Millennium Café

Brady Wassom | Croda Inc – Mill Hall

Mirroring work-related injury and illness incidence rates for US private industry overall, the injury and illness incidence rate at Croda Inc’s Mill Hall Pennsylvania facility has steadily declined since 2005. Strategic efforts to ensure compliance with safety standards, developing and maintaining safety and health management systems, and building a proactive safety culture have all contributed to this success. However, this journey to make our work environment injury free is ripe with challenges and opportunities. In this talk, I will discuss this journey and highlight the skills and attitudes that all of us should adopt to make safety sustainable in our personal and professional lives.

Under certain conditions, focused femtosecond laser pulses can permanently modify properties of transparent dielectric materials e.g. glass and crystals. By translating a substrate through this focal point, we can 'write' three-dimensional structures that can guide light in a well-controlled manner. I will briefly discuss how laser written waveguide networks can be used to probe novel physics and device concepts beyond conventional nonlinear optics and condensed matter physics.

Numerous social challenges have renewed interest in the need for ethics in organizations and more broadly in our approach to solving sociotechnological problems. In this presentation, a simple model for moral agency will be discussed along with the need for the integration of ethics with engineering, the sciences, and other disciplines. Resources at Penn State for aiding in such integration will be reviewed.

Tom Richard / Institutes of Energy and the Environment & Clive Randall / Materials Research Institute

A new strategic partnership between Penn State and the University of Freiburg is focused on developing a new class of engineered living materials with potential applications in sustainable infrastructure, robotics technologies, and next-generation medical care. Strategic funding will be provided to enable three primary activities:  prestigious research exchange programs open to undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and faculty; interconnected seed grants to encourage activities between research collaborators; shared access to specialized research equipment and facilities at each institution. This program will be jointly managed by MRI and IEE in partnership with the livMatS Centre of Excellence at the University of Freiburg.

Nuris Figueroa | Aronson Group

We have found that mucus, a slimy viscous substance protecting our respiratory, digestive, and reproductive tracks, can be turned into an effective liquid crystal through mechanical stress. Bacterial penetration of mucus can be relevant in the context of respiratory, intestinal and sexually-transmitted infections. In addition, bacteria can turn common passive materials into novel active materials, with emergent properties. In this talk, I will discuss our research on bacterial transport in non-isotropic liquids, like mucus and liquid crystals. Our results provide clues in the propagation of bacteria-borne diseases, as well as insight into the design and control of new active materials.

Nickel-based superalloys are broadly used in the manufacture of single crystal turbine blades. These components are often considered the limiting components of gas turbine engines due to the harsh operating conditions. Traditionally, these components are manufactured using exotic investment casting, which limits design flexibility. The goal of this presentation is to summarize progress made so far and highlight the challenges on additive manufacturing (AM) of such components.