Professor Jay Lee, a major force in pioneering Industrial AI, aims to create opportunities for both undergraduate and graduate studies to gain experience in the field. Lee is launching an Industrial AI Center at the University of Maryland, with operations expected to begin in September 2023. In conjunction with the center, Lee plans to establish an Industrial AI Foundry, featuring more than 100 industrial data sets, in order to scale up AI education and research.
Faculty Recognition
Associate Professor Ryan D. Sochol has been honored as an inaugural “Rising Star” in the latest issue of Advanced Materials Technologies. Sochol’s “Rising Star” research article —highlighted on the inside front cover of the issue—introduces a three-dimensional (3D) printing approach for building new classes of microneedle arrays that are beneficial for delivering therapies into the brain.

Associate Professor Siddhartha Das has been named an Emerging Investigator by the journal Soft Matter. In conjunction with this recognition, Soft Matter has published a new paper by Das and doctoral student Turash Haque Pial on the properties of polyelectrolyte (PE) brushes. Such brushes are useful in drug delivery, water harvesting, oil treatment, and many other applications.

Featured Papers
Maryland Engineering researchers led by Professor Chunsheng Wang have made a breakthrough in next-generation lithium batteries by developing less flammable electrolytes to enhance the performance and safety of lithium-ion metal batteries. The team has achieved a series of innovative results, with the preliminary work proposing non- flammable solid-state Li metal batteries (Nature Energy, 2023), non-aqueous (Nature, 2023), and aqueous (Nature Sustainability, 2023) electrolytes.

NASA intentionally crashed the DART probe into the surface of a moon orbiting the asteroid Didymos in order to help ascertain whether similar procedures could be used to deflect space objects on a collision course with Earth. Maryland engineers, including postdoctoral researcher Yun Zhang, have since been parsing data gleaned from the mission. Their findings have been published in a series of five papers appearing in Nature.

Student Spotlight
Corinne Martin and Neel Panchwagh, juniors in the Fischell Department of Bioengineering at the University of Maryland, have been awarded 2023 scholarships by the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation, which encourages students to pursue advanced study and research careers in the sciences, engineering and mathematics. Martin and Panchwagh are among 413 Goldwater Scholars selected nationally.