Millennium Café

Rui Shi | Chemical Engineering

With new technologies and innovations coming out each day in a transition to a sustainable economy, we need systems analysis tools to help prioritize research and development targets. Life cycle assessment (LCA) has been widely applied in a variety of industries to quantify the environmental impacts of a product, process, or service across the entire supply chain.  In this talk, I will share how we link engineering metrics with sustainability analyses including LCA (for environmental impacts) and techno-economic analysis (for economic viability) under uncertainty, and I invite you to consider how the application of LCA can elucidate sustainability implications of technological innovations and design decisions in your research.

Gaseous signaling molecules such as nitric oxide (NO), carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen sulfide (H₂S) have recently attracted growing attention due to their regulatory functions in the cardiovascular, nervous, and immune systems. My group is developing polymer-based delivery systems for these gas molecules to explore the therapeutic potential. In this talk, I will discuss how polymeric material design is being used to delivery of these gaseous molecules and impact biological functions in cardiomyocytes and vascular endothelial cells.

Ever advanced analytical capabilities are required for the Materials Characterization Laboratory to support the research from >45 PSU departments each year. In this talk we will briefly introduce a few capabilities on the horizon for the MCL: nanoscale infrared spectroscopy - Bruker nanoIR, TEM environmental gas cell- Protochips Atmosphere, and novel surface analysis capabilities.

Hua Tian | Chemistry

New approaches are required to understand the spatial heterogeneity within a tumor microenvironment (TME) if we are to elucidate information regarding the reprogramming mechanisms leading to immunosuppression and tumor progression. I will briefly discuss a new ToF-SIMS methodology for comprehensive lipidomic and metabolomic profiling of different types of individual cells on frozen-hydrated tissue sections. This new approach makes it is possible to integrate the spatial multi-omics profiling (metabolites, lipids and proteins) in the same tissue at single cell level, leading to new insights into the role of lipid reprogramming and metabolic response in normal regulation or pathogenic discoordination of cell-cell interactions in a variety of tissue microenvironments.

World population growth and fast urbanization are such that we will need to build over the next twenty years as many houses as we have built in the past two thousand years. The talk will describe how innovative design and construction technologies developed to overcome this situation on Earth were used to design a habitat to support the human exploration of Mars. It will also show how the lessons learned from this Martian effort may impact the way we design and make buildings on Earth. 

Asher Rosinger | Biobehavioral Health | Anthropology

Water is imperative for health, nutrition, and overall well-being. Yet, 884 million people worldwide lack basic access to improved drinking water sources. While progress has been made on this front, this talk will address the many ways water insecurity manifests and is experienced across the world and in the US. Further it will describe how water insecurity becomes embodied and affects a range of human health outcomes, beyond just water-borne illnesses.