come back. Huge industrial farms and sprawling cities are draining aquifers that could take centuries or millenniums to replenish themselves if they recover at all.
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News Release | September 12, 2023
WASHINGTON ― If the U.S. is to continue to lead in space exploration and reap the benefits it brings to society, the nation must substantially increase its investment in NASA’s Division of Biological and Physical Sciences (BPS) and associated research, infrastructure, and workforce, says a new decadal survey from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The report lays out the key scientific challenges facing NASA, its Artemis program, and other exploration and scientific goals, and presents a blueprint to advance the science needed in the coming decade.
The report says a new era of space exploration and space-based discovery is beginning, with the U.S. seeking to return to the moon and put humans on Mars for the first time. This era is marked by international efforts and a level of public interest not seen since the Apollo era. Especially notable is a large and continually expanding commercial launch capacity, especially in low Earth orbit, and planned commercial space stations. In this burgeoning space environment, NASA will play a leading role, but one different from previous eras. NASA will increasingly partner with other government space agencies and commercial entities supporting exploration and development, the report says. The success of NASA and the U.S. space industry will depend on their ability to effectively address the wide range of scientific issues that must be overcome, not only to explore space safely and responsibly ― over ever-increasing durations and distances from Earth ― but also to address vital research questions that can be done only in space environments.
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Does your company want to work with UChicago/PME?
Different ways to explore interactions with the PME:
- Senior design projects
- Internships (undergraduate and graduate students)
- Materials characterization/device fabrication facilities
- Participation in FORUM/Public events
- Give an industry seminar on your job/company/career path!
- Licensing opportunities (I'll connect you with the Polsky center)
- Do you want to do more computational/AI work in your product R&D?
- Ask Felix!
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PARKING - You are welcome to park for free on certain streets if you can find it. The closest parking lot to the Eckhardt Research Center is the North parking lot located at the SE corner of 55th St and South Ellis Ave.
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