Engineering - Brown University · PDF fileScience, Archaeology and Comparative ... material that can catalyze a chemical reaction ... a new NanoTools facility on campus

EngineeringSchool of

MagazineWINTER 2013BROWN

Inside this issue:

SPIRA Engineering Camp for Girls Completes Second Summer

Brown to Lead $4.5 million Multi-University Research Initiative

Senior Wins Elevator Pitch Competition

BROWN SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING 4

I N S I D E T H I S I S S U E M E S S A G E F R O M T H E D E A N

Message from the Dean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Spira Engineering Camp Completes Second Year . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

IMNI Turns Five! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

A SMART(er) Way to Track In!uenza . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4

Understanding Traumatic Brain Injury . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6

Brown to Lead Multi-University Quantum Metamaterials Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8

LEGO Robots Make Great Teachers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Engineering Senior Wins Elevator Pitch Competition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Brown’s Engineers Without Borders Returns to the Dominican Republic . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Faculty Awards and Grants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Meet the New Faculty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

Studying Renewable Energy in Costa Rica . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

Advisory Council / Development Committee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

School of Engineering Magazine

EditorialGordon Morton ’93Manager of CommunicationsSchool of Engineering

DesignAmy Simmons

PhotographyMike Cohea, Gordon Morton ’93, Frank Mullin, Jacqueline Pierri ’12,RI STAC, Amy Simmons

Letter from the Editor:

One of the most rewarding parts of my job is interacting with students and alumni. One of the interesting aspects of com-munication today is that so much of it is done online. I interact with so many peo-ple through Twitter and Facebook, not to mention e-mail, YouTube, and several other social media outlets. It’s so reward-ing to be able to connect with alumni who are away from College Hill.

Along those lines, I am happy to report that Brown Engineering is now on Instagram! Please use the hashtag #b row n e ng i n e ri ng when posting any Brown Engineering photos. In addition, we will be launching a revamped School of Engineering website in the spring with improvements in sev-eral areas to make it even easier to stay in touch with all the exciting happenings at the School of Engineering.

However, nothing beats a personal visit. When you come back to Providence for a reunion or other business, stop by Ba-rus and Holley, see what has changed (or maybe what hasn’t), say hello to some of your former professors, and reconnect o!-line for a few minutes. Take the opportu-nity to meet our dean, Larry Larson. Our doors are open. We look forward to con-necting with you in person or online!

Gordon Morton ’93Editor

Connect with Brown Engineering

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Comments, suggestions and address changes may be mailed to:

Brown School of Engineering

Box D182 Hope StreetProvidence, RI 02912 USA

Learn more about Brown Engineering at www.brown.edu/academics/engineering

Tel: 401-863-2677Fax: [email protected]

For all School of Engineering gifts and contributions, please call Rick Marshall

at 401-683-9877 or email him at

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Make a Gift

1 WINTER 2012

I N S I D E T H I S I S S U E M E S S A G E F R O M T H E D E A N

Online Education and the School of Engineering

Brown University’s School of Engineering educates future leaders in the fundamentals of engineering in an environment of world-class research. We stress an interdisciplinary approach and a broad understanding of underlying global issues. Collaborations across the campus and beyond strengthen our development of technological advances that address challenges of vital importance to us all.

There has been a lot of media “buzz” recent-ly about online education, and we have to ask ourselves how this will a"ect Brown and our School of Engineering in the coming years. It’s ironic to contemplate the e"ect of this new mode of education on engineer-ing, since it is the very developments led by engineers – in computer hardware, displays, communications, networking technologies and software – that have enabled this revo-lution in the #rst place.

Brown is not standing still in this arena. We recently signed an agreement with Cours-era to o"er online courses in Computer Science, Archaeology and Comparative Literature. More are no doubt on the way. Also, our recently announced IE-Brown MBA program has a substantial on-line compo-nent. As Katherine Bergeron – Dean of the College – put it: “In developing some inspir-ing Brown courses for the Coursera plat-form, we are not only bringing the best of Brown to a world learning community, we are also going to learn so much ourselves. I am personally excited to see how this act of opening our classrooms to a wider audience will help us rethink how we are teaching at home, and I am grateful to our excellent fac-ulty and to the team at Coursera for partner-ing with us in this experiment. “

In a world where lectures from the best teachers in the world are available for free on the internet, what will be the role of a place like Brown? Many people worry that this will lead to a fundamental change in the business model for the delivery of higher education, and that higher education will go through the same wrenching changes that the music, newspaper and magazine industries have gone through recently.

I’m not worried about these new opportuni-ties.

I think online courses have the potential to o!er students an even better experience here at Brown, and add even more value to the

education that we provide.

The reason I’m optimistic is that the under-graduate experience at Brown is about cre-ating a lifelong community of students and faculty in an intimate and highly personal learning environment. Our engineering

courses are “hands-on” in the early years, and this experiential approach, combined with deep faculty engagements and rich interactions between students, resulting from the residential experience, is not going to be duplicated in the foreseeable future by any online experience. In fact, the avail-ability of online resources will enhance what Brown does best, allowing faculty to spend more time with students on individualized problem-solving speci#cally targeted to the student’s needs.

My feeling is that universities that create value through an experiential community of learning and scholarship will be the ones that thrive in the future. Fortunately, this is the model that Brown has been following for the last 250 years, and I think it is the best model going forward, at least for the next 250 years!


S T E M O U T R E A C H I M N I A N N I V E R S A R Y

Farzanah Ausaluth ’14, Becca Barron ’15, Lizzie Costa ’14 and Jenn Thomas ’14 spent last summer running a four-week engineer-ing camp for rising tenth grade girls. The camp was overseen by faculty advisor Karen Haberstroh, Assistant Professor (Research). Spira has inspired and motivated 38 young women from schools in the Providence area since its start in 2011. A donation from Mi-chael Strem ’58 and a team Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award funded this year’s camp. With a curriculum structured around group learning and hands on proj-ects, these girls are immersed in the world of engineering in an engaging and relevant manner. From bungee jumping Barbie to balsa wood bridges to Arduino, the scope covered in the four weeks is immense. For Ausaluth, a mechanical engineering concentrator, and Costa, a biomedical engi-neering concentrator, this was their second time around with Spira. As co-founders of the program, they have seen the progress Spira has made over the past two years. Barron and Thomas, both concentrating in civil engineering, joined the Spira team in the spring of 2012. With their own fresh perspectives, they have since shared equal responsibility for planning and running the camp.

“Our recent focus has been on making Spira sustainable. We addressed this from many angles,” says Ausaluth.

The team has diligently worked on this com-mon focus concentrating on their lessons, network and alumni involvement. The co-ordinators sought mentors who could assist them with e"ective lesson planning strate-gies and delivery to make the lessons more varied. By reaching out to a greater number

Spira Engineering Camp Completes Second Year

Four Brown University Engineering undergraduate women run a summer

camp for rising tenth grade girls.

of engineering companies, professionals and Brown University professors, Spira was able to expand its network, increase #eld trips and have more guest speakers. Both Spira’s website and its Facebook page al-low Spira alumni to remain connected to both the camp and the engineering world. Additionally, the implementation of a men-toring program enabled past campers to contribute to the classroom dynamic while continuing their interest in STEM. These changes allow for the coordinators to evalu-ate the progress of Spira and work toward an educational model that best serves the campers.

Since last year, Spira has doubled the num-ber of #eld trips and increased the intake of girls from public schools. Spira is now work-ing on increasing the number of female guest speakers, allowing mentors to be more involved in lessons, and getting bet-ter connected to the pedagogical resources available at Brown University.

Dorothy Windham learns how to create a circuit using Arduinos.

Students work on the code for their Arduino, a mini computer.

The campers work in teams on an egg drop project, one of the "rst team exercises of camp.

3 WINTER 2012


Over the past decade, there’s been an explo-sion of nanotechnology research worldwide. Harnessing the peculiar properties of matter at the tiniest scales promises to revolutionize manufacturing, healthcare, and information technology. The Institute for Molecular and Nanoscale Innovation (IMNI) is helping to put Brown—and Rhode Island—at the forefront of this emerging science.

“People are asking what can our universi-ties do to help Rhode Island’s economy. IMNI is one of those things,” said Bob Hurt, IMNI’s director and an engineering professor here at Brown. “We can make nanotechnology an area of excellence in Rhode Island and help to put the state at the forefront of the knowledge economy.”

In #ve years, IMNI has grown to include 60 Brown faculty members, a statewide nanotech consortium with URI, and pri-vate partnerships with General Motors and Medtronic, a global biotech #rm. All told, the group now brings in as much as $8 million in research grants annually.

That research is generating exciting results. The lab of Shouheng Sun in Brown’s chemis-try department recently tested a cobalt-based material that can catalyze a chemical reaction crucial in fuel cell operation. Up to now that reaction has required a platinum catalyst, and the cost and scarcity of platinum is one of the main reasons fuel cells haven’t yet come into widespread use.

Domenico Paci#ci, assistant professor of engi-neering, has developed a sensing biochip that can measure glucose levels in saliva instead of blood. The sensors could be helpful to diabet-ics and may also hold promise for screening patients for other important biomarkers.

Engineering professor Huajian Gao recently published an important paper showing why carbon nanotubes are toxic to cells. A better understanding of nanotoxicity could help researchers design safer nanomaterials for medical applications.

Hurt expects similar results and further growth over the next #ve years. IMNI recently received approval from the university to open a new NanoTools facility on campus.

“The lab will have spectroscopic and imaging tools to help us understand the basic proper-ties of the new forms of matter we create,” Hurt said. “It will be open to all Brown researchers as well as local industry users.”

Hurt sees IMNI’s expansion as holding great promise not only for advancing knowledge but as a means for more collaboration with lo-cal businesses and industry. “My dream is to be able to establish a fabrication facility in the Knowledge District at some point,” he said, “to help nanotechnology become part of the fab-ric of Providence and Rhode Island. ”

IMNI Turns Five!

Brown’s Institute for Molecular and Nanoscale Innovation celebrated its !fth anniversary in November.

Over 100 posters were presented by IMNI professors, postdoctoral researchers and graduate students.

Clyde Briant, V.P. of Research, Brown University with IMNI sta! members.

Brown University President Christina Paxson discussing research during the poster session.

The campers work in teams on an egg drop project, one of the "rst team exercises of camp.


F R O M T H E L A B

tor is unique in that the engineers use a DNA probe with base letters that match the code in the targeted sequence. This ensures the probe will latch on only to the speci#c RNA strand being assayed. The team inundates the sample with probes, to ensure that all RNA molecules bind to a probe.

“We wanted to make something simple,” said Anubhav Tripathi,

associate professor of engineering at Brown and the corresponding author on the paper, published

in the Journal of Molecular Diagnostics. “It’s a low-cost device

for active, on-site detection, whether it’s in"uenza, HIV, or TB.”

“The device allows us to design probes that are both sensitive and speci#c," Tripathi said.

This approach creates excess: probes with no RNA partners. The Brown-led team at-tached the probes to 2.8 micron magnetic beads that carry the genetic sequence for the in!uenza RNA sequence. The engineers then used a magnet to slowly drag the RNA-probe pairs collected in the bulb through a tube that narrows to 50 microns and then deposit the probes at a bulb at the other end. This convergence of magnetism (the mag-netized probes and the dragging magnets)

A SMART(er) Way to Track In!uenza

By David Orenstein

Anubhav Tripathi

In April 2009, the world took notice as re-ports surfaced of a virus in Mexico that had mutated from pigs and was being passed from human to human. The H1N1 “swine !u,” as the virus was named, circulated world-wide, killing more than 18,000 people, ac-cording to the World Health Organization. The Centers for Disease Control and Preven-tion in the United States said it was the #rst global pandemic in more than four decades.

Swine !u will not be the last viral mutation to cause a worldwide stir. One way to con-tain the next outbreak is by administering tests at the infection’s source, pinpointing and tracking the pathogen’s spread in real time. But such e"orts have been stymied by devices that are costly, unwieldy and unreli-able. Now, biomedical engineers at Brown University and Memorial Hospital in Rhode Island have developed a biochip that can detect the presence of in!uenza by zeroing in on the speci#c RNA sequence and then using tiny magnets in a tube to separate the !u-ridden sequence from the rest of the RNA strand. The result: a reliable, fast prototype of a !u detection test that potentially can be carried in a #rst aid kit and used as easily as an iPhone.

The Brown assay is called SMART, which stands for “A Simple Method for Amplifying RNA Targets.” Physically, it is essentially a se-ries of tubes with bulbs on each end, etched like channels into the biochip.

There are other pathogen-diagnostic de-tectors, notably the Polymerase Chain Re-action device (which targets DNA) and the Nucleic Acid Sequence Based Ampli#cation (which also targets RNA). The SMART detec-

and micro!uidics (the probes’ movement through the narrowing channel and the bulbs) separated the RNA-probe pairs from the surrounding biological debris, allow-ing clinicians to isolate the in!uenza strains readily and rapidly for analysis. The team tracked the RNA-probe beads !awlessly at speeds up to 0.75 millimeters per second.

“When we amplify the probes, we have dis-ease detection,” Tripathi said. “If there is no in!uenza, there will be no probes (at the end bulb). This separation part is crucial.”

Once separated, or ampli#ed, the RNA can be analyzed using conventional techniques, such as nucleic acid sequence-based ampli-#cation (NASBA).

The chips created in Tripathi’s lab are less than two inches across and can #t four tube-and-bulb channels. Tripathi said the chips could be commercially manufactured and made so more channels could be etched on each.

The team is working on separate technolo-gies for biohazard detection.

Stephanie McCalla, who earned her doc-torate at Brown last year and is now at the California Institute of Technology, is the #rst author on the paper. Brown professors of medicine Steven Opal and Andrew Artens-tein, with Carmichael Ong and Aartik Sarma, who earned their undergraduate degrees at Brown, are contributing authors.

The U.S. National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation funded the research.

Brown University researchers have created a reliable and fast "u detection test that can be carried in a !rst aid

kit. The novel prototype device isolates in"uenza RNA using a combination of magnetics and micro"uidics, then

ampli!es and detects probes bound to the RNA. The technology could lead to real-time tracking of in"uenza.

Results are published in the Journal of Molecular Diagnostics.

5 WINTER 2012

F R O M T H E L A B

Anubhav Tripathi“We wanted to make something simple. It’s a low-cost device for active, on-site detection, whether it’s in#uenza, HIV, or TB.” Credit: Mike Cohea/Brown University

Schematic of SMART Technology and Detection of 2011 Flu Patient Samples from the Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island (below).(Collaborators Drs. Steven Opal and Andrew Artenstein)


F R O M T H E L A B

Helmets haven’t changed much since the late 1970s. Most are even tested in the same fashion, a simple drop test which is de-signed to gauge their ability to prevent skull fractures. The track record is impressive — with skull fractures resulting in very few of all helmet-protected head injuries.

However, as Brown University Assistant Professor of Engineering Christian Franck points out, helmet technology’s ability to prevent skull fractures has introduced a new set of issues: “Today’s helmets are keeping people alive — but now brains are dam-aged.” Such damage is often missed, as the worst of it may have occurred at the cellular level. Cellular damage often takes months, or years, to manifest related symptoms. The delay or absence of a proper diagnosis can have tragic results for traumatic brain injury (TBI) victims.

Franck is part of a Rhode Island Science and Technology Council (STAC) award-funded collaborative research team that is pro-ducing substantive results in addressing head trauma injury issues. He #rst became interested in TBI while at Harvard. There, as part of a biophysics group led by Kevin “Kit” Parker, he looked at blast injury con-cussion results. TBI shares many of the same symptoms caused by post-traumatic stress disorder, such as insomnia, headaches, and irritability. High rates of TBI resulting from current combat operations have become a matter of great concern to the U.S. military. Military leaders acknowledge TBI’s tremen-dous impact, both on service members’ health and safety, as well as troop readiness and retention.

As he worked with brain cells that had been subjected to TBI, Franck became interested in the forces these cells ‘see.’ Franck explains:

“#e thing about TBI is that everything starts with the cells.

When they die, or change networks — all that a!ects how we perceive

memory, what we think, and potentially impacts di!erent

functions.”

When Franck arrived at Brown University a comprehensive medical school project re-lated to TBI was already underway. The proj-ect, led by Henry F. Lippitt Professor of Or-thopaedics Dr. Trey Crisco, in collaboration with Dartmouth and Virginia Tech, involved instrumenting NCAA players’ helmets with accelerometers in order to measure the ac-celeration of their heads during impact, then comparing results with subsequent diagnoses of concussions by medics on the #eld.

Hearing of the research, Franck recognized an opportunity to continue his inquiry into

TBI, and soon was in contact with Dr. Crisco.

TBI, regardless of whether incurred in com-bat or on the football #eld, is diagnosed and treated in subjective fashion. Franck, work-ing with Dr. Crisco and supported by STAC, has been helping to move science towards an objective assessment of TBI cases. Other collaborators include experts from Brown Med, Rhode Island Hospital, Simulia, and the Veterans Administration Hospital.

The project team was granted the STAC award in 2009. One part of their work, the science investigation, involved looking at cells and how they ‘see’ and respond to forc-es. This work uses equipment that enables the construction of elegant 3-D computer models of damaged brain cells.

The other part of the STAC-funded work involved a translational engineering appli-cation, using Dr. Crisco’s original design for an apparatus that gets #tted into helmets in order to measure impacts. With support from STAC, Franck and other Brown engi-neers devised signi#cant upgrades to the original design. The resulting prototype was successful enough to inspire an Ohio-based helmet technology company, Team Wendy, to invest in a collaboration. The cur-rent system is well on its way to being able to measure a hit and instantaneously signal the level of injury to medical personnel up to a mile away. This technology has incred-ible potential for military applications. “In a blink, the medic would see on the screen, ‘This person’s going to have a concussion.’,” explains Franck.

Understanding Traumatic Brain Injury

Assistant Professor of Engineering Christian Franck is studying TBI at the cellular level and designed signi!cant

upgrades to a helmet that measures impacts.

Christian Franck

7 WINTER 2012

S T U D E N T S I N T H E N E W S

All of the system’s electronics are manufac-tured in Rhode Island. Team Wendy now has a proposal before Congress for additional funding. Were it to be funded, the state would reap immediate bene#ts.

Of his team’s e"orts, Franck says, “We’ve done really well.” He attributes a lot of the work’s success to STAC’s support. “People say, ‘What can you do with such a small amount of money?’ In academia... it allows you to... get people together, develop fertile ground, establish an infrastructure — then, if the community is supportive, you can re-ally make something. Every big building starts small.”

By Hallie Steele/RI STAC

The device (above) is used to damage brain cells before they are viewed in a 3-D microscope. An inside view of a helmet equipped with responsive padding (below).

Photos: RI STAC


F R O M T H E L A B

Through a new Multidisciplinary Univer-sity Research Initiative (MURI) awarded by the Air Force O%ce of Scienti#c Research (AFOSR), Brown will lead an e"ort to study new optical materials and their interactions with light at the quantum scale. The initia-tive, which includes six other top univer-sities, will receive $4.5 million over three years, with a possible two year extension.

Harnessing the power of light at the quan-tum scale could clear the way for superfast optical microprocessors, high-capacity op-tical memory, securely encrypted commu-nication, and untold other technologies. But before any of these potential applications sees the light of day, substantial obstacles must be overcome — not the least of which is the fact that the wavelength of light is larger than quantum-scale objects, limiting the range of possible light-matter interac-tions.

Rashid Zia, the Manning Assistant Profes-sor of Engineering, will lead the team in ad-dressing these challenges. He spoke recent-ly with science writer Kevin Stacey.

What are you hoping to accomplish with this MURI?

We’re trying to help de#ne an emerging #eld. The title of the MURI is “Quantum Metaphotonics and Quantum Metamate-rials.” Ultimately what we’re trying to do is expand the range of materials and light-matter interactions available for quantum optics.

The #eld of metamaterials has already ex-

panded the range of optical materials and phenomena available at larger, classical scales. People are doing things with meta-materials that we couldn’t have imagined before. For example, researchers are mak-ing metamaterials with negative refrac-tive indices, which can literally bend light backward around objects. Others have used metamaterials to make lenses that can image things smaller than the di"raction limit of traditional lenses. What we’re doing now is asking what happens when we bring these metamaterials down to the scale of quantum emitters — the level of things that can emit a single photon at a time.

Can you talk a bit about the challenges in-volved in doing this?

When you talk about the way light interacts with matter at the quantum level, the types of interactions and the strength of those interactions are limited by a size mismatch. The optical wavelength is something like 100 times larger than a quantum emitter. For example, a quantum dot — a small bit of semiconductor we can use as a light emit-ter — is 5 to 10 nanometers. The wavelength of light is on the order of 500 to 1,000 nano-meters. The problem is that the quantum dot doesn’t know there’s a wave. It can’t see the spatial variation of the light wave, just its local variation in time. So we need to shrink the wavelength of light to increase our in-teractions. Or we might increase the wave-length to collectively interact with many quantum emitters. And hopefully we can learn something fundamental about the na-ture of light that opens up new ways of ma-

nipulating these interactions. Those are the types of things we’ll be addressing.

In quantum optics we’re limited in part by the kinds of materials we can use. One of the common materials for quantum optics today is the nitrogen vacancy defect in dia-monds, so-called diamond NV centers. As you can imagine, diamond is not the cheap-est or most scalable technology. The chal-lenge posed for us is how to use the semi-conductor materials we use for electronics and extend their optical properties with metamaterial designs, so we can perform quantum optics at wavelengths and with materials commonly used in telecommuni-cations today.

How does the research you’re doing in your lab at Brown !t in?

It’s usually assumed that all light-matter in-teractions at visible frequencies result from the push-pull forces exerted by electric #elds. These are called electric dipole tran-sitions. One of the things we do in my lab is study things that aren’t electric dipoles — for example, magnetic dipoles. Because of the size mismatch we just discussed, it’s often assumed that magnetic dipole transi-tions are around 100,000 times less likely to happen than electric dipole transitions. In other words, it’s assumed that light emis-sion from magnetic dipoles simply doesn’t happen. But the fact is we see magnetic dipole emission every day from the lantha-nide ions that are commonly found in !uo-rescent lights. What we’ve been able to do is quantify the magnetic nature of light.

Through a new $4.5 million Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) awarded by the Air Force O#ce

of Scienti!c Research (AFOSR), Brown will lead an e$ort to study new optical materials and their interactions with

light at the quantum scale.

Brown to Lead Multi-University Quantum Metamaterials Research

Rashid Zia ‘01

9 WINTER 2012

F R O M T H E L A B

We just published a paper on this in Nature Communications. Basically, we demonstrat-ed a way to tell how light was emitted, and rather than simply counting the number of photons a system generates, we can tell you which fraction of them came from electric dipoles and which fraction came from mag-netic dipoles. This helps us understand fun-damental properties about quantum emit-ters, the source of this light. It might also help us access higher-order light-matter in-teractions, enabling new ways to modulate light or to trap energy in optical excitations and get it out when you want, which could be useful for things like optical memory.

Who else is involved in this work?

The team includes people who are world-class experts in di"erent areas. Nader Eng-heta at Penn, Nicholas Fang at MIT, and Xiang Zhang at UC–Berkeley are experts in metamaterials. Harry Atwater at CalTech and Mark Brongersma at Stanford are ex-perts in plasmonics, which is the science of using metal structures to enhance light-matter interactions. Shanhui Fan and Jelena Vuckovic at Stanford are experts in quantum optics. Seth Bank at UT–Austin and Arto Nur-mikko and me here at Brown, work on quan-tum emitters.

It’s really an exciting project. Over the next #ve years, this program will bring together 10 groups and 40-plus researchers with complementary expertise to help answer questions that we couldn’t have imagined a short time ago. We are very optimistic about where this will lead.

Antenna Array

Sub-! Cavities & Waveguides

Epsilon-Near-Zero

Optical Antenna

!!/30

QD Field

Quantum Metamaterials

Quantum Metaphotonics

“At the quantum level, the strength and nature of light-matter interactions are limited by the size mismatch between the electronic wavefunction of single emitters and the wavelength of the visible light. This limitation can be overcome using: Quantum Metamaterials where extended modes in epsilon-near-zero wave-guides and antenna arrays can couple large emitter ensembles; Quantum Metaphotonics where subwavelength cavities and opti-cal antennas can con!ne light and enhance light-matter interactions with single emitters.”

“This program will bring together 10 groups and 40-plus researchers ... to help answer questions that we couldn’t have imagined a short time ago. We are very optimistic about where this will lead.”



Like sumo wrestlers, two LEGO® robots made their way around an oval ring, grab-bing, swatting at each other, and trying with great gusto to push the other robot out of the ring to win the match. Ten young boys — third, fourth, and #fth graders — at the Paul Cu"ee Middle School in Providence cheered on their creations, watching in de-light as their aggressor responded to pre-programmed commands and light sensors to make their way around the ring in pursuit of the opponent. At each turn, parents and volunteer instructors joined in the cheering at the school’s cafeteria on Friday, July 20th. It was the culmination of a three-week pilot program designed to pique children’s inter-est in engineering and computer science.

The LEGO® robotic program was a partner-ship between Brown’s Science Center and the Paul Cu"ee Middle School. Ten student participants were divided into two teams — the Panthers and the Demons of Nothing-ness — and instructed in the #ner points of computer programming and engineering using LEGO® robots as the teaching tool. Students used a kit that not only contained LEGO® pieces but robots’ “brains,” which were connected to laptops so students could program the brains to respond to light, touch, ultrasonic, sound, color, tem-perature, accelerometer, compass, and ra-dio-frequency identi#cation sensors.

Brown engineering students Mike Lazos ’14 and Raymon Baek ’15 helped the students design, build and program robots for four hours every day during the three-week sum-

mer program. According to instructor Baek the program was a tremendous success.

“The kids were very bright and went beyond our expectations,” Baek said. “We always #n-ished the planned curriculum a lot quicker than expected, which kept Mike and me im-provising to stay ahead of the students.”

Instructors Raymon Baek ’14 and Michael Lazos ’15 were

impressed that students mastered the material so quickly.

In the $nal battle, the instructors’ own robot was

thrown for a loss.

The students used visual programming software with easily readable icons and distinct colors for each type of tile. For ex-ample, movement tiles would tell the ro-bot to move and sensor tiles would tell the program to rely on a speci#c sensor. The program used wait statements, (e.g., wait for a certain sound level or touch sensor to be activated), switch statements, (e.g., if the light sensor detects a dark area, move right;

move left for a bright area), and loops. These commands made it possible for the robots to compete in the sumo wrestling challenge and an obstacle course.

The students had to be creative about using sensors to follow a zigzag path through the obstacle course, navigating through various boxes, capturing colored balls from a central area, and bringing them back to their start-ing points. The Panthers easily won the ob-stacle course because they built a robot that had a robotic arm that pulled nearly all the balls back to its starting point in one trial.

As for the battle arena, the Demons of Noth-ingness won because their robot was very bulky and stable. “Mike and I decided to surprise them by introducing our own robot that we assumed was invincible,” said Baek. “We had the three robots #ght it out in the ring. To our surprise, our robot was pushed out of the ring and the Demons of Nothing-ness reigned victorious.”

During the three-week program, the in-structors gained some insight about the challenges of teaching. “The boys loved to build, but the programming, which re-quired them to sit still and concentrate, was a challenge. They need to get up and run around every so often to burn o" some en-ergy,” said Baek.

In this pilot e"ort, all participants, including the students, teachers, learning concept, and execution proved to be a perfect match.

LEGO® Robots Make Great Teachers

A partnership between Brown’s Science Center and the Paul Cu$ee Middle School gave 10 young student hands-on

instruction in the !ner points of computer programming and engineering using LEGO® robots as the teaching tool.

Brown engineering students Raymon Baek ‘14 and Michael Lazos ‘15 were the instructors for the program.

By Darlene Trew Crist

11 WINTER 2012

F R O M T H E L A BS T E M O U T R E A C H I M N I A N N I V E R S A R Y

Building a sumo warrior block by block: LEGO® programmers, from left, Aidan Marinelli, Jose Pagan, and Luke Taylor watch as their team’s robot is attackedby a competitor (above).To the victor, the spoils. The robot designed by the Demons of Nothingness outlasted all competitors (below).

Credit: Mike Cohea/Brown University



Brown alumni and students had another strong showing at the seventh annual Rhode Island Elevator Pitch contest, as Da-vid Emanuel ’13, a senior mechanical engi-neering concentrator, took home the top prize. It was the #fth consecutive year a Brown student or alumnus has won.

Emanuel pitched Lock’d, which enables travelers to attach their backpacks to sta-tionary objects such as hostel beds and train seats.

“With even just a little bit of funding we will fully develop a working prototype, enabling Lock’d to give travelers what they deserve: a worry-free and relaxing adventure,” he said.

Emanuel is currently in Danny Warshay’s ENGN1010 class, “The Entreprenuerial Pro-cess: Innovation in Practice,” and he and his team developed Lock’d as their semes-ter business plan project. Emanuel has also been active in the Entrepreneurship Pro-gram’s Idea Labs. The other members of Emanuel’s team are Amanda Lee ’13, Mat-thew Klimerman ’13, Joseph Stall ’13, and Mehves Tangun ’13. Stall is a business, entre-preneurship and organizations (BEO) con-centrator and Tangun is an engineering and economics double concentrator.

The event, sponsored by the Rhode Island Business Plan Competition, was held at the Johnson & Wales University Harborside Campus and included 46 presenters. A total of $1,000 in cash prizes was awarded to the top 10 presenters. Out of the 46 to pitch, 14 had Brown connections, including 12 cur-rent students. Of the 10 #nalists, an impres-sive six were from Brown.

Brown Mechanical Engineering Concentrator David Emanuel ’13 and team members Amanda Lee ’13,

Matthew Klimerman ’13, Joseph Stall ’13, and Mehves Tangun ’13 developed an idea for a Backpack Lock.

Three of the top ten #nalists were from Steve Petteruti’s Entrepreneurship I class, Engineering 1930G. Cory Abbe ’13, a BEO concentrator, pitched Sonacatch 3D, an all-inclusive trawl sonar system that keeps un-derwater #shing nets safe from harm. Other members of the team included David Killian, a computer science concentrator, Vanessa Munoz, a BEO concentrator, and Moss Amer, a BEO concentrator.

Isha Gulati ’13, pitched PowerHouse, a pow-er output meter that delivers key readings of the power output of oarsmen. Other mem-bers of her team include mechanical engi-neering concentrators Elizabeth Gianuzzi ’13 and Francisco Oliveira ’13, as well as Alice Leung ’13, who is concentrating in electrical engineering.

Tim Kwak ’13, a BEO concentrator, pitched SEVA, software that will allow mariners to in-dicate their preferred content to be broad-cast on a satellite network. Other members of his team included Ilana Foni ’13, a materi-als engineering concentrator, Ian Hovander ’13, a computer engineering concentrator, and William Gasner, a BEO concentrator.

The other two #nalists are also active partici-pants in the Entrepre-neurship Program’s Idea Labs. Cli" Weitzman ’16, pitched BoardBrake, an attachable brake for longboards to make skateboarding safer. Sidney Kushner ’13 pre-sented CCChampions, a nonpro#t corporation

he established to build a national network that links children with cancer to profes-sional athletes.

Established in 2000, the Rhode Island Busi-ness Plan Competition was recently named one of the top 40 business plan competi-tions in the country, and has awarded more than $1.2 million in prizes to competitors developing companies across many indus-tries. The contest required the competitors to pitch their business idea to a panel of eight expert judges from the Rhode Island business community in 90 seconds. The ele-vator pitch contest is a prelude to the annual Rhode Island Business Plan Competition, which features more than $200,000 in cash and prizes. Applications for the business plan competition close on April 1. Winners will be announced on May 2.

Previous Brown winners of the elevator pitch competition include: Julie Sygiel ’09 in 2008, Adam Leonard ’10 in 2009, Theresa Raimondo ’11 in 2010 and Kipp Bradford ’95 Sc.M.’96 in 2011.

Engineering Senior Wins Elevator Pitch Competition

David Emanuel ’13

13 WINTER 2012


Brown Engineers Without Borders Returns to the DR

The community of Los Sanchez lies in the center of the Dominican Republic. It is on the outskirts of Tireo, an agriculturally-based municipality, isolated from the rest of the country by a ring of high mountains. Home to about 300 people, the community is very self-contained. Most children do not travel far from their homes as they become adults. The pride of the community is El Centro Educativo de los Sanchez, a govern-ment-constructed one-room schoolhouse with one teacher and 35 students. The school is one of ten primary schools in Tireo, but the municipality is home to only one high school, which is located in a di"erent community.

The Brown University Chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) established the groundwork for a long-term partnership with Los Sanchez in late August. Members travelled to the community and met with administrative, health, and school o%cials as well as the teacher from El Centro Edu-cativo de los Sanchez, Angela Jimenez. A key area of research within the chapter has been sanitation hygiene and the design of a sanitation facility that is sustainable from both environmental and economic perspectives. Sanitation is a major point of concern at the school, where a set of pit la-trines provide the only bathroom facilities available to students. There is no running water and no access to toilet paper. Health Administrator Dr. Saif Haider explains that latrines such as the ones in Los Sanchez cre-ate pockets of illness that inhibit students’ abilities to learn in a healthy environment. The people of Los Sanchez desire to install !ush toilets, but the funds for such a project

have yet to be found. In other parts of Tireo where !ush toilets are in use, waste is typi-cally !ushed into a pit and then pumped out periodically into a gutter that runs behind a row of houses.

Brown EWB hopes to work closely with school o%cials and the people of Los San-chez to make the sanitation facilities at El Centro Educativo de los Sanchez healthy and environmentally sustainable. The mod-i#cations, which may include a new toilet system and handwashing system, will be presented alongside an education plan and pictorial instructional materials about ba-sic hygiene to be presented to the children in the school system. The #nal aim of this program is to turn the school into a healthy learning space and build a bond between a group of Brown students and a foreign com-munity.

Brown EWB lays the groundwork for a long-term partnership in the Dominican Republic to help improve

sanitation at a local school.

A student from El Centro Educativo de los Sanchez where Brown University Engineers Without Borders is working with local o$cials to upgrade sanitation facilities.

A typical sewage gutter: Waste is periodically pumped from toilets into open gutters located behind homes and schools.

by Dana Dourdeville ‘15

Engineering Senior Wins Elevator Pitch Competition


FA C U LT Y A W A R D S / G R A N T S

Researchers at Brown have been awarded $1.75 million to explore the potential of using car-bon dioxide instead of fossil fuels in the production of common industrial chemicals. Ad-vances could reduce the chemical industry’s carbon footprint and help stabilize production costs in the face of ever increasing fuel prices.

“The goal is to #nd new ways to produce some of the world’s largest-volume chemicals from a sustainable carbon source that the earth not only has in excess but urgently needs to re-duce,” said Tayhas Palmore, professor of engineering and principal investigator on the grant.

The funding comes from the National Science Foundation’s Centers for Chemical Innovation Program. The research team includes Wesley Bernskoetter, Christoph Rose-Petruck, Dwight Sweigart, and Shouheng Sun from the Department of Chemistry, as well as Robert Hurt and Andrew Peterson from the School of Engineering and Nilay Hazari from the Department of Chemistry at Yale. The team is administered by Brown’s Institute for Molecular and Na-noscale Innovation (IMNI).

Professor Tayhas Palmore Receives Grant for Chemical Innovation Center

A team of Brown University researchers has received a $750,000 grant to design an os-cillating underwater wing that can capture energy from !owing water in rivers and tidal basins. The funding comes from the Depart-ment of Energy’s Advanced Research Proj-ects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E), which funds breakthrough technologies that show fun-damental technical promise but are too early for private-sector investment.

“Marine and hydrokinetic energy is a vast renewable energy source,” said Shreyas Mandre, assistant professor of engineering who will lead Brown’s e"ort with colleagues Kenneth Breuer in engineering and Heather Leslie in ecology and evolutionary biology. “The main advantage of hydrokinetic en-ergy, unlike solar or wind power, is that the availability is predictable.”

The wing would capture forces exerted on it by !owing water in much the same way airplane wings capture lift force from wind. “This lift force causes the hydrofoil to heave up and down periodically, and this motion

ARPA-E Funds Hydrokinetic Workcan be used to generate electricity,” Mandre said.

The award supports developing proof-of-concept for this potential technology, and complements current e"orts to investigate the fundamental hydrodynamic mecha-nisms of energy conversion funded by the Air Force O%ce of Scienti#c Research.

David Cooper, professor emeritus of en-gineering and professor of engineering (research), was honored at the 25th Inter-national IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) which was held in Providence from June 18-20. This is the major annual meet-ing on CVPR. Professor Cooper was honored “In appreciation of his outstanding and pioneering contributions to Unsupervised Learning and Bayesian Inference in Com-puter Vision.” The international conference was held this year at the Convention Center with over 1800 attendees. Brown University Professor Benjamin Kimia served as one of three general co-chairs of the conference.

Professor Cooper’s current research focuses on the development and application of new geometric, algebraic, and probabilis-tic approaches, models, and algorithms for recognizing and estimating 2D and 3D geo-metric information and functioning in 3D scenes from images, video, and range data.

Professor David Cooper Honored

Shreyas Mandre

15 WINTER 2012

FA C U LT Y H O N O R S / N E W S

Brown University School of Engineering Professor Nitin Padture has been named editor of Scripta Materialia, one of the leading journals in the #eld of materials science and engineering. In this role, Padture will serve a four-year term and will handle approximately 300 manuscripts per year.

“It is a great opportunity to contribute toward the shaping of a fast-moving #eld, and I am humbled by the honor,” said Padture.

Padture, Professor of Engineering and Director of the Center for Advanced Materials Research (CAMR) at Brown, joined the Brown faculty in January of 2012. Previously, he was College of Engineering Distinguished Professor at The Ohio State University, and the founding director of the NSF-funded Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at OSU.

Padture received a B.Tech. in metallurgical engineering from The Indian Institute of Technol-ogy, Bombay (1985), an M.S. in ceramic engineering from Alfred University (1987), and a Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from Lehigh University (1991).

He was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for three years before joining the University of Con-necticut faculty in January 1995 as an assistant professor. Padture became an associate professor in 1998 and was promoted to professor in 2003. He served as interim department head at UConn before moving to Ohio State in January 2005.

Padture’s teaching and research interests are in the broad areas of synthesis/processing and properties of advanced materials used in applica-tions ranging from jet engines to computer chips, impacting transportation, energy, and information technology sectors. Speci#cally, he has active research in tailoring of structural ceramic composites and coatings, and functional nanomaterials including graphene and perovskites.

Padture has published over 125 journal papers, which have been cited over 5,000 times. Padture is a co-inventor of four patents, and he has de-livered some 150 invited/keynote/plenary talks in the U.S. and abroad. A fellow of the American Ceramic Society, he has received that society’s Roland B. Snow, Robert L. Coble, and Richard M. Fulrath awards. Padture is also a recipient of the O%ce of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Previously, Padture served as a principal editor of Journal of Materials Research and an associate editor of Journal of the American Ceramic Society.

Joseph Calo, professor emeritus at the Brown School of Engineering, has been named a Fellow of the American Chemical Society (ACS). Calo is one of 96 fellows in the 2012 class and was honored at the society’s national meeting in Philadelphia in August.

A founder of the chemical engineering program at Brown, Calo was honored for his research contributions in chemical kinetics and transport phenomena as applied to carbon materials, environmental characterization/remediation, and energy conversion.

He served as treasurer, councilor, technical program secretary and representative of the Fuel Chemistry (now Energy and Fuels, ENFL) Divi-sion to the Multidisciplinary Program Planning Group (MPPG), and Divisional Activities Committee (DAC) member of ACS.

“I’d like to congratulate Professor Calo on this spectacular achievement,” said Dean Larry Larson. “Becoming a Fellow of the ACS is a recogni-tion of a lifetime of technical contributions and service to the American Chemical Society. Professor Calo’s contributions to Brown and to Chemical Engineering have been and con-tinue to be extraordinary.”

The Fellows program began in 2009 as a way to recognize and honor ACS members for out-standing achievements in and contributions to science, the profession, and ACS.

Professor Nitin Padture Named Editor of Scripta Materialia

ARPA-E Funds Hydrokinetic Work

Professor Joe Calo Named Fellow of ACS


M E E T T H E N E W FA C U LT Y M E E T T H E N E W FA C U LT Y

Jennifer Franck’s #rst foray into comput-ing was on the venerable, if rudimentary, Commodore 64. As a child, she tapped out simple looping programs that sent a series of numbers to her printer. Since those early days, Franck’s programs have gotten con-siderably more complex.

The new lecturer in engineering is an ex-pert in computational !uid dynamics. She writes programs that simulate how !uids and gases !ow around objects. Speci#cally, she codes what are called large-eddy simu-lations, a class of code designed to study turbulence. She mostly uses her model to investigate the dynamics of !ight — how wind interacts with wings.

After earning her Ph.D. in mechanical engi-neering from Caltech in 2009, she came to Brown as a postdoc to work with Kenneth Breuer in engineering and Sharon Swartz in ecology and evolutionary biology, who are widely known for their research on the mechanics of bat !ight. “What I was inter-ested in was to see if I could explain some of the characteristics of animal !ight using my models on the computer,” Franck said.

One of the questions Franck looked at is why bats !ap their wings, as opposed to using them for soaring !ight. “There’s a theory that bats evolved from passive gliders to actively !apping their wings,” she said. “The question was, what’s the bene#t of !ap-ping.”

Franck’s models helped to show that !ap-ping creates vortices — tiny pockets of low air pressure — above a bat’s wings. Those vortices create extra lift and may be part of the reason !apping is worth the e"ort.

Franck has also used her models to explore applications that might improve aircraft !ight. “Say you want an airplane to have more lift,” she said. “Could you apply some sort of device on the wing that would pump some extra energy into the !ow and give you better performance? I’m interested in applying code to those types of !ow control questions.”

There are signi#cant advantages to the computational approach, Franck says. It’s much easier, for example, to modify the pa-rameters of an experiment on a computer than it is to design new physical models

Passenger jet or "apping bat, Jennifer Franck writes code that simulates

the "ow of air around things with wings. The computational approach

has advantages and e#ciencies, especially for someone to whom coding

comes naturally.

Jennifer Franck

for wind tunnel tests. Another advantage is that computer models help to isolate the speci#c aspects of a problem that research-ers are trying to address.

“We generally model a very simple airfoil that’s often just two dimensional because it simpli#es the problem,” Franck said. “If we’re looking at the basic physics behind a problem, we don’t want to make things too complicated.”

Though the models may be simple, the code that generates them is not. Most of Franck’s programs require computer clusters that string together multiple processors. For some of her research, Franck has used a cluster at Brown’s Center for Computation and Visualization. For other projects she’s used the Department of Defense’s Army Re-search Lab cluster in Maryland.

It’s a long way from the Commodore 64, but Franck is right at home. “Coding has always just come naturally to me,” she says.

She and her husband Christian, professor of engineering at Brown, live in Providence with their two kids.

17 WINTER 2012


As an engineer, Haneesh Kesari takes his in-spiration from nature.

The new assistant professor of engineering marvels at how nature takes a few proteins and a bit of calcium or silica and creates structures with amazing material properties — emergent properties that might seem impossible given limited raw ingredients.

“Nature is doing it,” he says, “hence it is pos-sible. How to do it is what my research will be focused on.”

Kesari is currently studying Euplectella, a genus of sea sponges. Sea creatures might seem strange territory for a materials scien-tist, but Euplectella have peculiarities that make them something of an engineering marvel. Whereas most animal species form their skeletons with calcium, Euplectella are made mostly of silica—glass. But don’t think of these creatures as the fragile Ming vases of the sea. On the contrary, their skeletons are strikingly robust.

Kesari is interested speci#cally in the root-like appendages that #x the animals to the ocean !oor. The glassy structures, called basalia spicules, have properties similar to man-made #ber optic cable, only the sponge-made versions are substantially stronger and more !exible. Imaging these appendages at the nanoscale reveals an in-tricate construction. Each spicule is made

of concentric layers, some made of glass, others made of a polymer. It’s the pattern in which these layers are arranged that caught Kesari’s attention.

“You see it and think, ‘Is this really an animal skeleton or is it a #gure from a math book?’” he said. “It had an algorithmic beauty to it. We didn’t know what the algorithm was, but felt that there had to be one, because it had such regularity to it.”

Kesari thought this pattern might contrib-ute to the spicules’ renowned strength, so he set to work calculating what pattern of layers would be the strongest given the ma-terials in the spicule. “We calculated it and it so happens the resulting algorithm matches very well with what we see in the spicule,” he said.

Amazing what nature can accomplish given enough time.

Understanding these sorts of mathemati-cal regularities in nature could lead to the man-made materials of the future. It’s a slow and di%cult process, Kesari says, but Brown is the perfect place for that sort of research. There’s a culture in the School of Engineer-ing that “encourages the pursuit of rigor and thoroughness, and rewards originality and creativity,” he says. “It’s nice to see the tradi-tional quality of science — the main reason why many of us chose to do science in the

#rst place — is retained here.”

Not to mention, he adds, that Brown is known for employing many of the “rock stars” in the #eld of solid mechanics over the years.

Aside from his work on Euplectella, Kesari has worked extensively on understanding adhesive properties and surface roughness, including a theoretical basis for why things like sticky notes and packing tape stick bet-ter when you push them down harder. He also studies failure patterns in polymer-based materials.

Kesari earned his Ph.D. from Stanford in 2011. He grew up in southern India, where his fascination with engineering started.

“My father worked in irrigation,” he said. “One of the early experiences I had was go-ing to these small irrigation canals to play. The entire community revolved around wa-ter for crops and everything else, and I could see how just having a simple stone structure changed people’s lives so dramatically.”

He came to view engineering as humanity’s way of putting our collective foot down, no longer helpless against the blind whims of droughts and !oods.

“Engineering, it seems to me, is a very spe-cial enterprise,” he said. Through it “we con-trol our own destiny.”

Understanding a small sea sponge and its ability to anchor itself to the

ocean "oor will point the way to stronger, lighter, better man-made

materials, Haneesh Kesari hopes.

Haneesh Kesari



Indrek Külaots is using garbage to make the world a cleaner place.

Untold tons of plant matter are discarded in the United States every day. Much of this bio-mass — farm waste, sawdust, wood scraps, household yard waste — is trucked o" to land#lls. As it rots, it produces carbon dioxide and methane, greenhouse gases that contrib-ute to global warming.

“My research focuses on trying to make better use of this bio-waste material,” said Külaots, lecturer in engineering. He has found a way to turn this trash into sorbent material that can sop up industrial pollutants.

Using a simple technique called pyrolysis — the same process used to make charcoal — plant waste can be broken down into what’s called bio-char. “This char product has a rela-tively high surface area and is also highly po-rous,” Külaots said. “We can use those pores as workers for pollutant capture.”

He has patented a method of using modi#ed bio-char to absorb elemental mercury. Bio-char could one day be used as a cost-e"ective way to scrub mercury from power plant vapor emissions, replacing expensive activated car-bon #lters. Bio-char sorbents also show prom-ise for cleaning up other pollutants like arse-nic, cadmium, and lead, Külaots says.

Külaots’ interest in environmental engineer-ing began in his native Estonia. After earning

his master’s degree in mechanical engineer-ing at the Tallinn Technical University, he worked on a project to recycle !y ash, a by-product produced by the burning of oil shale. His work on that subject caught the eye of Eric Suuberg, an engineering professor at Brown. Suuberg thought Külaots’ work could be ap-plied to !y ash created by the burning of coal, which is a major concern in the United States

“He saw my work and said, ‘Why don’t you ap-ply?’” Külaots said. “So I came to Brown as a Ph.D. student and I never left.”

After earning a master’s degree in applied mathematics in 2000 and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering in 2001, Külaots stayed at Brown as a senior research engineer. In 2009, he was awarded a joint position as lecturer and re-search engineer. This year he joins the faculty as a lecturer.

In addition to teaching classes in chemical, mechanical, and environmental engineer-ing, he’s expanding his research program to include a hot topic in the material sciences world: graphene.

Graphene is a one-atom-thick sheet of car-bon, with vast surface area. It began getting notoriety a few years ago and quickly gained a reputation as a miracle material. Its electrical properties make it a likely successor of silicon in microprocessors. It also holds promise as a way to store gases like hydrogen for use in fuel cells, and it can catalyze chemical reactions.

But for all its miraculousness, graphene has a problem. The sheets have a tendency to get stuck together in stacks when processed, which decreases this vast surface area on each sheet. Think of two sheets of paper stapled at all four corners. It’s not possible to write on the back of the #rst page or the front of the second because those surfaces are stuck together.

“My research is how to interrupt this stacking,” Külaots said. “How can we get something in the middle so we can actually use the inner layer space as well?”

He’s developing tiny carbon columns to do the job.

“It’s just a pillar, like in ancient Rome,” he said. “But when you’re working at the nanoscale it’s not that easy.” Despite the di%culty, Külaots has had success using his pillars to recover some of this lost space, and recently present-ed his work at one of the world’s top confer-ences on carbon materials.

“These pillared graphene and graphene oxide systems have a great potential in the #elds of gas storage, separation, and catalysis, if prop-erly converted into bulk materials,” he said.

Such is the fast-paced world of engineering: Even before graphene makes it out of the lab and into production, Külaots is thinking of ways to make it better.

Graphene — sheets of carbon that are one atom thick — could help take

mercury and other nasty pollutants out of circulation if only there were a

way to keep the sheets from sticking together. Indrek Külaots is working on

a system of nanoscale pillars.

Indrek Külaots

19 WINTER 2012


Jacob Rosenstein enjoyed his undergraduate years at Brown and certainly made the most of them. He graduated magna cum laude and co-founded a company with Anubhav Tripa-thi, associate professor of engineering. Still, when Rosenstein graduated in 2005, continu-ing in academia was far from his mind.

But seven years later, following a stint in the semiconductor industry and now all but #n-ished with a Ph.D. from Columbia University, he’s set to return to Brown for a job as an assis-tant professor of engineering. Much as he did while a Brown student, he plans to continue innovating at the nexus of electronics and bi-ology.

“Integrated circuits are all around us, but his-torically most of the industry focus has been toward computing and communications,” says Rosenstein. “I’m excited to see what we can do to leverage all of that advanced tech-nology for biological and chemical sensors.”

Rosenstein was a busy senior at Brown. At the same time he was developing a new micro-phone array platform with Harvey Silverman, professor of engineering, he was also working with Tripathi to develop instruments for mi-cro!uidic chips, which are integrated circuits that control the !ow of !uids rather than elec-trical current. They founded Gauge Micro!u-idics in Providence to commercialize the work.

With a resumé of academic excellence and en-trepreneurship, it didn’t take long for Rosen-stein to #nd an industry job. Shortly after

graduation, he moved to Boston to join Ana-log Devices, a major player in the semicon-ductor business. He worked in the company’s wireless division, helping to develop and test application-speci#c integrated circuits and working on prototype cell phone designs.

Rosenstein worked at Analog for more than two years before his whole business unit was sold to the Taiwanese company MediaTek. He was still happy there, but he had begun to do some professional soul searching. The desire to gain more experience in chip design led him back to the notion of graduate school. He enrolled at Columbia in 2008.

In the Bioelectronic Systems Lab of Kenneth Shepard at Columbia, Rosenstein returned to the practice of bringing silicon technology to bear on biophysical systems. At Columbia, his main project has been the design of an inte-grated circuit ampli#er to improve measure-ments of weak ionic currents. Cell membranes contain a variety of proteins which regulate the movement of dissolved ions in and out of the cell, and the movement of these ions can be measured as an electrical current. How-ever, in many cases this current is very small, making it di%cult to measure the signal above the noise. Rosenstein’s ampli#er reduces the noise level at high frequencies, considerably improving the quality of fast ion channel re-cordings.

“As you get down to the range of 10 microsec-onds or less it gets very di%cult to measure that weak current,” he said. “Where I’ve come

in is to make new electronics and experimen-tal setups to reduce the noise level and there-fore enable measurements at timescales that people have not been able to measure.”

Researchers have been also able to make bio-sensors inspired by ion channels using very tiny holes called “nanopores.” If its diameter is not much larger than a single molecule, a nanopore can yield a change in its ionic cur-rent when a molecule such as DNA passes through the pore. However, these weak sig-nals are usually very brief, making them di%-cult to measure. In a paper earlier this year in Nature Methods, Rosenstein demonstrated that signals as fast as one microsecond can be recorded from individual DNA molecules when a nanopore is integrated with his cus-tom ampli#er.

Now back at Brown, Rosenstein is looking for-ward to exploring other opportunities in bio-electronics. He said the University’s success in harnessing signals directly from neurons in the brain with the BrainGate sensor is a par-ticularly inspiring example.

“There are a lot of other interesting diagnos-tics, sensors, and hybrid systems that are mostly unexplored,” he said. “I’m very excited to test the waters and get to know the pure sci-ences and life sciences groups at Brown, and hopefully I can be a hub of instrumentation, sensing, and high-performance electronics.”

Rosenstein returns with an established track record of exactly that.

Biological sensors that detect currents at the nanoscale would have

important clinical applications, but how to separate signal from noise

when the current lasts for 10 microseconds? Jacob Rosenstein has theories

and devices that enable measurement at small timescales.

Jacob Rosenstein


F R O M T H E L A BStudying Renewable Energy in Costa Rica "rough the Green Program

by Jacqueline Pierri ‘12

I cannot speak highly enough of the Green Program. I #rst learned about it from an email sent to the School of Engineer-ing’s mailing list. It came at a moment when the clutter of my email inbox was representative of my plans for life after grad-uation. I needed a direction and purpose for the skills that I have acquired and developed as a Brown Engineering stu-dent. I wanted to continue working with renewable energies; I wanted to travel; and I wanted to help the world.

It described a two week engineering course in Costa Rica that studied renewable energies and included several visits to the state’s various renewable energy plants. Though appealing and exactly what I was searching for, I held my reservations about the program’s educational curriculum – which also ad-vertised visits to Costa Rican microbreweries. It seemed like a fun tropical vacation hidden under the guise of hands-on ex-perience and learning.

Having completed the two weeks abroad, I can truthfully admit that I was completely blown away by the program. My concerns over the educational quality of the program were put to rest on the #rst day when we met our instructor. His lec-tures were among the most engaging I have ever experienced – rivaling those at Brown. We learned about his professional experience in energy, which provided me insight on what my career might look like #ve years from now. The program ex-posed me to incredible opportunities I otherwise would not have experienced.

On one trip, we visited a wind farm to learn about its opera-tion, entered into the turbine base and climbed down its ro-tors for maintenance. We also visited two hydro plants and witnessed the extreme disparity in scale between di"erent renewable technologies. Thanks to this course I was also able to #nally visualize, in its entirety, the trapezoid representation of a turbine from ENGN72 class (Thermodynamics).

It was a perfect balance of education, fun, and adventure. Some days, I would #nd myself going straight from a biomass plant tour to a zip-line of the jungle canopy or a conservation zoo where injured animals are nursed. My favorite extracurric-ular was installing a rainwater harvesting system for a family in need. However, what truly enhanced my experience of the program was the group of people it brought together. It was a concentration of twenty like- minded and passionate indi-viduals – each with their own unique knowledge, experience, and perspective. Within two weeks, I was able to learn just as much from my peers as I did from my wonderful instructors.

As expected, Costa Rica is a tropical paradise. Its natural and cultural beauty is like no other place. I will surely return one day to its amazing people, delectable foods, and of course, ex-cellent microbrews.

21 WINTER 2012

F R O M T H E L A B

Sangeeta N. Bhatia ’90Professor, Investigator, Director: Laboratory for Multiscale Regenerative TechnologiesMITCambridge, MA

John Bravman PresidentBucknell UniversityLewisburg, PA

Seth Coe-Sullivan ’99 Chief Technology O%cer QD VisionLexington, MA

Dr. Rick Fleeter ’76 Ph.D.’81Author/Adjunct Professor Brown University Providence, RILa Sapienza /University of RomeRome, Italy

Thomas F. Gilbane, Jr. ’69 P’97 P’98 P’00Chairman & CEOGilbane Building CompanyProvidence, RI

D. Oscar Groomes ’82 P’15Metallurgical Engineer, Physicist and Materials Scientist Groomes Business SolutionsCharlotte, NC

Deirdre Hanford ’83 - ChairSenior Vice President, Global Technical ServicesSynopsys, Inc.Mountain View, CA

David Hibbitt Ph.D.’72 PMAT’96Co-Founder ABAQUS, Inc.Providence, RI

Mary Lou Jepson ’87 Ph.D.’97CEO and Founder Pixel Qi CorporationSan Bruno, CA

Alejandro Knoep!er ’82PrincipalCipher Investment Management Co.Coral Gables, FL

Peter Lauro ’78 P’11PartnerEdwards Wildman Palmer, LLPBoston, MA

JoAnn LightyChair, Professor of Chemical EngineeringUniversity of UtahSalt Lake City, Utah

Andrew Marcuvitz ’71 P’06Founder, ChairmanAlpond Capital, LLCLincoln, MA

Deb Mills-Sco"eld ’82PartnerGlengary LLCBeachwood, Ohio

James R. Moody ’58 Sc.M.’65 P’97PresidentCo-Planar, Inc.Denville, NJ

Venkatesh “Venky” NarayanamurtiDirectorScience Technology /Public Policy ProgramHarvard Kennedy School Cambridge, MA

James B. RobertoAssociate Laboratory DirectorOak Ridge National LaboratoryOak Ridge, TN

Paul Sorensen ’71 Sc.M.’75 Ph.D.’77 P’06 P’06Co-FounderABAQUS, Inc.Providence, RI

Donald L. Stanford ’72 Sc.M.’77Chief Innovation O%cerGTECHAdjunct ProfessorBrown UniversityProvidence, RI

Ted Tracy ’81 P’14Vice President of EngineeringBlue Jeans NetworkMountain View, CA

James E. Warne, III ’78President WTI, Inc. Phoenix, AZ

Advisory Council Members

ADVISORY COUNCIL/DE VELOPMENT COMMIT TEE

Engineering Advisory Council Mission

Provide support and advice in the develop-ment, execution, and attainment of the School of Engineering’s strategic goals.

Ensure the School of Engineering is provid-ing the highest quality educational experience for its students, and is em-barking on the highest impact, highest quality, research program.

Coordinate with the Engineering Develop-ment Committee to ensure that our strategic and !nancial initiatives are achieved.

Work with campus leadership to ensure their continued support of the School of Engineering, and recognition of the key role Engineering plays in the vitality of the entire Brown community.

Development Committee

Charlie Giancarlo ’79 P’08 P’11Managing DirectorSilver Lake PartnersMenlo Park, CA

Theresia Gouw ’90PartnerAccel PartnersPalo Alto, CA

Steven Price ’84Chairman and CEOTownsquare MediaGreenwich, CT

Joan Wernig Sorensen ’72 P’06 P’06Providence, RI

Paul Sorensen ’71 Sc.M.’75 Ph.D.’77 P’06 P’06Co-FounderABAQUS, Inc.Providence, RI

Executive Advisory Council members with Brown University President Christina Paxson (seated, center).

School of EngineeringBox D182 Hope StreetProvidence, RI 02912

E N G I N 0 030 D E S I G N PR OJ E C T S 2012

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Engineering - Brown University · PDF fileScience, Archaeology and Comparative ... material that can catalyze a chemical reaction ... a new NanoTools facility on campus