Millennium Café

Engineers have been solving problems, overcoming threats, and driving progress for over a millennium but with an inward focus on the connection between engineering and technology. To solve today’s challenges, engineers must partner with experts in all disciplines to build human-centric, culturally appropriate, engaged solutions to societal problems. This is a call to action to encourage Penn State engineers to take a leadership role within the engineering community so that, in partnership with all disciplines, humanity can emerge from today’s chaos stronger and prepared for the next 1000 years.

In situ analysis of bacterial response to various environmental stressors is fundamentally important in fields ranging from life sciences to generation of sustainable energy using microbial fuels. Being scalable, electronic/electrochemical sensing can enable label-free analysis of bacterial behavior to stress, in situ.  In this talk, I will discuss how the response of bacterial cells to stress (osmotic and heat stress as examples) can be monitored using time-dependent impedance spectroscopy, highlight some of the unanswered questions, and how collaboration can hopefully provide new insights.

While radiocarbon (¹⁴C) measurement is usually associated with archaeological or paleontological chronology building, the technique has creative applications in astrophysics, oceanic and atmospheric circulation, hydrology, forensics, art history, aerosol and hydrocarbon research, biofuels, soils science, drug enforcement, wildlife conservation, and more.  Penn State’s AMS ¹⁴C laboratory gives researchers access to high-precision AMS ¹⁴C measurements and interdisciplinary collaboration.  This talk will give a sense of the varied and unexpected uses of AMS ¹⁴C that may surprise you.

Brendan Culleton

Strategic planning has paved the way for Penn State's ascension among the ranks of the world’s great research universities. Since the 1980s, Penn State has engaged in strategic planning to strengthen its ability to make careful, informed choices, and to allocate resources based on evidence, judgment, and long-term priorities. In 2016, Penn State published its five-year strategic plan, titled “Our Commitment to Impact,” and plan implementation is underway across the university. In this presentation, Provost Jones will share details about the plan implementation process and some recently funded initiatives that reveal how real-world activities support Penn State’s strategic priorities. Also covered: best practices in strategic planning, as well as pitfalls to avoid; how engagement, collaboration, and innovation by researchers and others university-wide are driving meaningful change; and some key takeaways Dr. Jones has gleaned from his work in higher education leadership.

Nicholas P. Jones | Executive Vice President and Provost

Modern smart-phones come equipped with sophisticated optics that can be used to record scientific phenomena.  This talk provides an overview of how to extract scientific data from images recorded using smart-phone cameras and other sophisticated imaging devices.  Applications including object shape/surface-topography analyses, understanding complex material phenomena, and using smart phones as visual aids will be discussed.

Saurabh Basu | Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering

Dielectrics are a broad class of materials that do not have significant electronic or ionic conduction.  They are critical in many applications that require high voltage or controlled electromagnetic wave propagation.  The fundamental properties of dielectric materials will be discussed along with example applications in hybrid electric vehicles and magnetic resonance imaging.