Millennium Café

Most people drive from Pennsylvania to Florida to soak up the sun on a beach or ride a roller coaster at Disney World. My graduate student, Patrick McFarland, and I drove to Florida to huddle in tree-filled parks while overhead thunderstorms flashed lightning and lashed the minivan with rain. We were looking for the faint ultraviolet glow emitted by weak electrical discharges, called corona, that were hypothesized to form on treetops under thunderstorms. Patrick, David Miller, Jena Jenkins, and I had outfitted the minivan with an eye-catching periscope on the roof and a telescope and special ultraviolet camera inside where a seat had been. In this presentation, I will tell you what we observed and what it might mean.

Bill Brune | Meteorology and Atmospheric Science

Robots are designed to help people perform tasks more accurately, but the best way to perform a task may not always be the best way to learn it. I will share research on robotic systems that encourage people to explore varied movement strategies, including real-time assistance that adapts to performance and nudges users toward underexplored solutions. These results suggest that robots can support learning by shaping not only how much assistance a person receives, but also the variety of experiences they encounter. I will conclude by discussing an open challenge: how should we adapt task conditions and schedule different task variations—particularly for dynamic activities such as manipulating tools—to promote long-term learning?

Katie Fitzsimons | Mechanical Engineering

I will present two ideas driving my current research on food waste mitigation: food rescue and choice architecture. With approximately one-third of all food produced going to waste, the environmental and societal consequences are substantial, particularly given the connection between food waste and food insecurity. Addressing this challenge offers significant opportunities for interdisciplinary research, and I hope this talk will spark conversation and new collaborations.

Aydin Alptekinoglu | Smeal College of Business

Lost files, broken access, undocumented datasets, and simple handling errors can quickly turn into lost time, lost research, or even lost funding. At the same time, expectations from funders and regulators around data management, public access, and security are changing. This talk will explore what these changes mean for researchers, practical ways research groups can reduce risk, and how Penn State units are working together to make good data management easier. The MRI-to-ICDS automated data transfer will provide one example of how better infrastructure can make good practice the easy path.

Wolf Hey | Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS)

Millennium Café will resume on November 10.
See you then!

What if experiments that normally take days could be done in much less time? Our transient reactor generates rich kinetic data on catalyst reactions in seconds to minutes, with AI-guided modeling used to uncover the underlying catalyst behavior. A new DOE Genesis Mission project brings together Penn State, Georgia Tech, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and ExxonMobil to advance this approach and explore how faster, data-rich experiments coupled with AI can accelerate experimental science.

Mike Janik | Chemical Engineering