about stevens impact · 2016-02-18 · office of the vice provost of research 1 castle point on...
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Office of the Vice Provost of Research1 Castle Point on HudsonHoboken, NJ 07030
NON-PROFITUS POSTAGE
PAIDSOUTH HACKENSACK, NJ
PERMIT 981
Testing Financial Markets for Weaknesses and Vulnerabilities
The research newsletter of Stevens Institute of Technology Fall 2015
IMPACT
continued inside
continued from cover
STEVENS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
When retired NFL wide receiver Jack Snow decided in 2005 to have both his deteriorating hips replaced with titanium implants, all seemed well. Within weeks of the surgery, the former Pro Bowler was walking, golfing and seemingly back to normal. But he wasn’t; within less than a year, a Staphylococcus (“staph”) infection had migrated to the site of the implant, eventually sickening and killing the once-robust athlete.
Snow’s was far from an isolated case. Infection causes failure in from 1 to 15 percent of implants, particularly in those associated with orthopedic trauma such as wounds from an accident or a battlefield injury. An infected medical device must be surgically removed while the patient is given strong courses of antibiotics. Then the device must be re-implanted. Sometimes, even these treatments don’t work.
That’s why Stevens researchers are working todevelop more sophisticated materials that bacteria can’t cling to or multiply upon so easily.
“This is one of the holy grails of biomaterials science,” says Matthew Libera, a Stevens professor of materials science whose research group works actively in this area and who holds a patent in the technology.
The technology works by affixing microgels to device surfaces in specific patterns that exploit the shape and size differences between bacteria cells and healthy tissue and bone cells. Bacteria, which are generally round and rigid (“think of them as roughly like microscopic tennis balls,” explains Libera), cannot fit into small gaps between the patterned microgels and so are less likely to adhere to a device and form biofilms. Once bacteria grow into films, they become as much as 10,000 times more resistant to antibiotics, and much more dangerous to health.
Bone and healthy tissue cells, on the other hand, are highly plastic (“think of little Ziploc bags partially filled with water,” says Libera) and can mold themselves to the shapes of most surfaces, growing normally even as bacteria are repelled from the dotted surfaces of the medical devices with which the Stevens team is working.
“It’s fairly easy to make a surface to which many kinds of cells adhere, or one that repels nearly all cells,” Libera says. “Our challenge is to make a surface to which the good cells stick but the bad cells cannot. We think we’re close.”
While the gels can be printed on medical devices using electron beams, that solution remains unwieldy and expensive. So Libera’s team has come up with a method of depositing microgels onto device surfaces in a colloidal solution, from which they assemble themselves as they’re applied. The method can be used to modify the surfaces of hip and knee implants, heart valves and other devices during the final stages of manufacture.
“Our focus now is to use similar methods of self-assembly to load the microgels with antibiotics,” notes Libera. “When that effort is successful, any bacteria that do adhere to a device surface will then be confronted with antibiotics right at the device surface.”
A leading global conference on biomaterials
Stevens has also created one of the world’s most important conferences on biomaterial research.
At the third biannual Stevens Conference on Bacteria-Material Interactions in June, a range of experts discussed implant-associated infection. Nearly 80 scientists, researchers, students and clinicians convened to identify and address the scientific, technical and regulatory challenges facing the development of infection-resistant, tissue-contacting biomaterials. Presenters covered a range of topics including biomaterials-associated infection; biofilms and antimicrobial resistance; new approaches to evaluating biomaterials efficacy; and computational microbiology and materials design.
“These issues are meaningful to anyone who has had a joint, heart valve or tendon replaced, or has had dental implants,” says Libera, who served as chair of the conference. “We must work together to define and attack the challenge in as coordinated a fashion as possible.”
The next conference will likely take place at Stevens in spring 2017.
ABOUT STEVENSStevens Institute of Technology, The Innovation University®, is a premier, private research university situated in Hoboken, N.J. overlooking the Manhattan skyline. Founded in 1870, technological innovation has been the hallmark and legacy of Stevens’ education and research programs for more than 140 years. Within the university’s three schools and one college, more than 6,800 undergraduate and graduate students collaborate with more than 380 faculty members in an interdisciplinary, student-centric, entrepreneurial environment to advance the frontiers of science and leverage technology to confront global challenges. Stevens is home to three national research centers of excellence, as well as joint research programs focused on critical industries such as healthcare, energy, finance, defense, maritime security, STEM education and coastal sustainability. The university is consistently ranked among the nation’s elite for return on investment for students, career services programs and mid-career salaries of alumni. Stevens is in the midst of a 10-year strategic plan, The Future. Ours to Create., designed to further extend the Stevens legacy to create a forward-looking and far-reaching institution with global impact.
Imagine a tooth with its own sensor that could help detect decay or disease and warn dentists and doctors. Imagine a replacement ear, formed on a 3-D printer and grown in a lab, with built-in electronics that detect sound and carry it to the brain.
While they once might have been construed as something out of a science fiction novel, these advancements are now moving closer to reality in the laboratory of Manu Sebastian Mannoor, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Stevens.
Mannoor, with a background in mechanical engineering, biomedical engineering and electronics and communications engineering, combines the three fields in innovative research toward what he calls “bionic systems” — engineered devices designed to mimic or enhance human organs, tissues and functions.
He believes the research could lead to custom-formed replacement body parts for those who have been injured or disfigured by accidents, and could also lead to the development of organs that one day allow us to exceed normal human capabilities.
“My research is an effort to integrate all three of these disciplines, and the way I do it is through materials science,” Mannoor says. “This work blurs the boundaries between them while advancing all three disciplines.”
The research is an outgrowth and continuation of work Mannoor was
involved in prior to joining Stevens. After completing undergraduate studies in electronics and communication at the University of Calicut in his native India, he earned master’s degrees in biomedical
engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology and mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University. He later earned his Ph.D. in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton, where he began the bionic systems work.
Smart teeth, improved auditory function
Mannoor’s ultimate goal is to create devices that are fully integrated with the body. His bionic tooth is a good example: Like a tattoo, it is not merely meant to be worn, but rather becomes part of the body. Mannoor’s laboratory-developed tooth sensor is a tiny wireless communication device fashioned from graphene, pliable enough to mold to contours of a tooth and bond with natural enamel. The sensor is formed on a super-thin layer of silk, which then dissolves once the sensor is applied. Though it carries no electrical power, the sensor also contains components that can connect wirelessly with a powered device outside the body, allowing it to transfer data.
Depending on how the sensor is programmed, it can flag early signs of tooth decay or gum disease, and even potentially provide early warnings of stomach cancer, ulcers or other illnesses by continuously monitoring breath and saliva for specific bacteria.
The bionic ear is another example of merging electronics and tissue to improve health. To build his ear, Mannoor three-dimensionally
New Stevens research to help design safer implants
Bionic Systems Could Transform HealthcareInnovative Stevens research integrates electronics with the body to improve medical monitoring
BIONIC SYSTEMS: Making the Human Body Smarter
Material Difference
New Nanotechnology May One Day Power Small Devices with WaterA cell phone you never need to plug in. A watch, a television remote or a key fob that runs forever without any battery to change. A self-contained pacemaker that need not be surgically removed every seven to ten years for replacement.
None of these “green” products or technologies yet exists, but they might one day come to pass if Stevens’ research into sustainable energy sources at very small scales proves fruitful.
Chang-Hwan Choi, a mechanical engineering professor at Stevens, was recently awarded a three-year grant and $200,000 in support by the National Science Foundation to explore a so-called nanofluidic energy-harvesting system. Dubbed a “hydropower
plant on a chip,” the technology harvests energy from nanoscale water flows to create a self-sustaining energy supply.
“There is tremendous interest now in developing alternative energy sources, such as wind and solar energy,” explains Choi. “Our idea was to investigate the concept of using hydropower, at very small scales, to generate significant quantities of energy using another naturally abundant resource: water.”
Choi’s proposed system works like this: A tiny amount of water is circulated through extremely narrow channels just 1 to 100 nanometers wide
each. (By comparison, a single human hair is approximately 80,000 to 100,000 nanometers wide.) The channels are not perfectly smooth; instead, they have been specially engineered with nanoscale roughness so that their surfaces can attract
and hold tiny bubbles of air present in the water. Some of the water flows around the bubbles without ever touching the solid channels, creating a super-slippery effect.
“The water on this superhydrophobic surface is moving on a thin layer of air, much like a puck glides on an air-hockey table,” explains Choi. “Many natural surfaces, such as the leaves of plants, exhibit a similar water-repelling characteristic known as the ‘lotus effect.’ “
As the water streams over the frictionless surface, millions of ions formed in the nanoscale channel can be captured, transformed into electricity and temporarily stored — with almost no energy loss, compared with the 90-plus percent loss that occurs in conventional hydropower systems.
If his research proves fruitful, says Choi, the next step will be to develop larger, super-thin membranes incorporating arrays of the textured channels. Those membranes theoretically would be able to capture and store enough energy to power smaller electronic devices.
prints silver particles that will form an electronic coil antenna with a scaffold composed of a mixture of cartilage cells and other biological materials. The framework of the ear is printed layer by layer, then nurtured in a bath of nutrients to help it grow to form the cartilage tissue. This printing technique allows the ear to be built gradually, with all electronic components completely integrated as it is constructed. Mannoor says this method has proven better at forming highly complex, contoured structures, such as ears, than the traditional tissue replication and reconstruction techniques currently used in plastic surgery.
In a completed bionic ear, the coil antenna connects to wires that could be attached, like a hearing aid, directly to a patient’s nervous system.
Although more development work and testing is required before the ear could be implanted in a patient, Mannoor says his antenna can be designed to pick up sounds beyond the range of normal human hearing, thus not only restoring hearing but potentially enhancing it. There may also be military applications for the technology, and he hopes the techniques he is developing will one day be used to create other body parts such as replacement joints that physicians can monitor and use to prevent injuries from recurring.
New Biomaterials Use Nanosurfaces to Prevent Infection
Visualizing Predicted Fallout, Casualties from Nuclear Weapons
3D image reconstruction of bacterial biofilm growing on nanostructured gold thin film
INSIDE HIGHLIGHTS:
4stevens.edu
Drawing on the computational power of the Hanlon Financial Systems Lab, a small graduate-student team is writing software that will enable multiple complex strategies and high-frequency algorithms to be simultaneously entered and tested to study interactions of different models and strategies with one another and the dynamics of the resulting asset prices. Market orders will be routed and matched much as they are in actual high-frequency electronic markets. The platform will also possess the capability to record and store both live market data and historical data, enabling repeated testing of alternate scenarios.
In addition to the painstaking coding of the software, student research will be vital to the creation of the algorithms used.
“As part of each graduate financial engineering student’s curriculum at Stevens, we have a capstone course during which students are required to complete a practical project related to finance and financial markets,” explains Ionut Florescu, director of the Hanlon Lab and the lead researcher behind the sHiFT project. “Many students chose to work on the sHiFT project and devise trading strategies, thus gaining valuable hands-on market experience. These strategies reflect real market choices and will be implemented into the actual software.”
In addition to stress-testing financial markets, sHiFT will also be useful in testing the impact of new or proposed electronic-trading regulations
— in any nation or jurisdiction — simply by implementing these rules in the sHiFT system and observing the resulting impact, Florescu adds.
The first commercial version of sHiFT is expected to become available by mid-2016 — future iterations will extend beyond equities modeling to energy trading, futures, options and treasuries — and the university is already exploring potential partnerships with academic and industry partners to market and distribute the platform.
For decades, American ideas about nuclear weapons have been shaped by a few chilling images. The two-stage mushroom cloud high above Hiroshima, Japan, photographed from the bomber Enola Gay. Another fierce mushroom cloud, observed by soldiers in the foreground, produced in the desert sands of Nevada during bomb testing several years later. The terrible nuclear destruction averted — or depicted — in a string of Hollywood films.
But what sort of damage might today’s weapons of mass destruction inflict? Specific information has always been surprisingly difficult for the general public, and even interested researchers, to obtain — and even more difficult to visualize.
Now, thanks to the research of Stevens professor of science and technology studies Alex Wellerstein, new resources are helping researchers understand, quantify and graphically depict the effects of the world’s nuclear arsenals.
Wellerstein, a science historian who is also authoring a comprehensive history of U.S. nuclear secrecy, has developed a pair of web applications (NUKEMAP and NUKEMAP3D) that produce complex visualizations of simulated blast zones, mushroom clouds and fallout plumes — as well as casualty and fatality estimates, and numbers of schools affected — at the click of a button. The tools can portray the damage done by a range of weapons, from backpack bombs to large-scale thermonuclear weapons such as the hydrogen bomb.
Visualizing the Consequences of Nuclear WeaponsStevens researcher designs new fallout, casualty estimate tool
This issue of IMPACT arrives during a season of both renewal and assessment. Fall marks students’ return to campus and the start of a new academic year, and it is also the time when we begin to close the books on the previous year’s work and measure our progress.
I’m especially pleased to report that research is one of the areas
where Stevens has made great strides. The amount of research funding awarded to Stevens in Fiscal Year 2015 reached approximately $43 million, an increase of 41.5 percent over the previous year. Even more gratifying, this increase follows two relatively steady years during which funding remained at around $30 million.
The increase in funding has come in several of the university’s key areas of focus. A couple of notable examples:
• In the field of maritime security, Dr. Alan Blumberg received a $6.6 million award from the Port Authority
of New York and New Jersey to improve resilience and preparedness at key infrastructure sites.
• In defense, the Department of Homeland Security has selected Stevens to be the co-lead institution of the Maritime Security Center and is providing $2 million per year in funding for five years.
The increase in research funding aligns with key goals of Stevens’ ongoing strategic plan, The Future. Ours to Create. Stevens continues to encourage faculty to conceive of and develop high-quality sponsored research, and the Office of the Vice Provost for Research is providing the infrastructure to help researchers acquire and maintain support.
Significantly, the increase in funding also coincides with a rise in our graduate student population and the arrival of a number of new faculty members. This is an indication that Stevens is not only an outstanding instructional institution; it’s rapidly becoming a destination of choice for promising professors and Ph.D. students seeking a vibrant research community.
Stevens Research: Reaching New Heights
The days of open trading pits and frenzied brokers waving chits of paper have disappeared over the past decade or so, swiftly replaced by electronic markets and algorithmic trading. In response, regulators and practitioners have raced to keep pace with ever-more-rapid changes in trading technology.
Now CME Group Foundation — the philanthropic arm of the largest exchange in the world — has awarded Stevens a contract to perform a series of financial research projects that may reshape the way federal regulators prepare for electronic trading events. The research will not only help spot illegal trades; it will also help both researchers and agencies stay abreast of the tremendous quantities of routine automated trading activity occurring daily at light speed.
“Things have changed, and very quickly,” says George Calhoun, director of Stevens’ Financial Systems Center and the university’s pioneering undergraduate program in quantitative finance. “Finance is becoming a hard science, as technical as chemistry or biology. Systems are vulnerable, and markets and regulators need to get out in front of this as quickly as they are able.”
That’s where Stevens comes in. The CME Group Foundation-sponsored suite of four projects includes an investigation of applications of quantum computing to complex financial
problems; plans for the creation of the world’s first high-frequency finance journal, which will be based at Stevens; and support for the university’s annual October high-frequency finance conference, the largest such conference in the world.
One of the most exciting components of the Stevens-CME collaboration is sHiFT: an ambitious effort to build a new simulation platform, from scratch, that will run real-time market data and introduce actual high-speed trading scenarios into the market flow to test global markets and exchanges for weaknesses and vulnerabilities.
“There’s simply no tool like this currently available for regulators and researchers,” says Calhoun. “Its scope will be broad and the platform will run live market data from all markets available.”
Portland
Manchester
Bar Harbor
Orono
Boston
Providence
Worcester
Long Island
Bangor
New Haven
Springfield
Hartford
Stevens’ Aircraft-Detection Technology Licensed
A leading U.S. aviation company, BridgeNet International, has signed an agreement to license Stevens’ AAD passive-acoustic technology (described in the spring 2015 issue of IMPACT) for aircraft detection, tracking and classification.
BridgeNet provides services to airports, agencies and other aviation partners for better visualization of airspace and air traffic and improved airport design.
“We are very excited to work with BridgeNet to see the aircraft-detection technology being put to use in an operational environment,” says Hady Salloum, Stevens associate dean for research.
The Stevens technology works by using specially designed microphone arrays and software to detect acoustic signatures from various targets such as drones and small aircraft.
STEVENS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
CRASH TEST Stevens researchers build a bold new tool to stress-test financial markets and computerized trading scenarios for potential dangers
THROUGH COLLABORATION…IMPACT • Fall 2015
“Being told that a certain nuclear weapon ‘emits 500 rem of radiation over a given radius of meters’ means little to the average person,” says Wellerstein. “But when you pair that with an illustration of the distance over a city they know well, along with a qualitative description of the effects of 500 rem, suddenly the ultimate meaning of this becomes clear to anyone, technical or not.”
To create the new visualization tools, Wellerstein dug into national defense archives to obtain blast-zone research derived from painstaking study of detonations at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Nevada Test Site and the Marshall Islands. Then he used his programming expertise to write JavaScript code that would analyze weapons parameters, incorporating known data about local population densities and weather, and superimpose striking visualizations on Google Maps renderings of affected areas.
The resulting casualty figures and cloud images can be discomforting, but Wellerstein notes each are based on the best science publicly available on the subject.
“I did not create the models,” he points out. “All models used in the creation of these tools are adapted from government research, paid for by U.S. taxpayers.”
One tool, NUKEMAP, uses the Google Maps application programming interface to simulate detonations to any place on the planet, allowing for complex measurements of blast pressure, thermal and ionizing radiation and long-range fallout, among other phenomena associated with detonations. It also calculates potential casualties, using a government-produced database of global population densities.
A companion tool, developed later — NUKEMAP3D — generates dynamic, three-dimensional models of mushroom clouds in Google Earth, helping convey the enormous size of these mushroom clouds from ground level, in the air and from space.
In the visualizations produced by NUKEMAP, “a Hiroshima-type bomb in Manhattan punches out the center of the downtown area, while observers only a mile or two away mostly experience shattered windows,” Wellerstein notes. “But the first hydrogen bomb, tested less than 10 years later, destroys the entire metro area, with tremendous casualties and a huge mushroom cloud. Students audibly gasp when they see this unfolding, but they also begin to understand that we have entered a different era.
“Even a small nuclear weapon today is more powerful than the largest-ever weapons used in World War II.”
The Stevens quantitative finance and financial engineering group is also conducting research with additional partners, as well, including the Montreal Exchange, notes Calhoun.
“Trading and finance are no longer about the open trading pits,” he concludes. “The era of person-to-person execution has long since passed. Today, with trades overwhelmingly electronic, they are about technology, about quantitative thinking, about computer science — things we teach in the Stevens curriculum from the fall of freshman year.
“Now Stevens is in a unique position, with its proximity to Wall Street and the power of the Hanlon Lab, to become one of the nation’s research leaders in this rapidly growing field of high-frequency finance. I know of no other financial research lab like this in the Northeast. In fact, there are very few in the world.”
Drawing on the computational power of the Hanlon Financial Systems Lab, a small graduate-student team is writing software that will enable multiple complex strategies and high-frequency algorithms to be simultaneously entered and tested to study interactions of different models and strategies with one another and the dynamics of the resulting asset prices. Market orders will be routed and matched much as they are in actual high-frequency electronic markets. The platform will also possess the capability to record and store both live market data and historical data, enabling repeated testing of alternate scenarios.
In addition to the painstaking coding of the software, student research will be vital to the creation of the algorithms used.
“As part of each graduate financial engineering student’s curriculum at Stevens, we have a capstone course during which students are required to complete a practical project related to finance and financial markets,” explains Ionut Florescu, director of the Hanlon Lab and the lead researcher behind the sHiFT project. “Many students chose to work on the sHiFT project and devise trading strategies, thus gaining valuable hands-on market experience. These strategies reflect real market choices and will be implemented into the actual software.”
In addition to stress-testing financial markets, sHiFT will also be useful in testing the impact of new or proposed electronic-trading regulations
— in any nation or jurisdiction — simply by implementing these rules in the sHiFT system and observing the resulting impact, Florescu adds.
The first commercial version of sHiFT is expected to become available by mid-2016 — future iterations will extend beyond equities modeling to energy trading, futures, options and treasuries — and the university is already exploring potential partnerships with academic and industry partners to market and distribute the platform.
For decades, American ideas about nuclear weapons have been shaped by a few chilling images. The two-stage mushroom cloud high above Hiroshima, Japan, photographed from the bomber Enola Gay. Another fierce mushroom cloud, observed by soldiers in the foreground, produced in the desert sands of Nevada during bomb testing several years later. The terrible nuclear destruction averted — or depicted — in a string of Hollywood films.
But what sort of damage might today’s weapons of mass destruction inflict? Specific information has always been surprisingly difficult for the general public, and even interested researchers, to obtain — and even more difficult to visualize.
Now, thanks to the research of Stevens professor of science and technology studies Alex Wellerstein, new resources are helping researchers understand, quantify and graphically depict the effects of the world’s nuclear arsenals.
Wellerstein, a science historian who is also authoring a comprehensive history of U.S. nuclear secrecy, has developed a pair of web applications (NUKEMAP and NUKEMAP3D) that produce complex visualizations of simulated blast zones, mushroom clouds and fallout plumes — as well as casualty and fatality estimates, and numbers of schools affected — at the click of a button. The tools can portray the damage done by a range of weapons, from backpack bombs to large-scale thermonuclear weapons such as the hydrogen bomb.
Visualizing the Consequences of Nuclear WeaponsStevens researcher designs new fallout, casualty estimate tool
This issue of IMPACT arrives during a season of both renewal and assessment. Fall marks students’ return to campus and the start of a new academic year, and it is also the time when we begin to close the books on the previous year’s work and measure our progress.
I’m especially pleased to report that research is one of the areas
where Stevens has made great strides. The amount of research funding awarded to Stevens in Fiscal Year 2015 reached approximately $43 million, an increase of 41.5 percent over the previous year. Even more gratifying, this increase follows two relatively steady years during which funding remained at around $30 million.
The increase in funding has come in several of the university’s key areas of focus. A couple of notable examples:
• In the field of maritime security, Dr. Alan Blumberg received a $6.6 million award from the Port Authority
of New York and New Jersey to improve resilience and preparedness at key infrastructure sites.
• In defense, the Department of Homeland Security has selected Stevens to be the co-lead institution of the Maritime Security Center and is providing $2 million per year in funding for five years.
The increase in research funding aligns with key goals of Stevens’ ongoing strategic plan, The Future. Ours to Create. Stevens continues to encourage faculty to conceive of and develop high-quality sponsored research, and the Office of the Vice Provost for Research is providing the infrastructure to help researchers acquire and maintain support.
Significantly, the increase in funding also coincides with a rise in our graduate student population and the arrival of a number of new faculty members. This is an indication that Stevens is not only an outstanding instructional institution; it’s rapidly becoming a destination of choice for promising professors and Ph.D. students seeking a vibrant research community.
Stevens Research: Reaching New Heights
The days of open trading pits and frenzied brokers waving chits of paper have disappeared over the past decade or so, swiftly replaced by electronic markets and algorithmic trading. In response, regulators and practitioners have raced to keep pace with ever-more-rapid changes in trading technology.
Now CME Group Foundation — the philanthropic arm of the largest exchange in the world — has awarded Stevens a contract to perform a series of financial research projects that may reshape the way federal regulators prepare for electronic trading events. The research will not only help spot illegal trades; it will also help both researchers and agencies stay abreast of the tremendous quantities of routine automated trading activity occurring daily at light speed.
“Things have changed, and very quickly,” says George Calhoun, director of Stevens’ Financial Systems Center and the university’s pioneering undergraduate program in quantitative finance. “Finance is becoming a hard science, as technical as chemistry or biology. Systems are vulnerable, and markets and regulators need to get out in front of this as quickly as they are able.”
That’s where Stevens comes in. The CME Group Foundation-sponsored suite of four projects includes an investigation of applications of quantum computing to complex financial
problems; plans for the creation of the world’s first high-frequency finance journal, which will be based at Stevens; and support for the university’s annual October high-frequency finance conference, the largest such conference in the world.
One of the most exciting components of the Stevens-CME collaboration is sHiFT: an ambitious effort to build a new simulation platform, from scratch, that will run real-time market data and introduce actual high-speed trading scenarios into the market flow to test global markets and exchanges for weaknesses and vulnerabilities.
“There’s simply no tool like this currently available for regulators and researchers,” says Calhoun. “Its scope will be broad and the platform will run live market data from all markets available.”
Portland
Manchester
Bar Harbor
Orono
Boston
Providence
Worcester
Long Island
Bangor
New Haven
Springfield
Hartford
Stevens’ Aircraft-Detection Technology Licensed
A leading U.S. aviation company, BridgeNet International, has signed an agreement to license Stevens’ AAD passive-acoustic technology (described in the spring 2015 issue of IMPACT) for aircraft detection, tracking and classification.
BridgeNet provides services to airports, agencies and other aviation partners for better visualization of airspace and air traffic and improved airport design.
“We are very excited to work with BridgeNet to see the aircraft-detection technology being put to use in an operational environment,” says Hady Salloum, Stevens associate dean for research.
The Stevens technology works by using specially designed microphone arrays and software to detect acoustic signatures from various targets such as drones and small aircraft.
STEVENS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
CRASH TEST Stevens researchers build a bold new tool to stress-test financial markets and computerized trading scenarios for potential dangers
THROUGH COLLABORATION…IMPACT • Fall 2015
“Being told that a certain nuclear weapon ‘emits 500 rem of radiation over a given radius of meters’ means little to the average person,” says Wellerstein. “But when you pair that with an illustration of the distance over a city they know well, along with a qualitative description of the effects of 500 rem, suddenly the ultimate meaning of this becomes clear to anyone, technical or not.”
To create the new visualization tools, Wellerstein dug into national defense archives to obtain blast-zone research derived from painstaking study of detonations at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Nevada Test Site and the Marshall Islands. Then he used his programming expertise to write JavaScript code that would analyze weapons parameters, incorporating known data about local population densities and weather, and superimpose striking visualizations on Google Maps renderings of affected areas.
The resulting casualty figures and cloud images can be discomforting, but Wellerstein notes each are based on the best science publicly available on the subject.
“I did not create the models,” he points out. “All models used in the creation of these tools are adapted from government research, paid for by U.S. taxpayers.”
One tool, NUKEMAP, uses the Google Maps application programming interface to simulate detonations to any place on the planet, allowing for complex measurements of blast pressure, thermal and ionizing radiation and long-range fallout, among other phenomena associated with detonations. It also calculates potential casualties, using a government-produced database of global population densities.
A companion tool, developed later — NUKEMAP3D — generates dynamic, three-dimensional models of mushroom clouds in Google Earth, helping convey the enormous size of these mushroom clouds from ground level, in the air and from space.
In the visualizations produced by NUKEMAP, “a Hiroshima-type bomb in Manhattan punches out the center of the downtown area, while observers only a mile or two away mostly experience shattered windows,” Wellerstein notes. “But the first hydrogen bomb, tested less than 10 years later, destroys the entire metro area, with tremendous casualties and a huge mushroom cloud. Students audibly gasp when they see this unfolding, but they also begin to understand that we have entered a different era.
“Even a small nuclear weapon today is more powerful than the largest-ever weapons used in World War II.”
The Stevens quantitative finance and financial engineering group is also conducting research with additional partners, as well, including the Montreal Exchange, notes Calhoun.
“Trading and finance are no longer about the open trading pits,” he concludes. “The era of person-to-person execution has long since passed. Today, with trades overwhelmingly electronic, they are about technology, about quantitative thinking, about computer science — things we teach in the Stevens curriculum from the fall of freshman year.
“Now Stevens is in a unique position, with its proximity to Wall Street and the power of the Hanlon Lab, to become one of the nation’s research leaders in this rapidly growing field of high-frequency finance. I know of no other financial research lab like this in the Northeast. In fact, there are very few in the world.”
Drawing on the computational power of the Hanlon Financial Systems Lab, a small graduate-student team is writing software that will enable multiple complex strategies and high-frequency algorithms to be simultaneously entered and tested to study interactions of different models and strategies with one another and the dynamics of the resulting asset prices. Market orders will be routed and matched much as they are in actual high-frequency electronic markets. The platform will also possess the capability to record and store both live market data and historical data, enabling repeated testing of alternate scenarios.
In addition to the painstaking coding of the software, student research will be vital to the creation of the algorithms used.
“As part of each graduate financial engineering student’s curriculum at Stevens, we have a capstone course during which students are required to complete a practical project related to finance and financial markets,” explains Ionut Florescu, director of the Hanlon Lab and the lead researcher behind the sHiFT project. “Many students chose to work on the sHiFT project and devise trading strategies, thus gaining valuable hands-on market experience. These strategies reflect real market choices and will be implemented into the actual software.”
In addition to stress-testing financial markets, sHiFT will also be useful in testing the impact of new or proposed electronic-trading regulations
— in any nation or jurisdiction — simply by implementing these rules in the sHiFT system and observing the resulting impact, Florescu adds.
The first commercial version of sHiFT is expected to become available by mid-2016 — future iterations will extend beyond equities modeling to energy trading, futures, options and treasuries — and the university is already exploring potential partnerships with academic and industry partners to market and distribute the platform.
For decades, American ideas about nuclear weapons have been shaped by a few chilling images. The two-stage mushroom cloud high above Hiroshima, Japan, photographed from the bomber Enola Gay. Another fierce mushroom cloud, observed by soldiers in the foreground, produced in the desert sands of Nevada during bomb testing several years later. The terrible nuclear destruction averted — or depicted — in a string of Hollywood films.
But what sort of damage might today’s weapons of mass destruction inflict? Specific information has always been surprisingly difficult for the general public, and even interested researchers, to obtain — and even more difficult to visualize.
Now, thanks to the research of Stevens professor of science and technology studies Alex Wellerstein, new resources are helping researchers understand, quantify and graphically depict the effects of the world’s nuclear arsenals.
Wellerstein, a science historian who is also authoring a comprehensive history of U.S. nuclear secrecy, has developed a pair of web applications (NUKEMAP and NUKEMAP3D) that produce complex visualizations of simulated blast zones, mushroom clouds and fallout plumes — as well as casualty and fatality estimates, and numbers of schools affected — at the click of a button. The tools can portray the damage done by a range of weapons, from backpack bombs to large-scale thermonuclear weapons such as the hydrogen bomb.
Visualizing the Consequences of Nuclear WeaponsStevens researcher designs new fallout, casualty estimate tool
This issue of IMPACT arrives during a season of both renewal and assessment. Fall marks students’ return to campus and the start of a new academic year, and it is also the time when we begin to close the books on the previous year’s work and measure our progress.
I’m especially pleased to report that research is one of the areas
where Stevens has made great strides. The amount of research funding awarded to Stevens in Fiscal Year 2015 reached approximately $43 million, an increase of 41.5 percent over the previous year. Even more gratifying, this increase follows two relatively steady years during which funding remained at around $30 million.
The increase in funding has come in several of the university’s key areas of focus. A couple of notable examples:
• In the field of maritime security, Dr. Alan Blumberg received a $6.6 million award from the Port Authority
of New York and New Jersey to improve resilience and preparedness at key infrastructure sites.
• In defense, the Department of Homeland Security has selected Stevens to be the co-lead institution of the Maritime Security Center and is providing $2 million per year in funding for five years.
The increase in research funding aligns with key goals of Stevens’ ongoing strategic plan, The Future. Ours to Create. Stevens continues to encourage faculty to conceive of and develop high-quality sponsored research, and the Office of the Vice Provost for Research is providing the infrastructure to help researchers acquire and maintain support.
Significantly, the increase in funding also coincides with a rise in our graduate student population and the arrival of a number of new faculty members. This is an indication that Stevens is not only an outstanding instructional institution; it’s rapidly becoming a destination of choice for promising professors and Ph.D. students seeking a vibrant research community.
Stevens Research: Reaching New Heights
The days of open trading pits and frenzied brokers waving chits of paper have disappeared over the past decade or so, swiftly replaced by electronic markets and algorithmic trading. In response, regulators and practitioners have raced to keep pace with ever-more-rapid changes in trading technology.
Now CME Group Foundation — the philanthropic arm of the largest exchange in the world — has awarded Stevens a contract to perform a series of financial research projects that may reshape the way federal regulators prepare for electronic trading events. The research will not only help spot illegal trades; it will also help both researchers and agencies stay abreast of the tremendous quantities of routine automated trading activity occurring daily at light speed.
“Things have changed, and very quickly,” says George Calhoun, director of Stevens’ Financial Systems Center and the university’s pioneering undergraduate program in quantitative finance. “Finance is becoming a hard science, as technical as chemistry or biology. Systems are vulnerable, and markets and regulators need to get out in front of this as quickly as they are able.”
That’s where Stevens comes in. The CME Group Foundation-sponsored suite of four projects includes an investigation of applications of quantum computing to complex financial
problems; plans for the creation of the world’s first high-frequency finance journal, which will be based at Stevens; and support for the university’s annual October high-frequency finance conference, the largest such conference in the world.
One of the most exciting components of the Stevens-CME collaboration is sHiFT: an ambitious effort to build a new simulation platform, from scratch, that will run real-time market data and introduce actual high-speed trading scenarios into the market flow to test global markets and exchanges for weaknesses and vulnerabilities.
“There’s simply no tool like this currently available for regulators and researchers,” says Calhoun. “Its scope will be broad and the platform will run live market data from all markets available.”
Portland
Manchester
Bar Harbor
Orono
Boston
Providence
Worcester
Long Island
Bangor
New Haven
Springfield
Hartford
Stevens’ Aircraft-Detection Technology Licensed
A leading U.S. aviation company, BridgeNet International, has signed an agreement to license Stevens’ AAD passive-acoustic technology (described in the spring 2015 issue of IMPACT) for aircraft detection, tracking and classification.
BridgeNet provides services to airports, agencies and other aviation partners for better visualization of airspace and air traffic and improved airport design.
“We are very excited to work with BridgeNet to see the aircraft-detection technology being put to use in an operational environment,” says Hady Salloum, Stevens associate dean for research.
The Stevens technology works by using specially designed microphone arrays and software to detect acoustic signatures from various targets such as drones and small aircraft.
STEVENS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
CRASH TEST Stevens researchers build a bold new tool to stress-test financial markets and computerized trading scenarios for potential dangers
THROUGH COLLABORATION…IMPACT • Fall 2015
“Being told that a certain nuclear weapon ‘emits 500 rem of radiation over a given radius of meters’ means little to the average person,” says Wellerstein. “But when you pair that with an illustration of the distance over a city they know well, along with a qualitative description of the effects of 500 rem, suddenly the ultimate meaning of this becomes clear to anyone, technical or not.”
To create the new visualization tools, Wellerstein dug into national defense archives to obtain blast-zone research derived from painstaking study of detonations at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Nevada Test Site and the Marshall Islands. Then he used his programming expertise to write JavaScript code that would analyze weapons parameters, incorporating known data about local population densities and weather, and superimpose striking visualizations on Google Maps renderings of affected areas.
The resulting casualty figures and cloud images can be discomforting, but Wellerstein notes each are based on the best science publicly available on the subject.
“I did not create the models,” he points out. “All models used in the creation of these tools are adapted from government research, paid for by U.S. taxpayers.”
One tool, NUKEMAP, uses the Google Maps application programming interface to simulate detonations to any place on the planet, allowing for complex measurements of blast pressure, thermal and ionizing radiation and long-range fallout, among other phenomena associated with detonations. It also calculates potential casualties, using a government-produced database of global population densities.
A companion tool, developed later — NUKEMAP3D — generates dynamic, three-dimensional models of mushroom clouds in Google Earth, helping convey the enormous size of these mushroom clouds from ground level, in the air and from space.
In the visualizations produced by NUKEMAP, “a Hiroshima-type bomb in Manhattan punches out the center of the downtown area, while observers only a mile or two away mostly experience shattered windows,” Wellerstein notes. “But the first hydrogen bomb, tested less than 10 years later, destroys the entire metro area, with tremendous casualties and a huge mushroom cloud. Students audibly gasp when they see this unfolding, but they also begin to understand that we have entered a different era.
“Even a small nuclear weapon today is more powerful than the largest-ever weapons used in World War II.”
The Stevens quantitative finance and financial engineering group is also conducting research with additional partners, as well, including the Montreal Exchange, notes Calhoun.
“Trading and finance are no longer about the open trading pits,” he concludes. “The era of person-to-person execution has long since passed. Today, with trades overwhelmingly electronic, they are about technology, about quantitative thinking, about computer science — things we teach in the Stevens curriculum from the fall of freshman year.
“Now Stevens is in a unique position, with its proximity to Wall Street and the power of the Hanlon Lab, to become one of the nation’s research leaders in this rapidly growing field of high-frequency finance. I know of no other financial research lab like this in the Northeast. In fact, there are very few in the world.”
Office of the Vice Provost of Research1 Castle Point on HudsonHoboken, NJ 07030
NON-PROFITUS POSTAGE
PAIDSOUTH HACKENSACK, NJ
PERMIT 981
Testing Financial Markets for Weaknesses and Vulnerabilities
The research newsletter of Stevens Institute of Technology Fall 2015
IMPACT
continued inside
continued from cover
STEVENS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
When retired NFL wide receiver Jack Snow decided in 2005 to have both his deteriorating hips replaced with titanium implants, all seemed well. Within weeks of the surgery, the former Pro Bowler was walking, golfing and seemingly back to normal. But he wasn’t; within less than a year, a Staphylococcus (“staph”) infection had migrated to the site of the implant, eventually sickening and killing the once-robust athlete.
Snow’s was far from an isolated case. Infection causes failure in from 1 to 15 percent of implants, particularly in those associated with orthopedic trauma such as wounds from an accident or a battlefield injury. An infected medical device must be surgically removed while the patient is given strong courses of antibiotics. Then the device must be re-implanted. Sometimes, even these treatments don’t work.
That’s why Stevens researchers are working todevelop more sophisticated materials that bacteria can’t cling to or multiply upon so easily.
“This is one of the holy grails of biomaterials science,” says Matthew Libera, a Stevens professor of materials science whose research group works actively in this area and who holds a patent in the technology.
The technology works by affixing microgels to device surfaces in specific patterns that exploit the shape and size differences between bacteria cells and healthy tissue and bone cells. Bacteria, which are generally round and rigid (“think of them as roughly like microscopic tennis balls,” explains Libera), cannot fit into small gaps between the patterned microgels and so are less likely to adhere to a device and form biofilms. Once bacteria grow into films, they become as much as 10,000 times more resistant to antibiotics, and much more dangerous to health.
Bone and healthy tissue cells, on the other hand, are highly plastic (“think of little Ziploc bags partially filled with water,” says Libera) and can mold themselves to the shapes of most surfaces, growing normally even as bacteria are repelled from the dotted surfaces of the medical devices with which the Stevens team is working.
“It’s fairly easy to make a surface to which many kinds of cells adhere, or one that repels nearly all cells,” Libera says. “Our challenge is to make a surface to which the good cells stick but the bad cells cannot. We think we’re close.”
While the gels can be printed on medical devices using electron beams, that solution remains unwieldy and expensive. So Libera’s team has come up with a method of depositing microgels onto device surfaces in a colloidal solution, from which they assemble themselves as they’re applied. The method can be used to modify the surfaces of hip and knee implants, heart valves and other devices during the final stages of manufacture.
“Our focus now is to use similar methods of self-assembly to load the microgels with antibiotics,” notes Libera. “When that effort is successful, any bacteria that do adhere to a device surface will then be confronted with antibiotics right at the device surface.”
A leading global conference on biomaterials
Stevens has also created one of the world’s most important conferences on biomaterial research.
At the third biannual Stevens Conference on Bacteria-Material Interactions in June, a range of experts discussed implant-associated infection. Nearly 80 scientists, researchers, students and clinicians convened to identify and address the scientific, technical and regulatory challenges facing the development of infection-resistant, tissue-contacting biomaterials. Presenters covered a range of topics including biomaterials-associated infection; biofilms and antimicrobial resistance; new approaches to evaluating biomaterials efficacy; and computational microbiology and materials design.
“These issues are meaningful to anyone who has had a joint, heart valve or tendon replaced, or has had dental implants,” says Libera, who served as chair of the conference. “We must work together to define and attack the challenge in as coordinated a fashion as possible.”
The next conference will likely take place at Stevens in spring 2017.
ABOUT STEVENSStevens Institute of Technology, The Innovation University®, is a premier, private research university situated in Hoboken, N.J. overlooking the Manhattan skyline. Founded in 1870, technological innovation has been the hallmark and legacy of Stevens’ education and research programs for more than 140 years. Within the university’s three schools and one college, more than 6,800 undergraduate and graduate students collaborate with more than 380 faculty members in an interdisciplinary, student-centric, entrepreneurial environment to advance the frontiers of science and leverage technology to confront global challenges. Stevens is home to three national research centers of excellence, as well as joint research programs focused on critical industries such as healthcare, energy, finance, defense, maritime security, STEM education and coastal sustainability. The university is consistently ranked among the nation’s elite for return on investment for students, career services programs and mid-career salaries of alumni. Stevens is in the midst of a 10-year strategic plan, The Future. Ours to Create., designed to further extend the Stevens legacy to create a forward-looking and far-reaching institution with global impact.
Imagine a tooth with its own sensor that could help detect decay or disease and warn dentists and doctors. Imagine a replacement ear, formed on a 3-D printer and grown in a lab, with built-in electronics that detect sound and carry it to the brain.
While they once might have been construed as something out of a science fiction novel, these advancements are now moving closer to reality in the laboratory of Manu Sebastian Mannoor, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Stevens.
Mannoor, with a background in mechanical engineering, biomedical engineering and electronics and communications engineering, combines the three fields in innovative research toward what he calls “bionic systems” — engineered devices designed to mimic or enhance human organs, tissues and functions.
He believes the research could lead to custom-formed replacement body parts for those who have been injured or disfigured by accidents, and could also lead to the development of organs that one day allow us to exceed normal human capabilities.
“My research is an effort to integrate all three of these disciplines, and the way I do it is through materials science,” Mannoor says. “This work blurs the boundaries between them while advancing all three disciplines.”
The research is an outgrowth and continuation of work Mannoor was
involved in prior to joining Stevens. After completing undergraduate studies in electronics and communication at the University of Calicut in his native India, he earned master’s degrees in biomedical
engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology and mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University. He later earned his Ph.D. in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton, where he began the bionic systems work.
Smart teeth, improved auditory function
Mannoor’s ultimate goal is to create devices that are fully integrated with the body. His bionic tooth is a good example: Like a tattoo, it is not merely meant to be worn, but rather becomes part of the body. Mannoor’s laboratory-developed tooth sensor is a tiny wireless communication device fashioned from graphene, pliable enough to mold to contours of a tooth and bond with natural enamel. The sensor is formed on a super-thin layer of silk, which then dissolves once the sensor is applied. Though it carries no electrical power, the sensor also contains components that can connect wirelessly with a powered device outside the body, allowing it to transfer data.
Depending on how the sensor is programmed, it can flag early signs of tooth decay or gum disease, and even potentially provide early warnings of stomach cancer, ulcers or other illnesses by continuously monitoring breath and saliva for specific bacteria.
The bionic ear is another example of merging electronics and tissue to improve health. To build his ear, Mannoor three-dimensionally
New Stevens research to help design safer implants
Bionic Systems Could Transform HealthcareInnovative Stevens research integrates electronics with the body to improve medical monitoring
BIONIC SYSTEMS: Making the Human Body Smarter
Material Difference
New Nanotechnology May One Day Power Small Devices with WaterA cell phone you never need to plug in. A watch, a television remote or a key fob that runs forever without any battery to change. A self-contained pacemaker that need not be surgically removed every seven to ten years for replacement.
None of these “green” products or technologies yet exists, but they might one day come to pass if Stevens’ research into sustainable energy sources at very small scales proves fruitful.
Chang-Hwan Choi, a mechanical engineering professor at Stevens, was recently awarded a three-year grant and $200,000 in support by the National Science Foundation to explore a so-called nanofluidic energy-harvesting system. Dubbed a “hydropower
plant on a chip,” the technology harvests energy from nanoscale water flows to create a self-sustaining energy supply.
“There is tremendous interest now in developing alternative energy sources, such as wind and solar energy,” explains Choi. “Our idea was to investigate the concept of using hydropower, at very small scales, to generate significant quantities of energy using another naturally abundant resource: water.”
Choi’s proposed system works like this: A tiny amount of water is circulated through extremely narrow channels just 1 to 100 nanometers wide
each. (By comparison, a single human hair is approximately 80,000 to 100,000 nanometers wide.) The channels are not perfectly smooth; instead, they have been specially engineered with nanoscale roughness so that their surfaces can attract
and hold tiny bubbles of air present in the water. Some of the water flows around the bubbles without ever touching the solid channels, creating a super-slippery effect.
“The water on this superhydrophobic surface is moving on a thin layer of air, much like a puck glides on an air-hockey table,” explains Choi. “Many natural surfaces, such as the leaves of plants, exhibit a similar water-repelling characteristic known as the ‘lotus effect.’ “
As the water streams over the frictionless surface, millions of ions formed in the nanoscale channel can be captured, transformed into electricity and temporarily stored — with almost no energy loss, compared with the 90-plus percent loss that occurs in conventional hydropower systems.
If his research proves fruitful, says Choi, the next step will be to develop larger, super-thin membranes incorporating arrays of the textured channels. Those membranes theoretically would be able to capture and store enough energy to power smaller electronic devices.
prints silver particles that will form an electronic coil antenna with a scaffold composed of a mixture of cartilage cells and other biological materials. The framework of the ear is printed layer by layer, then nurtured in a bath of nutrients to help it grow to form the cartilage tissue. This printing technique allows the ear to be built gradually, with all electronic components completely integrated as it is constructed. Mannoor says this method has proven better at forming highly complex, contoured structures, such as ears, than the traditional tissue replication and reconstruction techniques currently used in plastic surgery.
In a completed bionic ear, the coil antenna connects to wires that could be attached, like a hearing aid, directly to a patient’s nervous system.
Although more development work and testing is required before the ear could be implanted in a patient, Mannoor says his antenna can be designed to pick up sounds beyond the range of normal human hearing, thus not only restoring hearing but potentially enhancing it. There may also be military applications for the technology, and he hopes the techniques he is developing will one day be used to create other body parts such as replacement joints that physicians can monitor and use to prevent injuries from recurring.
New Biomaterials Use Nanosurfaces to Prevent Infection
Visualizing Predicted Fallout, Casualties from Nuclear Weapons
3D image reconstruction of bacterial biofilm growing on nanostructured gold thin film
INSIDE HIGHLIGHTS:
4stevens.edu
Office of the Vice Provost of Research1 Castle Point on HudsonHoboken, NJ 07030
NON-PROFITUS POSTAGE
PAIDSOUTH HACKENSACK, NJ
PERMIT 981
Testing Financial Markets for Weaknesses and Vulnerabilities
The research newsletter of Stevens Institute of Technology Fall 2015
IMPACT
continued inside
continued from cover
STEVENS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
When retired NFL wide receiver Jack Snow decided in 2005 to have both his deteriorating hips replaced with titanium implants, all seemed well. Within weeks of the surgery, the former Pro Bowler was walking, golfing and seemingly back to normal. But he wasn’t; within less than a year, a Staphylococcus (“staph”) infection had migrated to the site of the implant, eventually sickening and killing the once-robust athlete.
Snow’s was far from an isolated case. Infection causes failure in from 1 to 15 percent of implants, particularly in those associated with orthopedic trauma such as wounds from an accident or a battlefield injury. An infected medical device must be surgically removed while the patient is given strong courses of antibiotics. Then the device must be re-implanted. Sometimes, even these treatments don’t work.
That’s why Stevens researchers are working todevelop more sophisticated materials that bacteria can’t cling to or multiply upon so easily.
“This is one of the holy grails of biomaterials science,” says Matthew Libera, a Stevens professor of materials science whose research group works actively in this area and who holds a patent in the technology.
The technology works by affixing microgels to device surfaces in specific patterns that exploit the shape and size differences between bacteria cells and healthy tissue and bone cells. Bacteria, which are generally round and rigid (“think of them as roughly like microscopic tennis balls,” explains Libera), cannot fit into small gaps between the patterned microgels and so are less likely to adhere to a device and form biofilms. Once bacteria grow into films, they become as much as 10,000 times more resistant to antibiotics, and much more dangerous to health.
Bone and healthy tissue cells, on the other hand, are highly plastic (“think of little Ziploc bags partially filled with water,” says Libera) and can mold themselves to the shapes of most surfaces, growing normally even as bacteria are repelled from the dotted surfaces of the medical devices with which the Stevens team is working.
“It’s fairly easy to make a surface to which many kinds of cells adhere, or one that repels nearly all cells,” Libera says. “Our challenge is to make a surface to which the good cells stick but the bad cells cannot. We think we’re close.”
While the gels can be printed on medical devices using electron beams, that solution remains unwieldy and expensive. So Libera’s team has come up with a method of depositing microgels onto device surfaces in a colloidal solution, from which they assemble themselves as they’re applied. The method can be used to modify the surfaces of hip and knee implants, heart valves and other devices during the final stages of manufacture.
“Our focus now is to use similar methods of self-assembly to load the microgels with antibiotics,” notes Libera. “When that effort is successful, any bacteria that do adhere to a device surface will then be confronted with antibiotics right at the device surface.”
A leading global conference on biomaterials
Stevens has also created one of the world’s most important conferences on biomaterial research.
At the third biannual Stevens Conference on Bacteria-Material Interactions in June, a range of experts discussed implant-associated infection. Nearly 80 scientists, researchers, students and clinicians convened to identify and address the scientific, technical and regulatory challenges facing the development of infection-resistant, tissue-contacting biomaterials. Presenters covered a range of topics including biomaterials-associated infection; biofilms and antimicrobial resistance; new approaches to evaluating biomaterials efficacy; and computational microbiology and materials design.
“These issues are meaningful to anyone who has had a joint, heart valve or tendon replaced, or has had dental implants,” says Libera, who served as chair of the conference. “We must work together to define and attack the challenge in as coordinated a fashion as possible.”
The next conference will likely take place at Stevens in spring 2017.
ABOUT STEVENSStevens Institute of Technology, The Innovation University®, is a premier, private research university situated in Hoboken, N.J. overlooking the Manhattan skyline. Founded in 1870, technological innovation has been the hallmark and legacy of Stevens’ education and research programs for more than 140 years. Within the university’s three schools and one college, more than 6,800 undergraduate and graduate students collaborate with more than 380 faculty members in an interdisciplinary, student-centric, entrepreneurial environment to advance the frontiers of science and leverage technology to confront global challenges. Stevens is home to three national research centers of excellence, as well as joint research programs focused on critical industries such as healthcare, energy, finance, defense, maritime security, STEM education and coastal sustainability. The university is consistently ranked among the nation’s elite for return on investment for students, career services programs and mid-career salaries of alumni. Stevens is in the midst of a 10-year strategic plan, The Future. Ours to Create., designed to further extend the Stevens legacy to create a forward-looking and far-reaching institution with global impact.
Imagine a tooth with its own sensor that could help detect decay or disease and warn dentists and doctors. Imagine a replacement ear, formed on a 3-D printer and grown in a lab, with built-in electronics that detect sound and carry it to the brain.
While they once might have been construed as something out of a science fiction novel, these advancements are now moving closer to reality in the laboratory of Manu Sebastian Mannoor, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Stevens.
Mannoor, with a background in mechanical engineering, biomedical engineering and electronics and communications engineering, combines the three fields in innovative research toward what he calls “bionic systems” — engineered devices designed to mimic or enhance human organs, tissues and functions.
He believes the research could lead to custom-formed replacement body parts for those who have been injured or disfigured by accidents, and could also lead to the development of organs that one day allow us to exceed normal human capabilities.
“My research is an effort to integrate all three of these disciplines, and the way I do it is through materials science,” Mannoor says. “This work blurs the boundaries between them while advancing all three disciplines.”
The research is an outgrowth and continuation of work Mannoor was
involved in prior to joining Stevens. After completing undergraduate studies in electronics and communication at the University of Calicut in his native India, he earned master’s degrees in biomedical
engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology and mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University. He later earned his Ph.D. in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton, where he began the bionic systems work.
Smart teeth, improved auditory function
Mannoor’s ultimate goal is to create devices that are fully integrated with the body. His bionic tooth is a good example: Like a tattoo, it is not merely meant to be worn, but rather becomes part of the body. Mannoor’s laboratory-developed tooth sensor is a tiny wireless communication device fashioned from graphene, pliable enough to mold to contours of a tooth and bond with natural enamel. The sensor is formed on a super-thin layer of silk, which then dissolves once the sensor is applied. Though it carries no electrical power, the sensor also contains components that can connect wirelessly with a powered device outside the body, allowing it to transfer data.
Depending on how the sensor is programmed, it can flag early signs of tooth decay or gum disease, and even potentially provide early warnings of stomach cancer, ulcers or other illnesses by continuously monitoring breath and saliva for specific bacteria.
The bionic ear is another example of merging electronics and tissue to improve health. To build his ear, Mannoor three-dimensionally
New Stevens research to help design safer implants
Bionic Systems Could Transform HealthcareInnovative Stevens research integrates electronics with the body to improve medical monitoring
BIONIC SYSTEMS: Making the Human Body Smarter
Material Difference
New Nanotechnology May One Day Power Small Devices with WaterA cell phone you never need to plug in. A watch, a television remote or a key fob that runs forever without any battery to change. A self-contained pacemaker that need not be surgically removed every seven to ten years for replacement.
None of these “green” products or technologies yet exists, but they might one day come to pass if Stevens’ research into sustainable energy sources at very small scales proves fruitful.
Chang-Hwan Choi, a mechanical engineering professor at Stevens, was recently awarded a three-year grant and $200,000 in support by the National Science Foundation to explore a so-called nanofluidic energy-harvesting system. Dubbed a “hydropower
plant on a chip,” the technology harvests energy from nanoscale water flows to create a self-sustaining energy supply.
“There is tremendous interest now in developing alternative energy sources, such as wind and solar energy,” explains Choi. “Our idea was to investigate the concept of using hydropower, at very small scales, to generate significant quantities of energy using another naturally abundant resource: water.”
Choi’s proposed system works like this: A tiny amount of water is circulated through extremely narrow channels just 1 to 100 nanometers wide
each. (By comparison, a single human hair is approximately 80,000 to 100,000 nanometers wide.) The channels are not perfectly smooth; instead, they have been specially engineered with nanoscale roughness so that their surfaces can attract
and hold tiny bubbles of air present in the water. Some of the water flows around the bubbles without ever touching the solid channels, creating a super-slippery effect.
“The water on this superhydrophobic surface is moving on a thin layer of air, much like a puck glides on an air-hockey table,” explains Choi. “Many natural surfaces, such as the leaves of plants, exhibit a similar water-repelling characteristic known as the ‘lotus effect.’ “
As the water streams over the frictionless surface, millions of ions formed in the nanoscale channel can be captured, transformed into electricity and temporarily stored — with almost no energy loss, compared with the 90-plus percent loss that occurs in conventional hydropower systems.
If his research proves fruitful, says Choi, the next step will be to develop larger, super-thin membranes incorporating arrays of the textured channels. Those membranes theoretically would be able to capture and store enough energy to power smaller electronic devices.
prints silver particles that will form an electronic coil antenna with a scaffold composed of a mixture of cartilage cells and other biological materials. The framework of the ear is printed layer by layer, then nurtured in a bath of nutrients to help it grow to form the cartilage tissue. This printing technique allows the ear to be built gradually, with all electronic components completely integrated as it is constructed. Mannoor says this method has proven better at forming highly complex, contoured structures, such as ears, than the traditional tissue replication and reconstruction techniques currently used in plastic surgery.
In a completed bionic ear, the coil antenna connects to wires that could be attached, like a hearing aid, directly to a patient’s nervous system.
Although more development work and testing is required before the ear could be implanted in a patient, Mannoor says his antenna can be designed to pick up sounds beyond the range of normal human hearing, thus not only restoring hearing but potentially enhancing it. There may also be military applications for the technology, and he hopes the techniques he is developing will one day be used to create other body parts such as replacement joints that physicians can monitor and use to prevent injuries from recurring.
New Biomaterials Use Nanosurfaces to Prevent Infection
Visualizing Predicted Fallout, Casualties from Nuclear Weapons
3D image reconstruction of bacterial biofilm growing on nanostructured gold thin film
INSIDE HIGHLIGHTS:
4stevens.edu