The COVID pandemic has touched nearly every aspect of human life across the globe. The pandemic and the global response have catalyzed an unparalleled scale of innovation and brought renewed focus to long-standing challenges in public health. On the one year anniversary of my first Café presentation about the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, I reflect on the lessons of this pandemic and the opportunities to improve the practice of public health.
Elena Vazquez | Stuckeman Center for Design Computing
Building envelopes are responsible for a large part of the building’s total energy consumption and indoor quality. Envelopes are typically designed to be static; however, new engineered materials present an opportunity to design envelopes to be dynamic and more efficient. This presentation will overview our work on developing kinetic building envelopes that use bistable materials and shape-changing smart materials, including interdisciplinary collaboration between the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing and the Convergence Center for Living Multifunctional Material Systems.
With over 3 billion airline passengers annually, the inflight transmission of infectious diseases is an important global health concern. Air travel can serve as a conduit for the rapid spread of newly emerging infections and pandemics. We describe a data-driven, dynamic network transmission model of short-range transmission of respiratory infectious diseases in an airplane cabin during transcontinental US flights.
The critical zone is the layer of the Earth surface defined from the outer edge of vegetation to the depths of groundwater. This relatively thin zone where rock, soil, water, air, and organisms evolve over time is the foundation of life for people on Earth. Studied since the 1970s and NSF-funded for nearly two decades, Penn State critical zone research at Shale Hills – a small watershed next to the Shavers Creek Environmental Center – is undergoing a transition expected to involve both ongoing and new areas of research and education, with applications that include enhanced understanding of land use impacts on water provision and water quality.
Christine Costello | Agricultural and Biological Engineering
Life cycle assessment (LCA) may seem like a recent buzz word, but the idea and techniques have been evolving for fifty years. LCA creates a quantitative inventory of materials and energy across the entire supply chain required to deliver a product, process, or service. The inventory is consolidated and linked to impacts, e.g., climate change, called the impact assessment stage. The goal is to identify opportunities to realize less impactful approaches to delivering the goods and services. I will emphasize how we connect inventory to impact assessment in order to highlight opportunities to improve representation of impacts with high spatial, temporal, and cultural variability. For example, assessing impacts to ecosystem or human health are very challenging, and requires ongoing, close work with scientists who evaluate and define “health” in ecosystems and humans.
Penn State has a wide range of activities related to additive manufacturing (AM) of metals. My group focuses on identifying (and modeling) links between processing conditions, microstructure, and mechanical properties of metals. I will highlight some topics ripe for innovation in AM, and with those, some tools in our lab that could be beneficial for new collaborations.