News

New Bubble Popping Theory Could Help Track Ocean Pollution and Viruses

Bubbles are fun for everyone. But, it turns out, they can also be little menaces. When a bubble pops, it can concentrate and aerosolize any particles stuck on it. Not a big deal when it’s a store-bought soapy bubble bursting in the yard or on your hand. But it’s a major concern when the particles it carries are potentially hazardous: bubbles caught in a crashing wave can send vaporized microplastics into the air where they might mess with the Earth’s atmosphere; bubbles burst by a flushing toilet can fling bacteria meters and onto nearby surfaces; a frothing cruise ship hot tub was once shown to be a Legionnaires’ disease super-spreader. More

students in EPIC lab

Pros Who Know Bolster EPIC Lessons

It’s one thing to design a pump that works. It’s quite another to choose the right materials, components, and manufacturing processes to ensure that thousands of identical pumps can be made efficiently, cost-effectively, and safely. More

Sabelhaus Research: Advancing the Safety of Soft Robots for Human Interactions

The emergence of soft robots will enable safe human interactions which will allow robots to assist in the industrial, medical, automotive and space industries. College of Engineering Professor Andrew Sabelhaus (ME, SE), has been working on making soft robots safer to improve these human interaction tasks, in areas such as medicine, as well as explore difficult or dangerous locations. His work will help improve the design of many other soft robots. More

Lab hand holding equipment

Building a New Kind of Faculty

If you want to harness the power of having faculty from multiple disciplines address a societal challenge, you have to make it easy for them to do so. Cross-disciplinary collaboration has long been part of the college’s DNA, and that culture is now being formalized in way that is unlike any other engineering school. More

To Protect Our Most Vital Organs

Professor Katherine Yanhang Zhang (ME, BME, MSE) had already established herself as an expert in the mechanics and mechanobiology of arterial tissue. But, this year, with the help of two large grants from the National Institutes of Health, she’s extended that expertise to the study of brain as well as heart arteries, aiming to discover origins and portents of Alzheimer’s disease and a life-threatening condition known as aortic dissection. More