Tag: physics

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Penn Scientist Nader Engheta Wins the Benjamin Franklin Medal

Nader Engheta
Nader Engheta (Image: Felice Macera)

by Amanda Mott

University of Pennsylvania scientist Nader Engheta has been selected as a 2023 recipient of the Benjamin Franklin Medal, one of the world’s oldest science and technology awards. The laureates will be honored on April 27 at a ceremony at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

Engheta, H. Nedwill Ramsey Professor in Electrical and Systems Engineering, is among nine outstanding individuals recognized with Benjamin Franklin Medals this year for their achievements in extraordinary scientific, engineering and business leadership.

“As a scientist and a Philadelphian, I am deeply honored and humbled to receive the Franklin Medal. It is the highest compliment to receive an award whose past recipients include some of my scientific heroes such as Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, Alexander Graham Bell, and Max Planck. I am very thankful to the Franklin Institute for bestowing this honor upon me.”

Larry Dubinski, President and CEO of The Franklin Institute, says, “We are proud to continue The Franklin Institute’s longtime legacy of recognizing individuals for their contributions to humanity. These extraordinary advancements in areas of such importance as social equity, sustainability, and safety are significantly moving the needle in the direction of positive change and therefore laying the groundwork for a remarkable future.”

The 2023 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering goes to Engheta for his transformative innovations in engineering novel materials that interact with electromagnetic waves in unprecedented ways, with broad applications in ultrafast computing and communication technologies.

“Professor Engheta’s pioneering work in metamaterials and nano-optics points the way to new and truly revolutionary computing capabilities in the future,” says University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill. “Penn inaugurated the age of computers by creating the world’s first programmable digital computer in 1945. Professor Engheta’s work continues this tradition of groundbreaking research and discovery that will transform tomorrow. We are thrilled to see him receive the recognition of the Benjamin Franklin Medal.”

Engheta founded the field of optical nanocircuits (“optical metatronics”), which merges nanoelectronics and nanophotonics. He is also known for establishing and& developing the field of near-zero-index optics and epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) materials with near-zero electric permittivity. Through his work he has opened many new frontiers, including optical computation at the nanoscale and scattering control for cloaking and transparency. His work has far-reaching implications in various branches of electrical engineering, materials science, optics, microwaves, and quantum electrodynamics.

“This award recognizes Dr. Engheta’s trailblazing advances in engineering and physics,” says Vijay Kumar, Nemirovsky Family Dean of Penn Engineering.“ The swift and sustainable technologies his research in metamaterials and metatronics offers the world are the result of a lifelong commitment to scientific curiosity. For over 35 years, Nader Engheta has personified Penn Engineering’s mission of inventing the future.”

Nader Engheta is the H. Nedwill Ramsey Professor in the Departments of Electrical and Systems Engineering and Bioengineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science and professor of physics and astronomy in the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.

This story originally appeared in Penn Today.

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ASSET Center Inaugural Seed Grants Will Fund Trustworthy AI Research in Healthcare

by Devorah Fischler

Illustration credit: Melissa Pappas

Penn Engineering’s newly established ASSET Center aims to make AI-enabled systems more “safe, explainable and trustworthy” by studying the fundamentals of the artificial neural networks that organize and interpret data to solve problems.

ASSET’s first funding collaboration is with Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine (PSOM) and the Penn Institute for Biomedical Informatics (IBI). Together, they have launched a series of seed grants that will fund research at the intersection of AI and healthcare.

Teams featuring faculty members from Penn Engineering, Penn Medicine and the Wharton School applied for these grants, to be funded annually at $100,000. A committee consisting of faculty from both Penn Engineering and PSOM evaluated 18 applications and  judged the proposals based on clinical relevance, AI foundations and potential for impact.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning promise to revolutionize nearly every field, sifting through massive amounts of data to find insights that humans would miss, making faster and more accurate decisions and predictions as a result.

Applying those insights to healthcare could yield life-saving benefits. For example, AI-enabled systems could analyze medical imaging for hard-to-spot tumors, collate multiple streams of disparate patient information for faster diagnoses or more accurately predict the course of disease.

Given the stakes, however, understanding exactly how these technologies arrive at their conclusions is critical. Doctors, nurses and other healthcare providers won’t use such technologies if they don’t trust that their internal logic is sound.

“We are developing techniques that will allow AI-based decision systems to provide both quantifiable guarantees and explanations of their predictions,” says Rajeev Alur, Zisman Family Professor in Computer and Information Science and Director of the ASSET Center. “Transparency and accuracy are key.”

“Development of explainable and trustworthy AI is critical for adoption in the practice of medicine,” adds Marylyn Ritchie, Professor of Genetics and Director of the Penn Institute for Biomedical Informatics. “We are thrilled about this partnership between ASSET and IBI to fund these innovative and exciting projects.”

 Seven projects were selected in the inaugural class, including projects from Dani S. Bassett, J. Peter Skirkanich Professor in the Departments of Bioengineering, Electrical and Systems Engineering, Physics & Astronomy, Neurology, and Psychiatry, and several members of the Penn Bioengineering Graduate Group: Despina Kontos, Matthew J. Wilson Professor of Research Radiology II, Department of Radiology, Penn Medicine and Lyle Ungar, Professor, Department of Computer and Information Science, Penn Engineering; Spyridon Bakas, Assistant Professor, Departments of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and Radiology, Penn Medicine; and Walter R. Witschey, Associate Professor, Department of Radiology, Penn Medicine.

Optimizing clinical monitoring for delivery room resuscitation using novel interpretable AI

Elizabeth Foglia, Associate Professor, Department of Pediatrics, Penn Medicine and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

Dani S. Bassett, J. Peter Skirkanich Professor, Departments of Bioengineering and Electrical and Systems Engineering, Penn Engineering

 This project will apply a novel interpretable machine learning approach, known as the Distributed Information Bottleneck, to solve pressing problems in identifying and displaying critical information during time-sensitive clinical encounters. This project will develop a framework for the optimal integration of information from multiple physiologic measures that are continuously monitored during delivery room resuscitation. The team’s immediate goal is to detect and display key target respiratory parameters during delivery room resuscitation to prevent acute and chronic lung injury for preterm infants. Because this approach is generalizable to any setting in which complex relations between information-rich variables are predictive of health outcomes, the project will lay the groundwork for future applications to other clinical scenarios.

Read the full list of projects and abstracts in Penn Engineering Today.

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Dani Smith Bassett Receives 2022-23 Heilmeier Award

by Olivia J. McMahon

Dani Bassett, Ph.D.

Dani Smith Bassett, J. Peter Skirkanich Professor in Bioengineering and in Electrical and Systems Engineering in Penn Engineering, has been named the recipient of the 2022-23 George H. Heilmeier Faculty Award for Excellence in Research for “groundbreaking contributions to modeling and control of brain networks in the contexts of learning, disease and aging.”

The Heilmeier Award honors a Penn Engineering faculty member whose work is scientifically meritorious and has high technological impact and visibility. It is named for the late George H. Heilmeier, a Penn Engineering alumnus and member of the School’s Board of Advisors, whose technological contributions include the development of liquid crystal displays and whose honors include the National Medal of Science and Kyoto Prize.

Bassett, who also holds appointments in Physics & Astronomy in Penn Arts & Sciences and in Neurology and Psychiatry in the Perelman School of Medicine, is a pioneer in the field of network neuroscience, an emerging subfield which incorporates elements of mathematics, physics, biology and systems engineering to better understand how the overall shape of connections between individual neurons influences cognitive traits. They lead the Complex Systems lab, which tackles problems at the intersection of science, engineering and medicine using systems-level approaches, exploring fields such as curiosity, dynamic networks in neuroscience, and psychiatric disease.

Bassett will deliver the 2022-23 Heilmeier Award Lecture in Spring 2023.

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Listen: ‘Curious Minds’ on NPR’s ‘Detroit Today’

by Ebonee Johnson

Twin siblings and scholars Dani S. Bassett of Penn and Perry Zurn of American University collaborated over half a dozen years to write “Curious Minds: The Power of Connection.” (Image: Tony and Tracy Wood Photography)

Twin academics Dani S. Basset, J. Peter Skirkanich Professor and director of the Complex Systems Lab, and Perry Zurn, a professor of philosophy at American University, were recently featured as guests on NPR radio show “Detroit Today” to discuss their new book, “Curious Mind: The Power of Connection.”

In their book, Basset and Zurn draw on their previous research, as well as an expansive network of ideas from philosophy, history, education and art to explore how and why people experience curiosity, as well as the different types it can take.

Basset, who holds appointments in the Departments of Bioengineering and Electrical and Systems Engineering, as well as the Department of Physics and Astronomy in Penn Arts & Science, and the Departments of Neuroscience and Psychiatry in Penn Perelman’s School of Medicine, and Zurn spoke with “Detroit Today” producer Sam Corey about what types of things make people curious, and how to stimulate more curiosity in our everyday lives.

According to the twin experts, curiosity is not a standalone facet of one’s personality. Basset and Zurn’s work has shown that a person’s capacity for inquiry is very much tied to the overall state of their health.

“There’s a lot of scientific research focusing on intellectual humility and also openness to ideas,” says Bassett. “And there are really interesting relationships between someone’s openness to ideas, someone’s intellectual humility and their curiosity and also their wellbeing or flourishing,”

Listen to “What makes people curious and how to encourage the act” at “Detroit Today.”

Register for a book signing event for “Curious Minds: The Power of Connection,” on Friday, December 9th at the Penn Bookstore.

This story originally appeared in Penn Engineering Today.

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‘Curious Minds: The Power of Connection’

Twin siblings and scholars Dani S. Bassett of Penn and Perry Zurn of American University collaborated over half a dozen years to write “Curious Minds: The Power of Connection.” (Image: Tony and Tracy Wood Photography)

With appointments in the Departments of Bioengineering and Electrical and Systems Engineering, as well as the Department of Physics and Astronomy in Penn Arts & Science, and the Departments of Neuroscience and Psychiatry in Penn Perelman’s School of Medicine, Dani S. Bassett is no stranger to following the thread of an idea, no matter where it might lead.

Curious Minds book cover

Those wide-ranging fields and disciplines orbit around an appropriate central question: how does the tangle of neurons in our brains wire itself up to learn new things? Bassett, J. Peter Skirkanich Professor and director of the Complex Systems Lab, studies the relationship between the shape of those networks of neurons and the brain’s abilities, especially the way the shape of the network grows and changes with the addition of new knowledge.

 

To get at the fundamentals of the question of curiosity, Bassett needed to draw on even more disciplines. Fortunately, they didn’t have to look far; Bassett’s identical twin is Perry Zurn, a professor of philosophy at American University, and the two have investigated the many different ways a person can exhibit curiosity.

Bassett and Zurn have now published a new book on the subject. In Curious Minds: The Power of Connection, the twins draw on their previous research, as well as an expansive network of ideas from philosophy, history, education and art.

In an interview with The Guardian, Bassett explains how these threads wove together:

“It wasn’t clear at the beginning of our careers that we would even ever have a chance to write a book together because our areas were so wildly different,” Bassett says – but then, as postgraduates, Zurn was studying the philosophy of curiosity while Bassett was working on the neuroscience of learning. “And so that’s when we started talking. That talking led to seven years of doing research together,” Bassett says. “This book is a culmination of that.”

How exactly do philosophy and neuroscience complement each other? It all starts with the book’s first, and most deceptively simple question: what is curiosity? “Several investigators in science have underscored that perhaps the field isn’t even ready to define curiosity and how it’s different from other cognitive processes,” says Bassett. The ambiguity in the neuroscience literature motivated Bassett to turn to philosophy, “where there are really rich historical definitions and styles and subtypes that we can then put back into neuroscience and ask: ‘Can we see these in the brain?’”

Curious Minds: The Power of Connection is available now. Read Amelia Tait’s review “Are you a busybody, a hunter or a dancer? A new book about curiosity reveals all,” in The Guardian. 

This story originally appeared in Penn Engineering Today.

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Training the Next Generation of Scientists on Soft Materials, Machine Learning and Science Policy

by Melissa Pappas

Developing new soft materials requires new data-driven research techniques, such as autonomous experimentation. Data regarding nanometer-scale material structure, taken by X-ray measurements at a synchrotron, can be fed into an algorithm that identifies the most relevant features, represented here as red dots. The algorithm then determines the optimum conditions for the next set of measurements and directs their execution without human intervention. Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Kevin Yager, who helped develop this technique, will co-teach a course on it as part of a new Penn project on Data Driven Soft Materials Research.

The National Science Foundation’s Research Traineeship Program aims to support graduate students, educate the STEM leaders of tomorrow and strengthen the national research infrastructure. The program’s latest series of grants are going toward university programs focused on artificial intelligence and quantum information science and engineering – two areas of high priority in academia, industry and government.

Chinedum Osuji, Eduardo D. Glandt Presidential Professor and Chair of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE), has received one of these grants to apply data science and machine learning to the field of soft materials. The grant will provide five years of support and a total of $3 million for a new Penn project on Data Driven Soft Materials Research.

Osuji will work with co-PIs Russell Composto, Professor and Howell Family Faculty Fellow in Materials Science and Engineering, Bioengineering, and in CBE, Zahra Fakhraai, Associate Professor of Chemistry in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences (SAS) with a secondary appointment in CBE, Paris Perdikaris, Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, and Andrea Liu, Hepburn Professor of Physics and Astronomy in SAS, all of whom will help run the program and provide the connections between the multiple fields of study where its students will train.

These and other affiliated faculty members will work closely with co-PI Kristin Field, who will serve as Program Coordinator and Director of Education.

Read the full story in Penn Engineering Today.

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A Novel Method for Monitoring the ‘Engine’ of Pregnancy

Combining optical measurements with ultrasound, an interdisciplinary team from the School of Arts & Sciences, Perelman School of Medicine, and CHOP developed a device to better measure blood flow and oxygenation in the placenta. (Image: Lin Wang)

A study published in Nature Biomedical Engineering details a novel method for imaging the placenta in pregnant patients as well as the results of a pilot clinical study. By combining optical measurements with ultrasound, the findings show how oxygen levels can be monitored noninvasively and provides a new way to generate a better understanding of this complex, crucial organ. This research was the result of a collaboration of the groups of the University of Pennsylvania’s Arjun Yodh and Nadav Schwartz with colleagues from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and was led by postdoc Lin Wang.

Schwartz describes the placenta as the “engine” of pregnancy, an organ that plays a crucial role in delivering nutrients and oxygen to the fetus. Placental dysfunction can lead to complications such as fetal growth restriction, preeclampsia, and stillbirth. To increase knowledge about this crucial organ, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development launched the Human Placenta Project in 2014. One focus of the program is to develop tools to assess human placental structure and function in real time, including optical devices.

For three years, the researchers optimized the design of their instrument and tested it in preclinical settings. The process involved integrating optical fibers with ultrasound probes, exploring various ultrasound transducers, and improving the multimodal technology so that measurements were stable, accurate, and reproducible while collecting data at the bedside. The resulting instrumentation now enables researchers to study the anatomy of the placenta while also collecting detailed functional information about placenta blood flow and oxygenation, capabilities that existing commercially devices do not have, the researchers say.

Because the placenta is located far below the body’s surface, one of the key technical challenges addressed by Wang, a postdoc in Yodh’s lab, was reducing background noise in the opto-electronic system. Light is scattered and absorbed when it travels through thick tissues, Yodh says, and the key for success was to reduce background interference so that the small amount of light that penetrates deep into the placenta and then returns is still large enough for a high-quality measurement.

“We’re sending a light signal that goes through the same deep tissues as the ultrasound. The extremely small amount of light that returns to the surface probe is then used to accurately assess tissue properties, which is only possible with very stable lasers, optics, and detectors,” says Yodh. “Lin had to overcome many barriers to improve the signal-to-noise ratio to the point where we trusted our data.”

Read the full story in Penn Today.

The authors are Lin Wang, Jeffrey M. Cochran, Kenneth Abramson, Lian He, Venki Kavuri, Samuel Parry, Arjun G. Yodh, and Nadav Schwartz from Penn; Tiffany Ko, Wesley B. Baker, and Rebecca L. Linn from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and David R. Busch, previously a research associate at Penn and now at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School.

Arjun Yodh is the James M. Skinner Professor of Science in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of the Penn Bioengineering Graduate Group.

Nadav Schwartz is an Associate Professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine.

Lin Wang is a postdoc in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences.

This research was supported by National Institutes of Health grants F31HD085731, R01NS113945, R01NS060653, P41EB015893, P41EB015893, T32HL007915, and U01HD087180.

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How Bacteria Store Information to Kill Viruses (But Not Themselves)

by Luis Melecio-Zambrano

A group of bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria, imaged using transmission electron microscopy. New research sheds light on how bacteria fight off these invaders without triggering an autoimmune response. (Image: ZEISS Microscopy, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

During the last few years, CRISPR has grabbed headlines for helping treat patients with conditions as varied as blindness and sickle cell disease. However, long before humans co-opted CRISPR to fight genetic disorders, bacteria were using CRISPR as an immune system to fight off viruses.

In bacteria, CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) works by stealing small pieces of DNA from infecting viruses and storing those chunks in the genes of the bacteria. These chunks of DNA, called spacers, are then copied to form little tags, which attach to proteins that float around until they find a matching piece of DNA. When they find a match, they recognize it as a virus and cut it up.

Now, a paper published in Current Biology by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania Department of Physics and Astronomy shows that the risk of autoimmunity plays a key role in shaping how CRISPR stores viral information, guiding how many spacers bacteria keep in their genes, and how long those spacers are.

Ideally, spacers should only match DNA belonging to the virus, but there is a small statistical chance that the spacer matches another chunk of DNA in the bacteria itself. That could spell death from an autoimmune response.

“The adaptive immune system in vertebrates can produce autoimmune disorders. They’re very serious and dangerous, but people hadn’t really considered that carefully for bacteria,” says Vijay Balasubramanian, principal investigator for the paper and the Cathy and Marc Lasry Professor of Physics in the School of Arts & Sciences.

Balancing this risk can put the bacteria in something of an evolutionary bind. Having more spacers means they can store more information and fend off more types of viruses, but it also increases the likelihood that one of the spacers might match the DNA in the bacteria and trigger an autoimmune response.

Read the full story in Penn Today.

Vijay Balasubramanian is the Cathy and Marc Lasry Professor of Physics at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Pennsylvania, a visiting professor at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and a member of the Penn Bioengineering Graduate Group.

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Vijay Balasubramanian Discusses Theoretical Physics in Quanta Magazine

Cathy and Marc Lasry Professor Vijay Balasubramanian at Penn’s BioPond.

In an interview with Quanta Magazine, Vijay Balasubramanian discusses his work as a theoretical physicist, noting his study of the foundations of physics and the fundamentals of space and time. He speaks of the importance of interdisciplinary study and about how literature and the humanities can contextualize scientific exploration in the study of physics, computer science, and neuroscience.

Balasubramanian is Cathy and Marc Lasry Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the Penn School of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Penn Bioengineering Graduate Group.

Read “Pondering the Bits That Build Space-Time and Brains” in Quanta Magazine.

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Decoding a Material’s ‘Memory’

by Erica K. Brockmeier

A suspension of particles of different sizes during shearing experiments conducted in the lab of Paulo Arratia, with arrows indicating particle “flow” and trajectories. In a new study published in Nature Physics, researchers detail the relationship between a disordered material’s individual particle arrangement and how it reacts to external stressors. The study also found that these materials have “memory” that can be used to predict how and when they will flow. (Image: Arratia lab)

New research published in Nature Physics details the relationship between a disordered material’s individual particle arrangement and how it reacts to external stressors. The study also found that these materials have “memory” that can be used to predict how and when they will flow. The study was led by Larry Galloway, a Ph.D. student in the lab of Paulo Arratia, and Xiaoguang Ma, a former postdoc in the lab of Arjun Yodh, in collaboration with researchers in the labs of Douglas Jerolmack and Celia Reina.

A disordered material is randomly arranged at the particle-scale, e.g. atoms or grains, instead of being systematically distributed—think of a pile of sand instead of a neatly stacked brick wall. Researchers in the Arratia lab are studying this class of materials as part of Penn’s Materials Research Science & Engineering Center, where one of the program’s focuses is on understanding the organization and proliferation of particle-scale rearrangements in disordered, amorphous materials.

The key question in this study was whether one could observe the structure of a disordered material and have some indication as to how stable it is or when it might begin to break apart. This is known as the yield point, or when the material “flows” and begins to move in response to external forces. “For example, if you look at the grains of a sand castle and how they are arranged, can I tell you whether the wind can blow it over or if it has to be hit hard to fall over?” says Arratia. “We want to know, just by looking at the way the particles are arranged, if we can say anything about the way they’re going to flow or if they are going to flow at all.”

While it has been known that individual particle distribution influences yield point, or flow, in disordered materials, it has been challenging to study this phenomenon since the field lacks ways to “quantify” disorder in such materials. To address this challenge, the researchers collaborated with colleagues from across campus to combine expertise across the fields of experimentation, theory, and simulations.

Read the full story in Penn Today.

The authors are Larry Galloway, Erin Teich, Christoph Kammer, Ian Graham, Celia Reina, Douglas Jerolmack, Arjun Yodh, and Paulo Arratia from Penn; Xiaoguang Ma, previously a postdoc at Penn and now at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China; and Nathan Keim, previously a postdoc at Penn and now at Pennsylvania State University.

Arjun Yodh is the James M. Skinner Professor of Science in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences and a member of the Penn Bioengineering Graduate Group.

Paulo Arratia is a professor in the departments of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Douglas Jerolmack is a professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences and in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at Penn Engineering.

Celia Reina is the William K. Gemmill Term Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at Penn Engineering.