Millennium Café

David Hughes | Entomology

PlantVillage is the largest and most technologically advanced decision support system for smallholder farmers in the world. The biggest threat facing all farmers (smallholder farmers or otherwise) is climate change. We focus on climate change adaptation reaching 16 million farmers/week with expectations for a x10 increase in the coming 3 years. This number of farmers could be a massive assist in climate change mitigation. Farms in the global south could draw down and store carbon enabling a massive wealth transfer to solve poverty in a single generation. PlantVillage has won both the Student and Milestone Carbon XPRIZE and we are competing for the $50 million prize and we need your help: engineers, material scientists, dreamers. Come join us and save the world!

Sanjana Krishna Mani, Christopher Wheatley, Ama Agyapong

On May 5^th >40 students competed in the Millennium Café Pitch Competition sponsored by PPG. The competition was fierce as students had <2 minutes to introduce their research in a manner that was understandable and inspiring to our panel of judges. Don’t miss this opportunity to hear the top-3 winners from this year’s competition.

• Sanjana Krishna Mani - “Machines in Microscale: Light-driven Oil Submarines”
• Christopher Wheatley - “Making cold sintering industrially feasible using ultrasonic nondestructive characterization”
• Ama Agyapong  - “Journey to Ordering”

Julie Fenton | Chemistry

The ability to make new materials and control them on an atomic scale remains a substantial challenge in materials chemistry. This talk will offer a window into planned research in the Fenton group, a new synthetic materials lab in the chemistry department at Penn State. Our work will focus on creative synthetic problem solving at the interface of inorganic and organic materials, covering a range of fundamental and application-driven inquiries in colloidal nanosolids, porous materials, polymers, and extended hybrid solids.

Neural Engineering is a truly collaborative cross disciplinary effort to bring modern technological approaches to interfacing with, understanding of, and clinical care of the brain and nervous system. I’ll sketch some of the strengths of PSU’s already strong interdisciplinary Neural Engineering community and the framework through which we’re targeting to expand.

Jenn Macalady | Geosciences

Innovators from coast to coast are building new things with fungi. The small number of fungi currently in mass production were already being cultivated at smaller scale for medicinal and other uses, suggesting that the best fungal building materials have yet to be discovered and that significant contributions toward sustainable materials will soon be made in collaboration with scientists who study fungal ecology, physiology, diversity and genomics.

TEM is a powerful nano/atomic scale imaging technique which can reveal structure-performance relationships and inspire the design of new materials. in-situ TEM – such as the ability to analyze samples in liquid/gaseous environments and/or while simultaneously heating or applying an electrical potential has created revolutionary new opportunities for real-time visualization of physical and chemical processes. I will introduce new opportunities for collaborative research offered by the recent advancements in in-situ TEM.