Millennium Café

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. 

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. 

Understanding how metallic alloys are processed and perform is one of the oldest scientific pursuits, and over the past two thousand years, a tremendous amount of empirical knowledge has been developed regarding how we can make and use these materials. Surprisingly, this has all been achieved without the ability to `watch’ how these materials evolve as they are being processed and used in-service. However, a new generation of X-ray techniques at synchrotrons (particle accelerators) are allowing us to look inside these materials in-situ, providing new insights into how to better use existing alloys and design new materials.

Cellular medicine is growing rapidly. However, there are many technical challenges related to cell manufacturing, delivery, and tracking. In this talk, I will show how my lab uses simple engineering and biomaterials to improve cell culture efficiency. I will also introduce the newly established Sartoris Cell Culture Facility at Huck Institute and call for collaborations from engineers, biologists, and materials scientists to address challenges in cell manufacturing.

Penn State’s Center for Energy Law and Policy supports interdisciplinary teams from across Penn State that want to use their joint scientific expertise in the service of complex problems in energy, regulation and society. The process of working across many domains is complicated, and how researchers can get their work noticed within the policy system is sometimes daunting - but the potential to have real impact is tremendous. Come learn about how you can work with the Center for Energy Law and Policy, and how we harness the depth of expertise from our university to improve real-world decisions.

Current sand shortages symbolize the onset of numerous global challenges within our immediate future - our world has started to run out of resources. In this talk, I aim to inspire you to ponder how our materials, buildings, and infrastructure can take the giant leap to become ‘resource independent.’ Framed with the research challenges of building on Mars, I invite you to consider how the small steps we undertake in extraterrestrial construction can lead to giant leaps to decarbonize our built environment on Earth.