Andrew Zydney + Wendy Oakes | Center of Excellence in Industrial Biotechnology (CoEIB)
The CoEIB leverages interdisciplinary expertise across Penn State to serve as a focal point in the area of industrial biotechnology. Join us to learn how to add your expertise to help this center realize its GIANT potential.
The COVID-19 pandemic has interrupted the rhythms of much that we know and do. We are dealing with unprecedented times and a new reality which includes the onslaught of information about what is happening locally, nationally and around the world; the dynamics of working from home; potential and real financial pressures; and family and friend dynamics. This talk is about how we cope and help others cope to stay mentally aware and hopefully healthy in these trying times.
Mauricio Terrones & Yin-Ting Yeh | Physics, Chemistry, and Materials Science & Engineering
We will show that it is possible to build a portable platform capable of capturing viruses according to their size and thus enabling direct genomic sequencing in the field. I will discuss how aligned carbon nanotubes (A-CNT) on different substrates can be used as novel three-dimensional (3D) filters that are able to effectively trap viruses by size without labels (antibodies). We are able to tune the inter-tubular spacing from 20 to 500nm. This range covers more than 90% of known viral pathogens. A new technology using this CNT-device in conjunction with Raman spectroscopy and machine learning will be discussed. This platform in now able to identify human viruses with 90% accuracy.
The Penn State Manufacturing and Sterilization initiative came together in March 2020 in response to needs and shortages caused by the novel coronavirus outbreak. I will give a brief overview of the current working groups that are being organized as well as list of the most immediate priorities as of March 23rd. Beyond priorities under MASC activities there is a critical need to inventory PPE which may be useful for our front line healthcare workers – more information on that can be found here: https://www.research.psu.edu/covid_labs
Vishal Monga | Electrical Engineering
Humans and machines alike are often engaged in visual tasks that involve analyzing, interacting with, forming or improving image data. The application landscape of automating visual tasks is rich and diverse and spans consumer and medical imaging, robotics and vision, remote sensing and space sciences, smart systems such as those for traffic analysis and process control. In the past decade, machine learning algorithms have greatly accelerated advances in automating visual tasks -- yet they are overly dependent on the quantity and quality of training image data available. This talk will survey research topics pursued in the Information Processing and Algorithms (iPAL) lab at Penn State (http://signal.ee.psu.edu), which is focused on developing innovations for visual tasks such as image quality enhancement, segmentation and classification when available data is severely limited, noisy or non-ideal.
Matt Ferrari | Biology | The Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics
In the words of the WHO Director General, the recent emergence of SARS-CoV-2 has led to both an epidemic and an infodemic. The state of scientific knowledge about the new virus, the threats it poses, and the strategies to mitigate its spread has been evolving on an hour-by-hour basis. I will present a situation report on the current state of the outbreak and discuss our role, as scientists, in communication to the broader community.