News Briefs

Elizabeth J. Opila Earns Recognition for Outstanding Contributions to the Ceramic Engineering Discipline

Congratulations to Elizabeth J. Opila, who has earned The American Ceramic Society Arthur L. Friedberg award in recognition of her outstanding teaching and research contributions to ceramic engineering.

Patrick Hopkins Wins ASME Gustus L. Larson Memorial Award

UVA mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Patrick Hopkins has won the prestigious ASME Gustus L. Larson Memorial Award for outstanding achievement in mechanical engineering within ten to twenty years following graduation with a baccalaureate degree in mechanical engineering or related field. Hopkins joins the ranks of accomplished researchers like Evelyn Wang at MIT who won the award in 2017. Hopkins has also been recognized by other awards such as the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) and the ASME Bergles-Rohsenow Young Investigator Award in Heat Transfer. 

NIH Awards Caliari Lab Research Project Grant for Approach to Treating Muscle Loss Injuries

University of Virginia assistant professor Steven R. Caliari has received a Research Project Grant (R01) to address an understudied aspect of tissue engineering solutions for muscle loss due to traumatic injury. The award of more than $2 million from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases proposes an approach to integrating the connective and nervous tissues surrounding the injured muscle. The aim is to improve the functionality of the repaired tissues.

The project, “Aligned and electrically conductive collagen scaffolds for guiding innervated muscle-tendon junction repair of volumetric muscle loss injuries,” will apply a 3D collagen scaffold that mimics the muscle fibers where they join tendons and other connective tissue, known as the musculotendinous junction (MTJ).

Caliari is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering with a secondary appointment in biomedical engineering. He is collaborating on the project with George J. Christ, professor of biomedical engineering and orthopaedic surgery, and Shawn Russell, assistant professor of orthopaedic surgery and mechanical and aerospace engineering. The work builds on previous research recently published in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Biomaterials Science, led by Ivan Basurto, a Ph.D. candidate in Caliari’s lab, with third-year chemical engineering student Gregg Gardner, biomedical engineering alumnus Mark Mora and Christ.

Goyne Helps Lead Efforts to Modernize Hypersonic Flight

University of Virginia’s Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering professor Chris Goyne has been appointed air-breathing propulsion technical area collaboration co-lead for the University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics (UCAH). The project is part of a $100 million U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) initiative to modernize hypersonic flight capabilities.

The University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics (UCAH) is an inclusive, collaborative ecosystem of universities working with government, industry, national laboratories, federally funded research centers, and existing university affiliated research centers. It aims to deliver the innovation and workforce needed to advance modern hypersonic flight systems in support of national defense.

Goyne will be fielding technical and teaming questions from the consortium members and government representatives, participating with the government, federal and national labs, industry, and academia through planned engagements by the UCAH and DOD’s Joint Hypersonics Transition Office, and providing lists of potential reviewers to UCAH for whitepaper proposal review.

Goyne has also been appointed to the UCAH Research Engagement Committee where he will lead international teaming efforts. Among others, Goyne is joined by distinguished UVA mechanical and aerospace engineering alumnus Wesley L. Harris, C.S. Draper professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, who is the co-director of technical area coordination for UCAH and the chair of technical area collaboration.

Applied Physics Letters Editors Highlight Paper First-authored by Shelby Fields

Kudos to Shelby Fields, University of Virginia Ph.D. student of materials science and engineering, who first-authored a collaborative research paper published and selected as an “editor’s pick” in Applied Physics Letters.

AI Neural Net Starts with Nanoscale Heat Transfer

C-3PO and Lt. Commander Data may be here sooner than you think.

Scientists at UVA’s ExSiTE Lab — which focuses on heat transfer at the nanoscale (think measuring atoms) — are developing a whole new class of memory that could become the building block for simulating the way a human brain processes information.

Alumnus (MAE '18) and research assistant Kuimars Aryana has recently advanced research about a new type of memory, called phase change memory, and catapulted this possibility forward. He recently published his findings in Nature Communications.

“If we intend to do the type of data processing needed by more advanced artificial intelligence, we need a better way to process and store memory,” Aryana said. “We’ve maxed out what we can do with our current technology, it’s not enough. One of the most promising candidates for next-level data processing is phase change memory, and that’s what we’re working on.

“Computers use two types of storage memory, ‘working’ memory, what we know as RAM, and ‘storage’ memory, what we know as SSD or our hard drive,” Aryana said. “Forty percent of the energy needed for the computer is used by the processor going back and forth between working and storage memory. Phase change memory has the potential to combine all of this into a single processing and storage unit, using significantly less energy. In our field, this type of memory design is the Holy Grail because it mimics the way human thinking works.”

Aryana’s work is supported by Western Digital, who’s aim is to catalyze a major jump in memory technology, not unlike the jump we have already seen between a floppy disk (remember those?) and a thumb drive.

“Kiumars started as a Ph.D. student three years ago but now he’s running the entire project and is just giving me updates. Besides making a huge impact in the field, he’s published in one of the most prestigious journals in our field as a student, that’s pretty awesome,” said Patrick Hopkins, Aryana’s advisor, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and ExSiTE lab director.

Graduate Researcher Juliet Simpson Awarded NSF Fellowship

Juliet Simpson won the prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to study wind and energy storage.

Research Associate Edem Tetteh Invited to Talk on National Webcast

In December, UVA alumnus and research associate Edem Tetteh was invited by the mechanical engineering department chairs at Cal Tech, Georgia Tech, Princeton, and Stanford in conjunction with the American Society of Mechanical Engineering (ASME) to give a national webcast invited talk “Ice Adhesion on Various Surfaces & Flow Conditions" focusing on his research at the University of Virginia with Eric Loth and Rolls-Royce. This talk was part of the new series Future Leaders in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering: Celebrating Diversity and Innovation.

NMCF Senior Scientist Dickie Named Chair of “Small Molecule” Scientific Interest Group

NMCF XRD & XCT Specialist Dr. Diane Dickie has been elected as the 2021 Chair Elect and 2022 Chair of the “Small Molecule” Scientific Interest Group for the American Crystallographic Association (ACA). The ACA is a  scientific organization founded in 1949 and dedicated to the promotion of atomic-scale molecular structure research. ACA's mission is to further scientific interactions that "will advance experimental and computational aspects of crystallography and diffraction. Understanding the nature of the forces that both control and result from the molecular and atomic arrangements in matter will help shed light on chemical interactions in nature." More information about the ACA and the activities of the more than one thousand members can be found on their website.

Congratulations Diane!

Daniel Quinn Receives Prestigious NSF CAREER Award

Fish and birds use complex high-speed maneuvers when chasing prey or escaping predators. How water and air flow around these animals during maneuvers is mostly unknown. Mapping out these flows will help biologists better understand the relationship between fish, birds, and their environment. Mapping out these flows will help bio-inspired roboticists, who currently rely on models of low-speed, symmetric gaits when designing and testing robots. Understanding the flows that govern rapid maneuvers will enable a new generation of fast, flexible, ultra-maneuverable bio-inspired robots. The principal goal of this project is therefore to discover the fluid dynamics that govern high-speed, asymmetric swimming/flying gaits. The project integrates educational activities, including virtual tours where students from rural high schools teleconference into the lab and remotely control a robotic swimming rig.

This project is made possible by a unique rig that creates high-frequency, asymmetric flapping motions in a water channel. The rig uses a scotch-yoke mechanism to double the frequencies traditionally available to studies of swimming and flying, and it floats on air bushings in order to simulate autonomous maneuvers. The performance of fish- and bird-inspired propulsion strategies are then quantified by a combination of Particle Image Velocimetry and dynamic force measurements. These experiments will inform adaptations to models of unsteady aerodynamics as they pertain to swimming and flying animals and robots. The experimental-theoretical campaign will focus on three specific research goals: (i) Determine what three-dimensional flow features govern the thrust and efficiency of high-frequency bio-inspired gaits, (ii) Determine what three-dimensional flow features govern the maneuverability of asymmetric bio-inspired gaits, and (iii) Determine what wake-driven models predict the performance of high-frequency, asymmetric, tunable-stiffness fins and wings. More generally, the project's overarching goal is for the unique semiautonomous rig and the associated modeling to create new precedents and templates for those integrating fluid dynamics into the next generation of intelligent machines.