2019 Swanson School of Engineering Annual Report

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH

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S WA N S O N S C H O O L O F E N G I N E E R I N G

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Dear Friends, In retrospect of the past four months, 2019 seems like a decade-old memory. My annual report to you of our research and accomplishments is punctuated by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, it does not lessen the transformative research and accomplishments of the previous year, which I hope you will enjoy with pride for our outstanding faculty, students, and professional staff. If 2019 was a testament to their innovation, this year truly is an exemplar of their dedication to Pitt and the Swanson School of Engineering.

Engineers solve problems that seek to improve the human condition. It is our passion and our determination.

And although the COVID-19 pandemic upended research, teaching and operations in Benedum Hall and across campus, it did not diminish our collective resolve to face this crisis and develop solutions that would support our students’ education as well as find ways to join the fight against the coronavirus. The next page shows you some of the ways that our Swanson School community immediately responded to the challenges faced by our health care workers and patients, as well as industry. You can learn more about how faculty have adapted their research to develop solutions that advance human care and protection at engineering.pitt.edu.

As for 2019, it represents another hallmark of stellar research as well as national and international recognition of our faculty and students. From international conferences and journals to professional society and media recognition, the Swanson School has gained a further foothold as one of the best public engineering schools. Of course, this is also because of your continued support as colleagues and research collaborators, alumni, and benefactors. Your contributions are just as important to our success.

This summer, Pitt and the Swanson School are adapting to the “new normal� while undertaking intensive and multidisciplinary planning to engage in teaching and research once again this fall. I am honored to be serving as co-chair with Provost Ann Cudd on the Task Force on Reimagining Pitt Education and help to contribute to helping us not only re-open our campus but reimagine how we can create a safe and productive environment for our community. The ideas we generate now will help to build a stronger, more resilient, and adaptive Pitt for years to come. We can do this because we are engineers, and we have exemplary collaborators across campus and disciplines, from the health sciences and public policy to teaching research and the arts.

As we approach the 175th anniversary of the first engineers to graduate from Pitt in 1846, it is important to remember the legacy we now build upon. The University and the Swanson School have faced many quandaries throughout our combined histories, but we have grown and thrived to become one of the leading research institutions in the world. The current pandemic may now be all-encompassing, but in the future it will be seen as another pivotal point in our history where engineers stepped forward with so many others to solve complex problems and improve the human condition. We are continuing to shape our legacy of success, and I trust you will share my pride in being a part of that while pausing to remember and honor those who lost their lives during this pandemic.

My wishes for a safe, healthy, and prosperous year ahead, and many to follow. Hail to Pitt!

Sincerely,

James R. Martin II, U.S. Steel Dean of Engineering

Engineers

develop solutions

that improve the human condition

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1. ALung Technologies’ Hemolung, developed by Bioengineering and McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine Professor William Federspiel, was granted emergency use approval by the U.S. FDA as an alternative to a ventilator for patients suffering from COVID-19.

2. The Swanson School’s Manufacturing Assistance Center (MAC) in Homewood is partnering with PPE Connect PGH, a local initiative that seeks to connect donated or locally manufactured PPE with the healthcare providers who need it, to produce hundreds of 3D-printed face shields each day.

3. Nasser Al Azri stands by a batch reactor repurposed to produce hand sanitizer in the lab of Götz Veser, Professor of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering. To date, the lab has produced more than 200 gallons of sanitizer and plans to continue to production as long as it can get supplies. For more information or to contribute supplies, e-mail gveser@pitt.edu.

4. The Swanson School Makerspace partnered with Reed & Witting and the UPMC 3D Print Lab to create a one-piece, one-size-fits-all plastic shield. The project was led by Brandon Barber, design, innovation and outreach coordinator in the Department of Bioengineering and Dan Yates (BSME ’19), innovation project coordinator for the Pitt Makerspace. The open-source design is available at https://pittfaceshield.github.io/.

5. Pitt, ExOne®, and ANSYS Inc. are utilizing advanced 3D-printing binder jet technology and optimization to develop reusable metal filters that fit into a specially designed respirator cartridge for sustainable, reusable, and long-term protection against contaminants such as COVID-19. Markus Chmielus, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science is leading the research at the Swanson School.

6. David Vorp, the William Kepler Whiteford Professor of Bioengineering and Associate Dean for Research, directed the collection and delivery of personal protective equipment and sanitizing supplies to the UPMC COVID-19 Command Center. Five pallets of supplies were ultimately donated by research faculty whose labs were closed by the pandemic.

TABLE OF CONTENTS UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH

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Bioengineering

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SWANSON SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING

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Chemical and Petroleum

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Civil and Environmental

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Electrical and Computer

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Industrial Mechanical and Materials Science

Sustainability

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Distinguished Alumni Award

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Awards and Honors Faculty and Students

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Statistics

Diversity

Executive Editor

Contributing Writers

Principal Photography

PAUL KOVACH Director of Marketing and Communications

MAGGIE PAVLICK Senior Communications Writer

JOHN ALTDORFER RIC EVANS

Design

LEAH RUSSELL Content Manager/Editor

LESLIE KARON-OSWALT Senior Graphic Designer

The information printed in this document was accurate to the best of our knowledge at the time of printing and is subject to change at any time at the University’s sole discretion.

The University of Pittsburgh is an affirmative action, equal opportunity institution.

07/20

DEBORAH TODD Contributing Writer (pgs. 24-25)

engineering.pitt.edu

twitter.com/pittengineering

facebook.com/pittengineering

youtube.com/pittengineering

BIOENGINEERING

of Sit-Stand Desks Bioengineer Dr. April Chambers Compiles Studies to Examine the Comprehensive Benefits of the Popular Accessory Have a seat. No, wait! Stand. With researchers suggesting that “sitting is the new smoking,” sit-stand desks (SSD) have become a common tool to quell sedentary behavior in an office environment. As this furniture becomes ubiquitous, conflicting opinions have arisen on its effectiveness. April Chambers, PhD, assistant professor in bioengineering*, worked with collaborators to gather data from 53 studies and published a scoping review article detailing current information on the benefits of SSDs. “There has been a great deal of scientific research about sit-stand desks in the past few years, but we have only scratched the surface of this topic,” said Chambers.

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“With my background in occupational injury prevention, I wanted to gather what we know so far and figure out the next steps for how can we use these desks to better benefit people in the workplace.”

In collaboration with researchers at Tufts University and the Office Ergonomics Research Committee (OERC), the scoping review published in Applied Ergonomics examines the effects of a sit-stand desk in the following domains: behavior, physiological, work performance, psychological, discomfort, and posture.

“The study found only minimal impacts on any of those areas, the strongest being changes in behavior and discomfort,” said Baker.

Their work showed that use of a SSD effectively got participants to sit less and stand more and that the device made users more comfortable at work. However, many frustrations with SSDs stem from the physiological outcomes. Early adopters were fed the idea that these desks would be the miracle cure for obesity, but users were not achieving the results they expected.

According to the review, physiological effects were the most studied, but within that domain, there were no significant results with regards to obesity.

“There are health benefits to using sit-stand desks, such as a small decrease in blood pressure or low back pain relief, but people simply are not yet burning

enough calories to lose weight with these devices,” said Chambers. “Though these are mild benefits, certain populations might benefit greatly from even a small change in their health. In order to achieve positive outcomes with sit-stand desks, we need a better understanding of how to properly use them; like any other tool, you have to use it correctly to get the full benefits out of it.”

There are many considerations to most effectively use a SSD, such as desk height, monitor height, amount of time standing, or the use of an anti-fatigue mat.

Chambers believes that workplace setup and dosage are two factors that should be further studied.

“There are basic ergonomic concepts that seem to be overlooked,” said Chambers. “Many workers receive sit-stand desks and start using them without direction.

I think proper usage will differ from person to person, and as we gather more research, we will be better able to suggest dosage for a variety of workers.”

Chambers noted that the current research is limited because many of studies were done with young and healthy subjects who were asked to use the desk for a week or month at most. Since some of the significant benefits are with cardiovascular health or muscle discomfort, it may be beneficial to perform additional studies with middle-aged or overweight workers.

“There is still more to learn about sit-stand desks,” said Chambers. “The science is catching up so let’s use what we’ve studied in this area to advance the research and answer some of these pressing questions so that people can use sit-stand desks correctly and get the most benefit from them.”

Are You Comfortable?

BMES Diversity Lecture Award Recipient Steven Abramowitch Asks his Peers to Consider the Level of Comfort in their Careers For Steven Abramowitch, PhD, getting out of his comfort zone led to choices that would significantly impact his career and those of countless future engineers.

Abramowitch, an associate professor of bioengineering, received the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) 2019 Diversity Lecture Award in recognition of his outstanding contributions to improving gender and racial diversity in biomedical engineering. His lecture, presented during the annual meeting on October 17, 2019, at the BMES annual conference, asked the audience to consider, “Are you comfortable?”

For Abramowitch, his comfort was with the path that altered his research and career, as well as his advocacy for diversity programs in engineering. Abramowitch attended graduate school at Pitt and performed ligament research in the Musculoskeletal Research Center under the direction of Savio L-Y. Woo, Distinguished Professor of Bioengineering. A natural continuation would have been a career in sports medicine, but as he learned more about women’s health and the complications associated pelvic floor disorders, he was drawn to research in that area.

In addition to his career in women’s health, Abramowitch has contributed to the Swanson School of Engineering’s diversity initiatives with programs such as PITT STRIVE, the Global Engineering Preparedness Scholarship (GEPS), Engineering Design for Social Change: South Africa, and CampBioE. Through these programs, he has helped to create a culture of diversity and inclusion and has worked to better prepare engineering students for a global marketplace.

“Being uncomfortable, I realized, is not such a bad thing,” said Abramowitch. “Connecting with individuals who have a different background or worldview can help broaden your perspective and, for me, has ultimately provided a more fulfilling career.”

* Chambers now holds a primary appointment in the Department of Health and Physical Activity with a secondary appointment in bioengineering.

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An Ultrasmall, Light -Activated Electrode for Neural Stimulation Takashi D. Y. Kozai’s Lab Examines the Use of the Photoelectric Effect on Untethered Implanted Devices to Mitigate Damage

Neural stimulation is a developing technology that has beneficial therapeutic effects in neurological disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease. While many advancements have been made, the implanted devices deteriorate over time and cause scarring in neural tissue. Takashi D. Y. Kozai, PhD, an assistant professor in bioengineering, detailed a less invasive method of stimulation that would use an untethered ultrasmall electrode activated by light, a technique that may mitigate damage done by current methods.

Kaylene Stocking, a senior bioengineering and computer engineering student, was first author on the paper titled, “Intracortical neural stimulation with untethered, ultrasmall carbon fiber electrodes mediated by the photoelectric effect.” She works with Kozai’s group – the Bionic Lab – to investigate how researchers can improve the longevity of neural implant technology. This work was done in collaboration with Alberto Vasquez, research associate professor of radiology and bioengineering at Pitt.

“Typically with neural stimulation, in order to maintain the connection between mind and machine, there is a transcutaneous cable from the implanted electrode inside of the brain to a controller outside of the body,” said Kozai. “Movement of the brain or this tether leads to inflammation, scarring, and other negative side effects. We hope to reduce some of the damage by replacing this large cable with long wavelength light and an ultrasmall, untethered electrode.”

“We discovered that photostimulation is effective,” said Stocking. “Temperature increases were not significant, which lowers the chance of heat damage, and activated cells were closer to the electrode than in electrical stimulation under similar conditions, which indicates increased spatial precision.”

The photoelectric effect is when a particle of light, or a photon, hits an object and causes a local change in the electrical potential. Kozai’s group discovered its advantages while performing other imaging research. Based on Einstein’s 1905 publication on this effect, they expected to see electrical photocurrents only at ultraviolet wavelengths (high energy photons), but they experienced something different.

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“What we didn’t expect to see was that this photoelectric method of stimulation allows us to stimulate a different and more discrete population of neurons than could be achieved with electrical stimulation,” said Kozai. “This gives researchers another tool in their toolbox to explore neural circuits in the nervous system.”

CHEMICAL AND PETROLEUM

A “Shocking” New Way to Treat Infections Using an Electrochemical Approach to Treat Infections of Metal-Based Implants Titanium has many properties that make it a great choice for use in implants.

Its low density, high stiffness, high biomechanical strength-to-weight ratio, and corrosion resistance have led to its use in several types of implants, from dental to joints. However, a persistent problem plagues metal-based implants: the surface is also a perfect home for microbes to accumulate, causing chronic infections and inflammation in the surrounding tissue.

Consequently, five to 10 percent of dental implants fail and must be removed within 10-15 years to prevent infection in the blood and other organs.

New research led by Tagbo Niepa, PhD, introduces a revolutionary treatment for these infections that uses electrochemical therapy (ECT) to enhance the ability of antibiotics to eradicate the microbes.

“We live in a crisis with antibiotics: most of them are failing. Because of the drug resistance that most microbes develop, antimicrobials stop working, especially with recurring infections,” says Niepa, assistant professor of chemical and petroleum engineering, with secondary appointments in civil and environmental engineering and bioengineering. “With this technique, the current doesn’t discriminate as it damages the microbe cell membrane.

It’s more likely that antibiotics will be more effective if the cells are simultaneously challenged by the permeabilizing effects of the currents.

This would allow even drug-resistant cells to become susceptible to treatment and be eradicated.”

The innovative method passes a weak electrical current through the metalbased implant, damaging the attached microbe’s cell membrane but not harming the surrounding healthy tissue. This damage increases permeability, making the microbe more susceptible to antibiotics. Since most antibiotics specifically work on cells that are going to replicate, they do not work on dormant microbes, which is how infections can recur. The ECT causes electrochemical stress in all the cells to sensitize them, making them more susceptible to antibiotics.

The researchers hope this technology will change how infections are treated.

Researchers focused their research on Candida albicans (C. albicans), one of the most common and harmful fungal infections associated with dental implants. But while dental implants are one application for this new technology, Niepa says it has other exciting potential applications, such as in wound dressings.

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New, Affordable CO2 Capture Materials for Coal Power Plants Although coal-generated power plants in the U.S. alone currently represent only 30 percent of nation’s energy portfolio, in 2017 they contributed the largest share of 1,207 million metric tons of CO2, or 69 percent of the total U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions by the entire U.S. electric power sector. A computational modeling method developed by Christopher Wilmer, PhD, and his Hypothetical Materials Lab, may help to fast-track the identification and design of new carbon capture and storage materials for use by the nation’s coal-fired power plants. The hypothetical mixed matrix membranes would provide a more economical solution than current methods, with a predicted cost of less than $50 per ton of CO2 removed.

“Polymer membranes have been used for decades to filter and purify materials, but are limited in their use for carbon capture and storage,” noted Wilmer. “Mixed matrix membranes, which are polymeric membranes with small, inorganic particles dispersed in the material, show extreme promise because of their separation and permeability properties. However, the number of potential polymers and inorganic particles is significant, and so finding the best combination for carbon capture can be daunting.”

The research group – in collaboration with co-investigator Jan Steckel, research scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, and Pittsburghbased AECOM – published its findings in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal, Energy & Environmental Science.

The potential implications for the Wilmer group’s research are tremendous.

“Our computational modeling of both hypothetical and real MOFs resulted in a new database of more than a million mixed matrix membranes with corresponding CO2 capture performance and associated costs,” Dr. Wilmer said. “Further techno-economic analyses yielded 1,153 mixed matrix membranes with a carbon capture cost of less than $50 per ton removed. Thus, the potential exists for creating an economically affordable and efficient means of CO2 capture at coal power plants throughout the world and effectively tackling a significant source of fossil fuel-generated carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”

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Catalytic Flying Carpet A Developing a Self-Powered Microfluidic Sheet that Wraps, Flaps and Creeps The “magic carpet” featured in tales from “One Thousand and One Nights” to Disney’s “Aladdin” captures the imagination not only because it can fly, but because it can also wave, flap, and alter its shape to serve its riders. With that inspiration, and the assistance of catalytic chemical reactions in solutions, a team from the Swanson School of Engineering has designed a two-dimensional, shape-changing sheet that moves autonomously in a reactant-filled fluid.

“It’s long been a challenge in chemistry to create a non-living object that moves on its own within

an environment, which in turn alters the object’s shape, allowing it to carry out brand new tasks, like trapping other objects,” explained Anna C. Balazs, the John A. Swanson Chair and Distinguished Professor of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering and principal investigator.

The group accomplished this feat of self-propulsion and reconfiguration by introducing a coating of catalysts on the flexible sheet, which is roughly the width of a human hair. The addition of reactants to the surrounding fluid initiates both the carpet’s motion and the changes of its form.

The article, “Designing self-propelled, chemicallyactive sheets: Wrappers, flappers and creepers,” was published in the AAAS journal Science Advances.

“A microfluidic device that contains these active sheets can now perform vital functions, such as shuttling cargo, grabbing a soft, delicate object, or even creeping along to clean a surface,” Shklyaev said. “These flexible micro-machines simply convert chemical energy into spontaneous reconfiguration and movement, which enables them to accomplish a repertoire of useful jobs.”

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CIVIL AND ENVIRONMENTAL

Using Nature to Protect Cities from Extreme Weather Pitt and Northwestern Awarded $2 Million by NSF to Study Nature-Based Strategies to Prevent Urban Flooding As the planet warms, communities will continue to face the sometimes crippling aftermath of flooding and increasingly common extreme weather events. The U.S.’ failing infrastructure exacerbates the problem, leaving engineers in search of solutions that are both sustainable and future-proof.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and Northwestern University $2 million to study naturebased strategies that can help prevent urban flooding and give under-resourced communities the ability to

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prepare for, recover from, and adapt to extreme weather events. The project, entitled “Catalyzing Resilient Urban Infrastructure Systems: Integrating the Natural & Built Environments,” is part of the NSF’s Leading Engineering for America’s Prosperity, Health and Infrastructure (LEAP HI) program, which has awarded five projects a total of $9 million this year.

investigator Kimberly Gray, PhD, Kay Davis Professor and Chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northwestern, on the project. Daniel Bain, PhD, assistant professor of geology and environmental science and associate director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Water Collaboratory, will also contribute his expertise to the Pitt team.

The Swanson School’s Carla Ng, PhD, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Murat Akcakaya, PhD, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, will work with principal

“Cities across the country experience flooding when severe weather strikes due to their overtaxed and aging stormwater infrastructure,” says Ng. “Here in Pittsburgh, a combined sewer system means water

quality is often hit as well. We want to give cities the ability to use natural features that will not only improve water management and enhance the livability of the surrounding community, but are also more adaptive, robust and resilient than current systems.”

Linda Young, Peter Haas, PhD, and Drew Williams-Clark at the Center for Neighborhood Technology in Chicago; and Nicole Chivaz and Laura Brenner Kimes at Greenprint Partners in Chicago, are also on the team. Sarah States, PhD, director of research and science education at Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, will contribute expertise towards biodiversity assessments and outreach activities in Pittsburgh.

The goal is to develop the engineering tools that will allow communities to integrate nature-based green infrastructure, such as green roofs, rain gardens and porous pavements, with existing built infrastructure to manage storm water in ways that help prevent flooding while improving water quality and ecological health.

The collaboration will fundamentally reinvent the urban water cycle using a systems approach that will be designed to operate with predictive and expanded performance metrics tailored to local conditions.

The researchers will use two topographically different cities with ongoing stormwater issues – Pittsburgh and Chicago – to establish a model that can be replicated in communities across the country. Phipps’ Center

for Sustainable Landscapes, one of only a handful of certified Living Buildings in the United States, will provide historical data from several of its existing green infrastructure installations from which the team will build new models and understanding of green infrastructure function within the landscape.

“Using green infrastructure alongside the built environment can benefit the entire ecosystems, including humans, wildlife and vegetation,” says Ng. “We aim to identify and resolve the hurdles that have limited green infrastructure to single installations with limited real-time performance data or to plans that remain unrealized. Our goal is to apply engineering tools to real communities with real outcomes affecting real lives.”

Pictured from left to right are Carla Ng, Murat Akcakaya, and Daniel Bain.

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Applying Structural Monitoring Technology to the Human Spine Amir Alavi, PhD, Receives Nearly $400,000 from NIH to Lead Development of an Implantable, Self-Powered Spinal Fusion Sensor Amir H. Alavi, PhD, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, has spent much of his career developing sensors to monitor the health of large, complex structures like bridges and roads. Now, he has applied those skills to a smaller and even more complex structure – the human spine. Alavi received $393,670 in funding from the National Institutes of Health to design and test a miniature, implantable, and battery-free sensor to monitor spinal fusion progress after surgery.

A clear understanding of the spinal fusion rate is essential for better surgical outcomes. Currently, spinal fusion progress is assessed using radiographic images, such as X-ray and CT scans, which are costly, expose the patients to significant radiation, and, more importantly, do not provide a continuous history of the spinal fusion process. To avoid relying on radiographic imaging, Alavi’s team is developing wireless sensors that will be attached to the spine fixation device to monitor the spinal fusion process and will completely rely on the energy harvested from the spine’s natural micromovements for operation.

“This implantable sensor has a major advantage over other existing spinal implants in that it does not rely on batteries, which are not really suitable for biomedical implants due to their limited lifetime, large size, and chemical risks. If there is spine movement, the sensor will self-power itself and track the progress of spinal fusion,” says Alavi. “Also, the data from the sensor can be wirelessly interrogated using a diagnostic ultrasound scanner, rather than the commonlyused RFID technology, which faces severe limitations inside the tissue.”

In addition to avoiding the costly imaging appointments, the sensor itself is expected to be inexpensive to produce – less than $5 in raw materials each.

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Modeling the World’s Water Research Team Led by Pitt Receives More than $1.3 Million to Develop “CyberWater” Modeling Framework Understanding the earth’s water systems is a complicated endeavor. Factors like climate, air and water quality, ecosystem, droughts, erosion, sediments and the impact of human activity need to be taken into account when creating a model that would accurately predict, for example, how the scale and frequency of floods and droughts will be affected by climate change in the coming years.

Yet such a model would require tremendous amount of valuable and diverse data that are not always readily available; specialized models from across diverse disciplines; high-performance computing (HPC) resources to develop integrated model simulations and store the massive outputs; and a sizable group of researchers to orchestrate it.

Now, a national, cross-disciplinary team of researchers, led by Xu Liang, professor of civil and environmental

engineering, has received a combined $1.3 million from the National Science Foundation to create a new cyberinfrastructure framework that can build such a model, with $437,232 designated for Pitt.

CyberWater, an open framework of cyberinfrastructure, will enable easy integration of diverse data sets and models for investigating water resources and climate-related environmental issues. It will allow users to integrate many different models without the need for coding, and it will enable reproducible computing and seamless, on-demand access to various HPC resources. The grant, titled “Collaborative Research: CyberWater – An open and sustainable framework for diverse data and model integration with provenance and access to HPC,” will continue through 2022.

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ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER

Developing a Breathalyzer for Marijuana As recreational marijuana legalization becomes more widespread throughout the U.S., so has concern about what that means for enforcing DUI laws. Unlike a breathalyzer used to detect alcohol, police do not have a device that can be used in the field to determine if a driver is under the influence of marijuana. New research from the University of Pittsburgh is poised to change that.

An interdisciplinary team from the Department Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Chemistry has developed a breathalyzer device that can measure the amount of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive compound in marijuana, in the user’s breath. Current drug testing methods rely on blood, urine or hair samples and therefore cannot be done in the field. They also only reveal that the user has recently inhaled the drug, not that they are currently under the influence.

The breathalyzer was developed using carbon nanotubes, tiny tubes of carbon 100,000 times smaller than a human hair. The THC molecule, along with other molecules in the breath, bind to the surface of the nanotubes and change their electrical properties.

The speed at which the electrical currents recover then signals whether THC is present.

Nanotechnology sensors can detect THC at levels comparable to or better than mass spectrometry, which is considered the gold standard for THC detection.

“The semiconductor carbon nanotubes that we are using weren’t available even a few years ago,” says Sean Hwang, lead author on the paper and a doctoral candidate in chemistry. “We used machine learning to ‘teach’ the breathalyzer to recognize the presence of THC based on the electrical currents recovery time, even when there are other substances, like alcohol, present in the breath.”

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Hwang works in the Star Lab, led

by Alexander Star, PhD, professor of chemistry with a secondary appointment in bioengineering.

The group partnered with Ervin Sejdic’, PhD, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, to develop the prototype.

“Creating a prototype that would work in the field was a crucial step in making this technology applicable,” says Sejdic’. “It took a cross-disciplinary team to turn this idea into a usable device that’s vital for keeping the roads safe.”

Pictured from left to right are Ervin Sejdic’ and Alexander Star with the prototype of the THC Breathalyzer.

The prototype looks similar to a breathalyzer for alcohol, with a plastic casing, protruding mouthpiece, and digital display.

It was tested in the lab and was shown to be able to detect the THC in a breath sample that also contained components like carbon dioxide, water, ethanol, methanol, and acetone. The researchers will continue to test the prototype but hope it will soon move to manufacturing and be available for use.

“In legal states, you’ll see road signs that say ‘Drive High, Get a DUI,’ but there has not been a reliable and practical way to enforce that,” says Star. “There are debates in the legal community about what levels of THC would amount to a DUI, but creating such a device is an important first step toward making sure people don’t partake and drive.”

The team included Sean Hwang, Long Bian, David White, Seth Burkert, Raymond Euler, Brett Sopher, Miranda Vinay and Alexander Star, from the Department of Chemistry, and Nicholas Franconi, Michael Rothfuss, Kara Bocan, and Ervin Sejdic’, from the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Their work was published in the ACS journal Sensors.

An Artificial Synapse for Artificial Intelligence In science fiction stories from “I, Robot” to “Star Trek,” an android’s “positronic brain” enables it to function like a human, but with tremendously more processing power and speed. In reality, the opposite is true: a human brain – which today is still more proficient than CPUs at cognitive tasks like pattern recognition – needs only 20 watts of power to complete a task, while a supercomputer requires more than 50,000 times that amount of energy.

For that reason, researchers are turning to neuromorphic computer and artificial neural networks that work more like the human brain. However, with current technology, it is both challenging and expensive to replicate the spatio-temporal processes native to the brain, like short-term and long-term memory, in artificial spiking neural networks (SNN).

Feng Xiong, PhD, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, received a $500,000 CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation for his work developing the missing element, a dynamic synapse, that will dramatically improve energy efficiency, bandwidth and cognitive capabilities of SNNs. By programming the conductor to conduct more electricity for a stronger neural connection, it can function more like the synapses of the human brain, giving more weight to items that are more closely linked as it learns.

“When the human brain sees rain and then feels wetness, or sees fire and feels heat, the brain’s synapses link the two ideas, so in the future, it will associate rain with wetness and fire with warmth. The two ideas are strongly linked in the brain,” explains Xiong. “Computers, on the other hand, need to be fed massive datasets to do the same task. Our dynamic synapse would mimic the brain’s ability to create neuronal connections as a function of the timing differences between stimulations, significantly improving the energy efficiency required to perform a task.”

Engineering Synergy

Following almost two years of intense investigation, research, and feedback, the Swanson School of Engineering started a new chapter in the 126-year history of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. ECE received approval to adopt new curricula for its two undergraduate programs (electrical engineering, computer engineering) to provide greater synergy between the two fields, create more opportunities for hands-on learning, and address the needs of employers who demand that graduates have a greater breadth and depth of knowledge.

The two new curricula began in fall 2019 for rising sophomores in these two majors and were greatly influenced by input from faculty, alumni, industry, and students. Alan George, department chair and the R&H Mickle Endowed Chair and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, explained that the time was perfect to modernize and seamlessly integrate the two programs and encourage greater flexibility in learning.

“The genesis of Pitt’s ECE program is one for the history books. The electrical engineering (EE) curriculum was born in 1893 from the minds of George Westinghouse and Reginald Fessenden, two of the leading engineering pioneers of the late 19th century, while creation of the computer engineering (CoE) program in 1996 was a response to the incredible growth of the industry,” Dr. George explained.

“I think that, after our students graduate, each will find that the new curriculum has benefited them by making them more adaptable, nimble, and impactful engineers. Just as Westinghouse, Fessenden, and the first computer engineers could only have theorized how our disciplines would evolve over the century, we need to prepare our students to adapt to the next technological breakthroughs that we haven’t yet imagined. It’s an exciting time for the ECE Department, and I’m looking forward to the response and success of our undergraduates.”

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INDUSTRIAL

Wings of Glass I N S P I R E D BY

Glass for technologies like displays, tablets, laptops, smartphones, and solar cells need to pass light through, but could benefit from a surface that repels water, dirt, oil, and other liquids. To engineer such a material, Paul Leu, PhD, professor of industrial engineering, and PhD candidate Sajad Haghanifar have taken inspiration from the wings of the glasswing butterfly to create a nanostructure glass that is not only very clear across a wide variety of wavelengths and angles, but is also antifogging.

The team published a paper detailing their findings: “Creating Glasswing-Butterfly Inspired Durable Antifogging Omniphobic Supertransmissive, Superclear Nanostructured Glass Through Bayesian Learning and Optimization” in Materials Horizons.

They presented this work at the International Conference on Machine Learning, in the workshop, “Climate Change: How Can AI Help?”

The nanostructured glass has random nanostructures, like the glasswing butterfly wing, that are smaller than the wavelengths of visible light. This allows the glass to have a very high transparency of 99.5% when the random nanostructures are on both sides of the glass. This high transparency can reduce the brightness and power demands on displays that could, for example, extend battery life.

The glass is antireflective across higher angles, improving viewing angles. The glass also has low haze, less than 0.1%, which results in very clear images and text.

“The glass is superomniphobic, meaning it repels a wide variety of liquids such as orange juice, coffee, water, blood, and milk,” explains Haghanifar. “The glass is also anti-fogging, as water condensation tends to easily roll off the surface, and the view

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Pictured from left to right are Paul Leu and Sajad Haghanifar presenting the nanostructured glass.

through the glass remains unobstructed. Finally, the nanostructured glass is durable from abrasion due to its self-healing properties – abrading the surface with a rough sponge damages the coating, but heating it restores it to its original function.”

Natural surfaces like lotus leaves, moth eyes and butterfly wings display omniphobic properties that make them self-cleaning, bacterial-resistant and water-repellent – adaptations for survival that evolved over millions of years. Researchers have long sought inspiration from nature to replicate these properties in a synthetic material, and even to improve upon them.

While the team could not rely on evolution to achieve these results, they instead utilized machine learning.

“Something significant about the nanostructured glass research, in particular, is that we partnered with SigOpt to use machine learning to reach our final product,” says Leu. “When you create something like this, you don’t start with a lot of data, and each trial takes a great deal of time. We used machine learning to suggest variables to change, and it took us fewer tries to create this material as a result.”

“Bayesian optimization and active search are the ideal tools to explore the balance between transparency and omniphobicity efficiently, that is, without needing thousands of fabrications, requiring hundreds of days.” said Michael McCourt, PhD, research engineer at SigOpt. Bolong Cheng, PhD, fellow research engineer at SigOpt,

added, “Machine learning and AI strategies are only relevant when they solve real problems; we are excited to be able to collaborate with the University of Pittsburgh to bring the power of Bayesian active learning to a new application.”

“Creating Glasswing-Butterfly Inspired Durable Antifogging Omniphobic Supertransmissive, Superclear Nanostructured Glass Through Bayesian Learning and Optimization” was coauthored by Haghanifar and Leu; McCourt and Cheng from SigOpt; and Paul Ohodnicki and Jeffrey Wuenschell from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Laboratory.

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CATERING THE HILL DISTRICT’S

IE Students Help a Local Caterer Develop a Recipe for Success Pittsburgh’s Hill District was, for the first half of the 20th century, a place where jazz music evolved and thrived. The community’s jazz legacy is one that Leeretta Payne hopes to capture with her catering company the Legacy Café. With dishes named after famous jazz musicians who passed through – like Calloway Beans and Rice, GreenLee Spicy Cucumber, and her most famous offering, the Loendi Club Chocolate Chip Cookie – Payne uses her dishes to educate her customers about the community’s celebrated past.

The Loendi Club cookies are a laborious process, though, one that Payne enlisted a group of industrial engineering students to streamline. IE students Ashley Dacosta, Elsie Wang, Keegan MacDougall, and Yang Ren embraced the opportunity for their senior capstone project, an undergraduate program where students help local businesses grow while they gain valuable industry experience.

The students used a mechanical extrusion tool to pump the warm dough into a uniform cylinder which was then cooled and cut into equal sized cookies, giving a uniform weight throughout. It also incorporated a tamper that would allow the cookies to be pressed into the mold, moving some of the force and pressure from the fingers to the wrist and the lower arm.

Increased demand for the cookies necessitated an updated process, and the students’ new method will help Payne produce the quantity needed for her customers. Throughout the warmer months, she is the sole cookie vendor at Pittsburgh farmers markets in the Carrick, Larimer, Southside, and Beechview neighborhoods. New opportunities like this will help Payne expand her business and spread the history of the Hill District to a wider audience.

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MANIPULATING THE

Meta-Atom

Metamaterials are a unique class of intricate composites engineered to interact with electromagnetic radiation – such as light – in ways that go beyond conventional materials. By designing their structure at the nanometer scale, such materials can steer, scatter and rotate the polarization of the light in unusual ways. Realizing their full potential in sectors like consumer electronics, bioimaging or defense, requires the ability to manipulate their intricate structure. This presents a daunting challenge – how to manipulate the nanoscale metaatoms making up metamaterials to then manipulate light?

“Consider something like photochromatic lenses, which have a simple reaction of darkening when exposed to ultraviolet light, and then lighten when you return indoors,” explained M. Ravi Shankar, principal investigator and professor of industrial engineering.

“Instead, if we harness the light to physically manipulate arrays of nano-scale structures we call meta-atoms, we can program much more complex responses.”

Thanks to a combined $1.7 million from the National Science Foundation, Shankar’s group hopes to utilize “meta-atoms” to fine-tune metamaterials with light and in turn, control how they interact with the light itself. The projects are funded through the NSF’s Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) program.

Because of the complexity of the problem, Shankar assembled a multi-disciplinary team from three other universities: Mark Brongersma, professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford University; Robert P. Lipton, the Nicholson Professor of Mathematics at Louisiana State University; Hae Young Noh, assistant professor and Kaushik Dayal, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. The team hopes to discover new classes of dynamically programmable metamaterials using theories of plasmonic structures, which are aided by machinelearning algorithms. These will feed into experimental efforts to fabricate these structures.

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MECHANICAL AND MATERIALS SCIENCE

a close look at a

New Research Finds Missing Link between Soft Surface Adhesion and Surface Roughness Tires gripping the road. Nonslip shoes preventing falls. A hand picking up a pen. A gecko climbing a wall.

All these things depend on a soft surface adhering to and releasing from a hard surface, a common yet incompletely understood interaction. New research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) finds the missing link between soft surface adhesion and the roughness of the hard surface it touches. The paper, “Linking energy loss in soft adhesion to surface roughness,” was coauthored by Siddhesh Dalvi, Abhijeet Gujrati, Subarna R. Khanal, Lars Pastewka, Ali Dhinojwala, and Tevis D.B. Jacobs.

Dr. Jacobs, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science, and Dr. Dhinojwala, interim dean and H.A. Morton Professor of Polymer Science at The University of Akron’s College of Polymer Science and Polymer Engineering, have used in situ microscopic measurements of contact size to unlock the fundamental physics of how roughness affects soft material adhesion.

“A gecko running up a vertical wall is an excellent example of how nature has developed a solution to stick to rough surfaces,” says Dhinojwala. “The key to achieve this adhesion on rough surface is molecular contact. Soft material can conform to rough surfaces and create the molecular contact necessary to stick well. We need a fundamental understanding of the parameters that control adhesion to rough surfaces and the underlying physics.”

There are two different parts of the process: what happens when you load up the contact and what happens when you separate it.

Previous theories have proposed how roughness affects the first half of the process, but offer no insight into the second half. This problem is called “adhesion hysteresis,” meaning the soft surface contact behaves differently as it encounters the rough surface rather than when pulled away. One

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way to think about adhesion hysteresis is to think of a small rubber ball. Pressing the ball down against a hard surface expands the area of contact; letting go will cause the area to shrink again, but not in a predictable, symmetrical way. This discovery marks the first model of rough adhesion that can predict both.

The key to this foundational discovery is a close look at the rough surface itself – very, very close.

“People have been measuring roughness for a hundred years, but conventional techniques can’t see the small detail,” says Jacobs. “We zoomed in, combining multiple techniques, to measure roughness on top of roughness on top of roughness.

The texture goes down to the atomic scale for many surfaces.”

The group developed a new approach using an electron microscope to measure roughness down to below the scale of a nanometer. One of the surfaces in this study appeared far smoother than two others when measured using conventional techniques; however, when measured down to the atomic scale, it proved to be the roughest of all. This small-scale roughness created a lot more surface area for the soft material to grip. The detailed understanding of the rough surface was the missing link that explained the predicted the surfaces’ adhesion behavior.

“Our research answered an important question, but in another sense, it opened up a new line of inquiry,” says Jacobs. “There are a lot of interesting questions about what it really means for surfaces to be ‘in contact’ and how to link what is happening at the atomic-scale to what we observe in full-size, real-world contacts. And we’re excited to continue answering them.”

Pictured from left to right are DOE funding recipients Daniel Cole, Heng Ban, Jung-Kun Lee, and Kevin Chen.

Pitt Nuclear Engineering Captures More than $2 Million in DOE Grants The Stephen R. Tritch Nuclear Engineering program received three substantial grants from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP) totaling $2.3 million.

The awards are three of the 40 grants in 23 states issued by the DOE, which awarded more than $28.5 million to research programs through the NEUP this year to maintain the U.S.’s leadership in nuclear research.

“Nuclear energy research is a vital and growing source of clean energy in the U.S., and we are at the forefront of this exciting field,” says Heng Ban, PhD, R.K. Mellon Professor in Energy and director of the Stephen R. Tritch Nuclear Engineering Program at the Swanson School of Engineering. “These grants will enable us to collaborate with leading international experts, conducting research that will help shape future of nuclear energy.”

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The Difference the Right Tools Can Make Generous 2018 Gift from Alumnus Thomas Dudash Enables Foundational MEMS Research Sometimes, in order to understand the big picture, you need to start by assessing the smallest of details.

It’s a truth that engineers know well – selecting the right materials can mean the success or failure of a given application.

As technology advances, researchers have assessed engineering materials at the microscopic level for applications ranging from nanomachines to semiconductors, specialized coatings to robotics. For researchers at the Swanson School of Engineering, looking closely enough to engineer materials for cutting-edge applications would not have been possible without the generous $1 million gift that Thomas F. Dudash provided in 2018.

Pitt Alumnus Thomas Dudash gifts $1 million to support Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at the Swanson School.

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Mr. Dudash, an alumnus of the University of Pittsburgh who received his bachelor’s degree in metallurgical engineering in 1960, never imagined that he’d have a million dollars to donate for advanced research. After a lifelong career with Allegheny Ludlum, he wanted to share his success with the next generation of materials engineers.

The gift was designated for the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science (MEMS), the successor to the metallurgical engineering program. The gift enabled the Department to purchase nano-manipulators, specialized sample holders that allow researchers to make in situ observations

of materials behavior at the nano-scale using transmission electron microscopy.

“It is generous gifts from donors like Mr. Dudash that enable advanced research and, ultimately, discovery,” said Brian Gleeson, Harry S. Tack Chair Professor and MEMS Department Chairman. “Moreover, the funds provided by Mr. Dudash are being used strategically to create specialized capabilities that greatly help to procure further funding from agencies and, hence, further bolster research activities.”

Pictured from left to right are Scott Mao, PhD, Tevis Jacobs, PhD, Markus Chmielus, PhD, and Anne Robertson, PhD.

SUSTAINABILITY

Converging on a Global Waste Solution University of Pittsburgh Leads Multidisciplinary $1.3 Million NSF Award to Address Global Waste Through Circular Economy Design In less than a generation, the plastic bottle has evolved from inexpensive convenience to scourge. What once was an accessory on the fashion runway has polluted the earth’s oceans, while plastic microparticles have been found in many living organisms. Recycling efforts have attempted to curb plastic overuse and misuse, but in the U.S. alone only 30 percent of plastic is recycled, while globally almost 20,000 plastic bottles are produced every second. And plastic is only one of the many types of waste – from construction materials to electronics and paper – that industries and government are attempting to reroute from landfills.

However, recycling is only part of the solution to control, let alone mitigate, the proliferation of waste.

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A five-university team, led by the Swanson School of Engineering and the Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation, will utilize convergence research to address this complex challenge. Their proposal, Convergence Around the Circular Economy, received a two-year, $1.3 million award from the National Science Foundation’s new Growing Convergence Research program. The award has the potential to be extended to five years and $3.6 million.

“Convergence research is one of NSF’s ‘Big Ideas’ to bring together a diverse team that can break apart silos and develop novel research paradigms to solve pressing societal challenges,” explained Melissa Bilec, deputy director of the Mascaro Center, associate professor

of civil and environmental engineering, and Roberta A. Luxbacher Faculty Fellow at Pitt, and the award’s principal investigator. “I am personally interested in high-impact research that addresses significant societal challenges. Circular economy offers promising solution as it aims to cycle products and materials back into production through creating new products or benign degradation.

“With our project, we are aiming to advance the much needed fundamental science behind circular economy solutions by not only designing products with an eye towards circularity, but also in alignment with sustainability goals.”

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Within the Swanson School and the Mascaro Center, Dr. Bilec, an expert in high-performance buildings and environmental impacts, assembled experts in polymers and green molecular design, life cycle assessment, industrial ecology, blockchain, and complexity leadership theory. External members were recruited from Rochester Institute of Technology, the University of Illinois at Chicago and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Maine.

“For centuries, the global consumption model for any product has been linear – ‘take, make, waste.’ As the global population continues to grow, this places enormous pressures on all parts of the supply chain and ultimately results in a negative environmental impact, as we’ve seen with plastic bottles and containers,” explained Eric J. Beckman, Co-Director of the Mascaro Center and Distinguished Service Professor of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering at Pitt. “This, however, is a difficult philosophy for the chemical industry, whose production processes and inside-the-box thinking have remained virtually unchanged for more than 70 years,” Dr. Beckman added. “What has changed – and what industry wasn’t prepared for – is that consumers are demanding a fix.”

Circling the Research Wagons Bilec’s convergence research team includes engineers, economists, anthropologists, and environmental assessment experts, each of whom will leverage their own expertise toward addressing this global waste crisis through circular economy fundamentals. Rather than

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focusing solely on creating a better plastic or improving recycling methods, the researchers will seek to develop novel business models, engagement approaches, policy options, and innovative technical and science-based advances that potentially could impact the entire lifecycle of plastics and construction materials.

“The problem with simply reusing or recycling stuff is knowing what’s in it, where it came from, where it is now. This is the reason why some plastic packaging, although made with components that individually are recyclable, has to be thrown away because there is no way to separate these parts,” noted Vikas Khanna, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and Wellington C. Carl Faculty Fellow at Pitt. “To determine a product’s life cycle, there is a tremendous amount of data that needs to be collected, sourced and distributed to even begin finding sustainable solutions.”

One approach to tracking that data is utilizing blockchain, which is making inroads in healthcare, supply chains, law and more, beyond its more well-known use in cryptocurrencies. “Blockchain is ideal for establishing provenance and can assist with the development and reuse of materials,” explained Christopher Wilmer, assistant professor of chemical and petroleum engineering and William Kepler Whiteford Faculty Fellow at Pitt and founder of Ledger, the first peerreviewed scholarly journal dedicated to blockchain and cryptocurrency. “Blockchain provides a secure, immutable series of data that can establish a firm foundation for life-cycle assessment.”

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To leverage additional expertise toward the challenge, Bilec recruited researchers from four other universities: • Callie Babbitt, Associate Professor, Golisano Institute for Sustainability, Rochester Institute of Technology • Don Fullerton, Professor, Finance, Economics & Institute of Government and Public Affairs, Gies College of Business, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign • Cindy Isenhour, Associate Professor, Anthropology and Climate Change, University of Maine • Thomas L. Theis, Director, Institute for Environmental Science & Policy, University of Illinois at Chicago And to determine whether their work is indeed converging toward a solution, Gemma Jiang, director of the Organizational Innovation Lab at Pitt, will monitor the researchers’ organizational functions, structures and processes to better review progress and implement any course corrections.

“Solving the global waste problem demands a seachange of thought and accepted practices across so many disciplines and industries, which is why this NSF funding is critical,” Bilec said. “This will require potentially disruptive change, but with a convergence approach we can create a more equitable and sustainable set of solutions that benefit the planet as a whole.”

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DIVERSITY

BE STEM Center Gets Federal Grant to Boost Diversity in STEM Higher Education Swanson School’s Dr. Alaine Allen is Part of Interdisciplinary Research Team at Pitt

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Pictured from left to right are the BE STEM Center team members: Mackenzie Ball, Lori Ann Delale O’Connor, Jennifer Iriti, David Boone, Alison Slinskey Legg, Alaine Allen, and Rebecca Gonda.

Team members not pictured: Jennifer Sherer, Jennifer Russell, Jan Morrison, and Alyssa Briggs.

Photo courtesy of Mike Drazdzinski/University of Pittsburgh.

A multidisciplinary Pitt research team will work with a national ecosystem of science, technology, engineering and math stakeholders to accredit precollege STEM programs and boost college enrollment for underrepresented students.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a $10 million INCLUDES Alliance grant to the team that makes up Pitt’s Broadening Equity in STEM (BE STEM) Center and the STEM Learning Ecosystem Community of Practice (SLECoP), a network of STEM programs and partners in 84 regions.

The five-year award makes Pitt the home base for the STEM Pathways for Underrepresented Students to HigherEd Network, a national collaborative of precollege programs, STEM educators, college admissions professionals and others committed to increasing racial and ethnic diversity in STEM. It will also support the creation of an accreditation model to communicate the validity of these precollege programs to college admissions officers.

“With the new NSF INCLUDES Alliance awards, we continue to expand our national network of partners who are helping us build a more diverse, inclusive, innovative and well-prepared STEM workforce,” said Karen Marrongelle, head of NSF’s Directorate for Education and Human Resources.

The award continues work done through a 2017 NSF INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilot Grant awarded to Alison Slinskey Legg, principal investigator, co-director of the BE STEM Center and director of outreach programs in the Department of Biological Sciences, and Alaine Allen, co-principal investigator, co-director of the BE STEM center and director of K-12 outreach and community engagement at the Swanson School of Engineering.

Under the 2017 grant for $300,000, Slinskey Legg, Allen and a team from across the University created an accreditation system for Pitt precollege STEM programs that would be recognized by the University’s admissions office. Slinskey Legg said the latest grant will go towards creating a model that can be applied nationally.

“Ultimately, this work will decrease the distance between STEM precollege programs and college admissions offices and forge a new, more equitable pathway for racially and ethnically underrepresented students to access higher education in STEM,” she said.

The team will work to create a set of best practices that aims to grant STEM precollege programs accreditation through the Middle States Commission on Higher Education.

That accreditation will give college admissions officers a means to measure the program’s value when evaluating students for acceptance.

“Precollege programs such Pitt’s INVESTING NOW have played an important role in exposing students of color to college and STEM opportunities,” said Allen. “Developing a system to connect these initiatives to admissions is our opportunity to honor the legacy of the pioneers who created these programs.”

Efforts will begin with STEM education programs that are part of SLECoP network in Pittsburgh, New York, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. Those programs will come together to create a vibrant, collaborative learning network designed to strengthen and leverage standards that are known to support strong student outcomes.

Once standards are finalized and the first round of programs receive accreditation, efforts will be expanded to six additional urban areas by the end of the grant cycle.

Allen and Legg will work with co-principal investigators David Boone, assistant professor of biomedical informatics at the School of Medicine and director of the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center Academy; Jennifer Iriti, a research scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center; and Jan Morrison, co-founder of SLECoP. The multidisciplinary team also features representatives from the Center for Urban Education in the School of Education and the School of Computing and Information.

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DISTINGUISHED ALUMNI AWARD

Thomas W. Gilbert, PhD, BIOE ’06

Hanwant B. Singh, MS ’70, PhD Che ’72

Ruthann L. Omer, P.E., BSCE ’83

David Toth, BSEE ’78

Robert Van Naarden, BSEE ’69

Kevin D. Braun, BSIE ’90

Following the Technology Wave David Toth, BSEE ’78, NetRatings Founder, Named 2019 Distinguished Alumnus

Kiteboarding is an art and a science – a kiteboarder harnesses the force of the wind, balancing movement and stability while pulled along the water’s surface.

However, the art is knowing how to best use the environmental conditions to propel oneself forward, and when to ease up on the line.

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David Toth (BSEE ’78), the Swanson School of Engineering’s 2019 Distinguished Alumnus, knows a thing or two about that art, both as an avid beginner kiteboarder and as a professional who successfully navigated a nascent Silicon Valley. Toth’s engineering education provided both the foundational technical knowledge and critical thinking skills necessary for success, but he attributes many of his achievements to surrounding himself with the right people. From his role as a controls engineer at PPG to the founding of his company, NetRatings, Toth has tapped into the resources around him to propel him forward; after retiring at 46, he has spent the past 15 years helping others to do the same.

Changing Direction

Learning the Fundamentals

He settled in the Bay Area and seized an opportunity to work with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he worked with world-class physicists. From there, he joined up with two start-ups: one that, like many start-ups, ultimately folded, and another, which had more success.

As a child, Toth was no stranger to engineering. His father, an industrial engineer, worked for Corning Inc., a job that moved him and his family around the region before settling in Chambersburg, Pa. In high school there, Toth began taking classes in the fledgling field of computer programming, and by the time he graduated and chose to attend the University of Pittsburgh, the electrical engineering department felt like a natural fit.

But that doesn’t mean it came easily.

“Engineering school is hard. It’s one of the hardest programs in the University, I think. It requires the hardest subjects, the most rigorous classes, and it means you have to work harder,” he says. “But it was part of growing up: you have to be prepared to encounter different cultures and ways of thinking, you have to be prepared to change your study habits and behavior to succeed.”

In the early days, he recalls, computer science classes taught different types of data structures and modeling before there were tools in place for such processes.

Writing software, too, is an art and a science.

There is discipline and rigor around it: it requires an understanding of how a computer understands input, and a set of tools that, once learned, can solve problems and create something new. Learning how computers work on the most basic level was foundational to his understanding of everything they can do today.

Toth graduated from the Electrical Engineering program in 1978 and began working for PPG soon after as a controls engineer, where he was tasked with automation in the glass division. But on the West Coast, an emerging Silicon Valley offered bigger opportunities in the quickly growing world of technology.

“Attending engineering school doesn’t automatically make a person an engineer; what it does is provide a set of tools and discipline around solving problems, skills that can be applied anywhere, in the business world, academia, and industry,” Toth said. “I looked around and said, ‘I’m a technologist, and there’s a lot happening in the tech world.’ So, I moved to California.”

The move that proved to be most significant, however, was joining the Japanese technology company Hitachi Computer Products, where he became senior vice president leading the Network Products Group.

“For a large company, Hitachi was trying to be very entrepreneurial,” said Toth. “My career really grew there – I became the first gaijin to be a senior vice president and had around 400 people working under me.”

Toth had the idea for a company that would measure and analyze audiences for the new but rapidly evolving internet, and when Hitachi couldn’t find a create a profitable business within the company, Toth and a small group of his colleagues spun out a new company, NetRatings, with the help of established entrepreneur David Norman (Founder; Businessland and Dataquest) and the first ever venture investment from Hitachi.

Through strategic partnerships with Nielsen Media Research and ACNielsen, Toth’s venture went onto become the leading global internet audience measurement service in the world.

“I couldn’t have done it without Dave and my cofounders. The moral of the story is that when you have great people around you and you work with them, you can be successful. You just have to be able to recognize those people,” says Toth. “Some of it comes from experience in life – people with a good moral compass who have been successful. Some comes from personal relationships – people who are your confidants in your life and your career who you can rely on. Those relationships are so important throughout your life.”

Launching and Landing In 2004, after NetRatings merged with the Nielsen Company, Toth stepped away from the company to focus on angel venture investments. For the past 15 years, he’s spent a great deal of time helping other entrepreneurs be successful and working with them to make sure they don’t make the same mistakes he and other entrepreneurs have had to learn from.

He currently is a member of the Board of Directors at HiveIO, LeadCrunch.AI, and GutCheckIt.com. He was formerly a Director at NexTag (acquired by Providence Equity Partners), TubeMogul (acquired by Adobe) and Edgewater Networks (acquired by Ribbon Communications).

“There is no easy road. Start-ups are one of the most stressful things you can do in your life, and it requires a little luck, too,” says Toth. “I’ve worked hard, but a lot of working hard is working smart, putting yourself in a place, surrounded by the right people, where there is an opportunity for success.”

Today, Toth is active on several companies’ boards and continues to invest in start-ups with Dave Norman.

When he’s not inspiring and guiding the successful entrepreneurs of tomorrow, he and his wife enjoy camping in their Airstream, hiking and mountain biking in southern Utah, where they reside.

And, of course, “learning” to kiteboard.

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FACULTY AWARDS Steven Abramowitch, associate professor of bioengineering, received the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) 2019 Diversity Lecture Award, which recognizes outstanding contributions to improving gender and racial diversity in biomedical engineering.

Taryn Bayles, vice chair for education and professor of chemical and petroleum engineering, was awarded the 2019 James Pommersheim Award for Excellence in Teaching Chemical Engineering. The Pommersheim Award was established by the Department and James M. Pommersheim ’70 to recognize departmental faculty in the areas of lecturing, teaching, research methodology, and research mentorship of students.

Susan Fullerton, associate professor and Bicentennial Board of Visitors Faculty Fellow, won the 2018 Pommersheim Award.

Ipsita Banerjee, associate professor of of chemical and petroleum engineering, was the recipient of the School’s 2019 Faculty Diversity Award.

Beyond her work with organizations on campus, Banerjee devotes time and effort into programs like the Carnegie Science Center’s CanTEEN Career Exploration Program, sharing her experience with middle school girls and encouraging them to pursue an education in STEM. She has also been involved with the Women Student Networking conference, AlChE Women’s Initiatives Committee, and in panels for Women in Science and Medicine organized by UPMC.

A four-professor team from the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering was among the recipients of 2019 seed grants from Pitt’s Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation. The grants support graduate student and post-doctoral fellows on one-year research projects that are focused on sustainability. The research, Chemical Recycling of Polyethylene to Ethylene, includes professors Eric Beckman, Robert Enick and Götz Veser, and Associate Professor Giannis Mpourmpakis.

Melissa Bilec, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, Roberta A. Luxbacher Faculty Fellow and deputy director of the Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation was appointed Director of Faculty Community Building and Engagement in the PITT STRIVE Program, which works to improve the transitions of under-represented minorities into doctoral engineering programs. In this position, Bilec will lead key FacultyCentered Strategies and Faculty Learning Community Activities to help improve faculty engagement with under-represented minority students.

Bilec, along with PhD graduate Harold Rickenbacker, received the Senior Vice Chancellor for Engagement’s Partnerships of Distinction Award for their partnership with the East End’s Kingsley Association on communitybased environmental justice and air pollution initiatives.

The highly competitive award recognizes partnerships that are exemplars of community engagement.

Bryan Brown, associate professor of bioengineering, received an Honorable Mention in the Carnegie Science Awards for University/Post-Secondary Educator.

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William “Buddy” Clark, professor of mechanical engineering and materials science, won the University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute’s Marlin Mickle Outstanding Innovator Award, presented to a Pitt faculty member who has demonstrated a sustained commitment to commercializing research and ranks among the University’s prolific innovators in terms of the number of invention disclosures, patents and licenses.

Youngjae Chun, associate professor of industrial engineering and bioengineering, received a funding award from the American Heart Association for his project creating a stent that will use sensors to monitor for signs of restenosis and alert the patient’s doctor without the need for endless follow-up visits.

Recognizing his role in developing undergraduate programs, innovative teaching and leadership in his field, Samuel Dickerson, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, won the 2019 Board of Visitors Award for faculty excellence in teaching, research and service, and for contributions to the University, the Swanson School, and the engineering discipline. He was also the recipient of the Swanson School’s Outstanding Educator Award, which recognizes his excellence in teaching and innovative work in developing and improving the department’s undergraduate program.

Lastly, Dickerson received the IEEE Education Society’s 2019 Mac E. Van Valkenburg Award. Faculty who are within the first 10 years after receiving their PhD and have at least two years of experience as a faculty member are eligible to be nominated.

William Federspiel, professor of bioengineering, won the Carnegie Science Award for Life Sciences. The award recognizes and honors scientific advances in new and innovative biomedical and life sciences endeavors that benefit the economy, health, or societal well-being of the region. He was also elected fellow of the National Academy of Inventors in 2019. With 12 issued U.S. patents in the medical device industry and five more pending, Federspiel is also among 168 distinguished academic inventors to be named a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.

Leanne Gilbertson, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, received the Mara H. Wasburn Early Engineering Educator Grant from the American Society for Engineering Education Women in Engineering Division (WIED). Which honors and supports women who at the beginning of their academic career have the potential to contribute to the engineering education community and support the mission of WIED. In 2019 a total of four awards were presented to female faculty and students who have a demonstrated commitment to innovation in teaching and/or potential for substantial contributions to the field.

Kent Harries, FASCE, FACI, P.E., professor of civil and environmental engineering, was elected a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). The Fellow status, FASCE, signifies members of the organization who have made celebrated contributions to the field and developed creative solutions that have enhanced lives.

Fellows make up just three percent of ASCE’s members.

John Keith, associate professor of chemical and petroleum engineering, received two awards to fund a 10-month collaboration with a researcher at the University of Luxembourg. Keith received the equivalent of $89,000 from the Luxembourg National Research Fund as well as a $26,746 NSF Travel Award supplement to support a 10-month visit to the University of Luxembourg, where he will work with Prof. Alexandre Tkatchenko, a world expert in developing atomistic machine learning methods that use artificial intelligence to make computer simulations faster and more accurate. Together, the researchers will study complex reaction mechanisms, such as carbon dioxide conversion into fuels and chemicals, and environmentally green chemical design of molecular chelating agents. The researchers also plan to develop a modern textbook on quantum chemistry and contemporary methods to study chemical bonding that would educate the next generation of computational researchers. Keith is also the R.K. Mellon Faculty Fellow in Energy.

The Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation (MCSI) named three engineering faculty members in its 2020 John C. Mascaro Faculty Program in Sustainability.

Tony Kerzmann, associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science (MEMS) was named a John C. Mascaro Faculty Fellow in Sustainability. Katherine Hornbostel, assistant professor in MEMS, and Robert Kerestes, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, were named John C. Mascaro Faculty Lecturers in Sustainability.

Sangyeop Lee, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science, received a $500,000 CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for research that would utilize machine learning to model thermal transport in polycrystalline materials.

In recognition of his “service and commitment to the field of chemistry over the years, with particular emphasis on efforts to reinvent chemical engineering education in the Pittsburgh area,” the Pittsburgh Section of the American Chemical Society named Professor Steven R. Little as recipient of its 2018 Pittsburgh Award. Established in 1932 by the Pittsburgh Section of ACS, the Pittsburgh Award recognizes outstanding leadership in chemical affairs in the local and larger professional community and symbolizes the honor and appreciation accorded to those who have rendered distinguished service to the field of chemistry.

Louis Luangkesorn, assistant professor of industrial engineering and INFORMS member, was awarded the Outstanding Community Partner Volunteer Award from Houston Methodist Hospital, along with Rachel Chung, clinical associate professor of business analytics at College of William and Mary, for their work on volunteer on-boarding and retention analytics done as part of the INFORMS Pro Bono Analytics program.

Mark Magalotti, professor of practice in civil and environmental engineering and assistant codirector of the Center for Sustainable Transportation Infrastructure, received the Engineering Society of Western Pennsylvania’s William Metcalf Award. Named in honor of ESWP’s first President, the award recognizes an outstanding engineer who is a resident of the United States and whose field of engineering accomplishment relates to those normally associated with western Pennsylvania. Thirteen faculty or alumni of the University of Pittsburgh have received the Metcalf Award since its inception in 1963, representing more than a quarter of all awardees.

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FACULTY AWARDS continued Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) selected James McKone, assistant professor of chemical and petroleum engineering, to receive the Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award. ORAU is a consortium of more than 100 universities whose mission is to integrate academic, government and scientific resources globally in order to advance national priorities and serve the public interest. McKone’s recognition includes a $5,000 research award that will be matched by the University to fund his lab’s research in applied electrochemistry, specifically an emerging technology in large-scale energy storage called the redox flow battery.

Giannis Mpourmpakis, associate professor and Bicentennial Alumni Faculty Fellow won the Bodossaki Foundation Distinguished Young Scientists Award in Chemistry and was honored at a ceremony in Athens

by Prokopis Pavlopoulos, president of Greece. The Distinguished Young Scientists Award honors the most outstanding scientists of Greek descent under the age of 40 and is given once every two years. The award takes into consideration the individual’s achievements in their field, their contribution to the cultural, scientific and economic development of Greece, and their contribution to the international promotion of Greece through their work and ethics.

“After careful deliberation on the ten excellent nominations received, the selection committee, consisting of distinguished scientists of Greek origin working in the field of chemistry all around the globe, unanimously recommended Dr. Giannis Mpourmpakis for the 2019 Bodossaki Young Scientist award in Chemistry,” said Professor Theodoros Theodorou, Associate Vice President of the Board of Trustees of the Bodossaki Foundation. “The committee appreciated Dr. Mpourmpakis’s creative use of state-of-the-art multiscale modeling and simulation methods to understand and predict the properties of materials systems ranging from colloidal metallic nanoparticles to kidney stones.

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Dr. Mpourmpakis’s work can guide experimental efforts towards the development of new, efficient, and environmentally friendly materials and processes.”

Jayant Rajgopal, professor of industrial engineering, won the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) John L. Imhoff Global Excellence Award for Industrial Engineering Education.

Piervincenzo Rizzo, professor, received the 2020 A. J. Durelli Award from the Society for Experimental Mechanics. The award is named for an experimental stress analyst known for seeking new methods to solve problems, rather than relying on existing methods. The award recognizes “a young professional who has introduced, or helped to introduce, an innovative approach and/or method into the field of experimental mechanics.”

Warren Ruder, associate professor and William Kepler Whiteford Fellow of Bioengineering, was invited to attend the 4th Israeli-American Kavli Frontiers of Science Symposium in Jerusalem, Israel. The program’s participants are selected from recipients of prestigious fellowships, awards, and other honors, as well as from nominations by members of the National Academy of Sciences and other participants.

David Sanchez, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, along with the Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation and research students from the Sustainable Design Labs, were selected as an honorable mention this year for the University of Pittsburgh’s Sustainability and STEM initiative. Sustainability and STEM is a long-term engineering educational outreach program with a focus on sustainability that brings a team of high-energy Pitt students to Manchester Academic Charter School to engage the students there in STEM modules focused on sustainability.

Ervin Sejdic’, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, participated in the sixth annual Arab-American Frontiers of Science, Engineering, and Medicine symposium, November 4-6, 2018 in Kuwait City. The meeting is presented by the US National Academy of Sciences and the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences and brings together a multidisciplinary group of young scientists, engineers, and medical professionals from across the U.S. and the 22 Arab League countries.

Gelsy Torres-Oviedo, assistant professor of bioengineering, was awarded a $805,670 CAREER Award by the National Science Foundation to apply a novel approach to improve locomotor learning in stroke patients. She was awarded the Society for the Neural Control of Movement’s 2019 Early Career Award, which recognizes outstanding contributions by scientists who have significantly advanced the understanding of the neural control of movement within 10 years of receiving their doctoral degree.

The Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities Council on Research (CoR) named David Vorp, associate dean for research, as one of eight fellows in its third Research Leader Fellowship Program cohort selected nationwide.

Sylvanus Wosu, associate dean for diversity affairs and associate professor of mechanical engineering and materials science, won the ASEE DuPont Minorities in Engineering Award.

Assistant Professor Feng Xiong was a recipient of a 2019 seed grant from Pitt’s Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation for the project, Amplifying the Efficiency of Tungsten Disulfide Thermoelectric Devices. The award supports graduate students and post-doctoral fellows on one-year research projects focused on sustainability.

STUDENT AWARDS Group Awards American Heart Association Predoctoral Fellowships Ali Behrangzade, bioengineering Soroosh Sanatkhani, bioengineering Danial Sharifi Kia, bioengineering Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS) The Pitt student chapter of INFORMS was selected for a 2019 Student Chapter Annual Award, the chapter’s third since 2015.

George Washington Prize National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships Nathanial Buettner, civil and environmental Charles Griego, chemical and petroleum Dulce Mariscal, bioengineering Kalon Overholt, bioengineering Honorable Mentions Ethan Schumann, mechanical engineering and materials science Sommer Anjum, bioengineering Swanson School of Engineering Co-Op Awards Student of the Year Dmitri Labko, mechanical engineering, Jet Propulsion Laboratory Finalist Mason P. Kline, electrical engineering, Bombardier

Co-Op Tenacity Award Jordan Ewing, chemical engineering, DuPont Honorable Mentions Jada Gerz, industrial engineering, Seegrid Corporation Maxwell Lohss, bioengineering, Edwards Lifesciences Calvin Gealy, computer engineering, Aerotech Erik Wehner, computer engineering, Net Health Adalee X. Jacobs, environmental engineering, Langan Engineering & Environmental Services Co-op Employer of the Year Emerson Swanson School of Engineering George Washington Prize Nathan Carnovale, electrical and computer engineering Finalists Kaylene Stocking, bioengineering and electrical and computer engineering Rafael Rodriguez, mechanical engineering and materials science Semifinalist Gillian Schriever, chemical engineering University of Pittsburgh Student Organization of the Month (December) Society of Women Engineers Future Kings Mentoring, the brainchild of Swanson School of Engineering students Terrell Galloway and Isreal Williams, and Sean Spencer, a Duquesne University student studying journalism and web design, is one of 30 winning projects in the Changemaker Competition, sponsored by T-Mobile in partnership with Ashoka.

Individual Ryan Brody, a second-year MS student, was selected to receive Siemens’ Peter Hammond Scholarship for $10,000. The scholarship is named for Peter Hammond, inventor of the Perfect Harmony drive and long-time engineer at Siemens. Hammond’s Perfect Harmony drive is a high-power machine that controls the speed of large motors; today, it is a key part of Siemens’ medium voltage variable frequency drive portfolio. The resulting energy savings on large pumps, fans, compressors, and other industrial equipment have had an enormous environmental impact, the carbon footprint equivalent of removing millions of cars from the road. Brody plans to complete his master’s degree and pursue a PhD focused on power conversion in electric vehicles.

Nathanial Buettner BSCE ’19 was one of four Swanson School undergraduate students to receive a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. His work in the Pavement Mechanics and Materials Laboratory aims to advance research on concrete pavements. He plans to pursue a PhD in civil engineering at the Swanson School under the advisement of Dr. Julie Vandenbossche.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Power and Energy Society (PES) selected University of Pittsburgh seniors Nathan Carnovale and Shamus (James) O’Haire as recipients of the 2018-19 IEEE PES Scholarship Plus Award. This is Carnovale’s second IEEE PES Scholarship in as many years. The IEEE PES Scholarship Plus Initiative awarded scholarships to 174 electrical engineering students from 96 universities across the U.S., Canada, and Puerto Rico. Applicants were evaluated based on high achievement with a strong GPA, distinctive extracurricular commitments, and dedication to the power and energy field.

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STUDENT AWARDS continued The Robert E. Rumcik ’68 Scholarship in Mechanical and Materials Engineering has been awarded to two highperforming students in the MEMS Department: MSE junior Jonah De Cortie and MSE senior Alexandra Beebout. The scholarship recipients were selected by the Swanson School of Engineering based on recommendations from the MEMS Department Chair, Brian Gleeson, PhD. The scholarship, which is provided through an endowment established by ELLWOOD Group, allocates $15,000 towards the education expenses of each recipient.

Kaitie DeOre BSCE ’20 was selected to receive the 2019 American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Region 2 Outstanding Student Award in recognition of her contributions to Pitt’s ASCE Student Chapter, the community, and the engineering profession. DeOre serves as president of Pitt’s student chapter. Prior to her current appointment, she held the role of service/ outreach chair where she established a strong volunteer base with the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) and other organizations. In 2019 DeOre planned Pitt ASCE’s first annual Civil Engineering Day, an event that targeted high school students interested in civil engineering and facilitated hands-on activities, lab tours, professional demonstrations, and faculty panels.

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Alexander Hartman, Maiti Keen, Megan McCormick, Dina Perlic, and Abigail Pinto, all undergraduates in industrial engineering, made up the team that won first place this year at the International Ergonomics Design Competition hosted by Auburn Engineers, Inc. After their success in the Swanson School of Engineering’s Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition, bioengineering graduate students Piyusha Gade and Gerald Ferrer participated in the university-wide event hosted by the University of Pittsburgh Office of the Provost on April 1, 2019. Gade was awarded first place while Ferrer captured the runner-up prize and the People’s Choice award.

More than 400 student startups applied to the prestigious Rice Business Plan Competition, and only 42 teams were selected from the world’s top institutions to compete for over $1,500,000 in prizes. Among this elite group of teams will be Heart I/O, a digital diagnostics startup led by bioengineering graduate students Utkars Jain and Adam Butchy. Their “smarter cardiac triage” technology uses artificial intelligence to detect problems with a patient’s heart more quickly and accurately at a fraction of the cost of current technology.

Maria Jantz, a bioengineering graduate student, was selected to receive the 2019 National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship Award.

The competitive fellowship, which received more than 2,900 applications, recognizes academic excellence in STEM fields and awards up to three years of full tuition, a monthly stipend, health insurance, and a travel budget for research-related training and/or conferences.

Two junior bioengineering students from the University of Pittsburgh were accepted to the Rice 360° Global Health Design Competition where more than 20 national and international student teams will present low-cost global health innovations. Sneha Jeevan and Shivani Tuli demonstrated their handheld complete blood count point-of-care device, which can be used as a diagnostic tool for doctors working in underdeveloped nations.

Janae Johnson, mechanical engineering senior, was awarded a $7,500 Naugle Fellowship in Mechanical Engineering. This fellowship is used to reduce tuition debt and hence decrease financial burden. Johnson was selected based on a nomination by Prof. Tony Kerzmann.

Trevor Kickliter, a junior mechanical engineering student, was selected as one of six undergraduate researchers to represent the University of Pittsburgh at the 2019 ACC Meeting of the Minds Conference hosted by the University of Louisville, March 29-31, 2019. Kickliter presented his research on the use of adipose-derived mesenchymal stem cells (ADMSCs) as a promising alternative to traditional surgical therapy for an abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA).

CyteSolutions, a bioengineering- and opthamologyled research group led by Alexis Nolfi, was awarded $100,000 at the 2019 Pitt Innovation Challenge on September 25, 2019 for their novel contact lens that is coated with an immune modifying molecule for the treatment of dry eye disease.

Sene Polamalu, a bioengineering graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, was named the 2019 Wesley C. Pickard Fellow by the Department of Bioengineering.

Recipients of this award are selected by the department chair and chosen based on academic merit.

Harold Rickenbacker, PhD ’19 was the 2019 recipient of the Carnegie Science Award in the College/University Student category. Dr. Rickenbacker was recognized for integrating engineering and environmental justice with community-based organizations to address the pressing issue of indoor and ambient air quality in under-served Pittsburgh neighborhoods. Through an initiative in Pittsburgh’s East End called the Environmental Justice Community Alert Matrix, he led trainings to provide over 200 residents with the technical knowledge to identify environmental concerns within their homes, while detailing the importance of addressing environmental sustainability at the nexus of water use, energy consumption, and air pollution.

The Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) selected Gillian Schriever ChemE ’19 as one of the two ACC candidates for 2019 NCAA Woman of the Year.

The NCAA Woman of the Year honors female studentathletes whose performance in academic achievement, athletics excellence, service and leadership stands out throughout their collegiate careers. Schriever currently works as a Business Technology Analyst at Deloitte.

During her undergraduate work in the Steven Little group, she researched polymer microspheres as a method for treating dry eye disease, and later interned with the Bettis Naval Nuclear Laboratory.

Nathan Sloan BSCE ’19 was named to the 2019 All-ACC Outdoor Track & Field Team. Sloan earned a bachelor’s degree in civil and environmental engineering with a focus in he engineering and construction management. A native of Gibsonia, Pa., he is a field/ office engineer with Kiewit Corp. in Denver, Colo. The All-ACC Academic Outdoor Track & Field Team has stringent academic requirements for its athletes, in addition to its high athletic standards. Team members must have maintained at least a 3.0 grade point average in the previous semester and have a 3.0 cumulative grade point average for their academic careers.

Emily Siegel, senior majoring in chemical engineering and biological sciences, won the University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute’s Outstanding Student Innovator Award in recognition of her founding of Trek, a startup developing solutions for eco-friendly dental care for people on the go. This award is presented to a Pitt student of any level who has embraced innovation and entrepreneurship as a career path and have participated in the Innovation Institute’s Big Idea Center programs and competitions to help bring their ideas to life.

Kaylene Stocking BSBioE, BSCoE ’19 received the 2019 Emma W. Locke Award at the University’s 43rd annual Honors Convocation. The award is given to a graduating senior in recognition of high scholarship, character and devotion to the ideals of the University of Pittsburgh. For the past two years, she worked in the BIONIC Lab led by Takashi D. Y. Kozai, assistant professor of bioengineering, where she studied how researchers can improve the longevity of neural implant technology. Stocking’s research led to three journal publications, two presentations and a Goldwater Scholarship honorable mention. She was also an undergraduate teaching assistant, an Honors College ambassador and member of the Pitt orchestra.

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STATISTICS Undergraduate Enrollment in the Swanson School

SAT Scores, Incoming First-Years, Swanson School

Graduate Enrollment in the Swanson School

3,100 3,000 2,900 2,800 2,700 2,600 2,500 2,400 2,300 2,200 2,100 2,000 1,900 1,800 1,700 1,600 1,500 1,400 1,300

1,450

1,000

1,400

900

1,350

800

1,300 1,250

700

1,200

600

1,150

500

1,100 1,050

400 2014 2014

2016

2017

2018

2016

2017

2018

1,000

2019

2014

2016

2017

2018

2019

Engineering Endowment: Book and Market Value Increases Goal: $100 Million $225,000,000

Research Productivity in the Swanson School Research Expenditures ($ Millions)

$200,000,000

$100 $90

$175,000,000

$80 $70

$150,000,000

$60 $125,000,000

$50 $40

$100,000,000

$30 $20

$75,000,000

$10 $0

$50,000,000

2014-15 $0 2014

2016

Market Value

34

2017

2018

2019

Book Value

2015-16

Interdisciplinary

2016-17

School

2017-18

2018-19

2019

Engineering Excellence since 1846

Swanson School of Engineering 104 Benedum Hall 3700 O’Hara Street Pittsburgh, PA 15261

engineering.pitt.edu