NENY received a Regional Tech Hub designation from the Biden-Harris administration and the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration (EDA). The Tech Hubs program aims to drive regional innovation and job creation by strengthening a region’s capacity to manufacture, commercialize and deploy technology that will advance American competitiveness.

The announcement included a Zoom meeting with White House representatives and campus visit from U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer.

“For months, you could feel the electricity and excitement in Binghamton over the growing battery industry, but today lightning has struck, and I am proud to announce the region has officially won the prestigious federal designation as America’s next battery Tech Hub,” Schumer says. “Binghamton University, its partners, and I have worked hand-in-hand to bring this idea to life, and now the ultimate recognition of the Southern Tier as the home to the future of our nation’s battery innovation has become a reality.”

NENY, one of 31 Tech Hubs, is the only awardee in the battery industry.

“NENY’s designation as an EDA Tech Hub is a momentous day in the history of the University, the coalition, as well across the Southern Tier of New York,” President Harvey Stenger says. “With [this] designation, Binghamton and the region will only grow as global leaders in energy storage solutions and will continue to be a driving force working towards a sustainable and secure energy future.”

The Tech Hubs designation significantly expands the goals and geographical region originally laid out by NENY for the EDA’s Build Back Better Regional Challenge (BBBRC) last year. Project areas include broadening the scope from one of regional recovery to advancing the U.S. as a global competitor in the lithium-ion battery space, enlarging the focus from battery cell manufacturing to the entire battery lifecycle and supply chain, and expanding the supported region, core consortium members and external partnerships.

“New Energy New York’s designation as a Tech Hub by the Economic Development Administration (EDA) provides our consortium and wider team with the recognition we need to create a national battery epicenter in the region,” said Per Stromhaug, associate vice president for innovation and economic development. “As a federally designated Tech Hub, in addition to other prestigious acknowledgements, including being awarded the Build Back Better Regional Challenge (BBBRC) grant and becoming a finalist in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) Innovation Engines competition, we will be able to build out the battery innovation and manufacturing ecosystem here in Upstate New York and help the nation secure a domestic battery supply chain.”

Standout challenges the NENY Tech Hub designation will address include:

• The speed of innovation and lack of available resources to support domestic battery technology commercialization and market launch
• The development of a prepared and robust workforce to meet the expected job demand
• Fortifying U.S. national and economic security against unstable global battery supply chains.

“The EDA Tech Hub designation will help amplify the current efforts and momentum under New Energy New York, propelling our region towards becoming a nation-leading energy storage innovation ecosystem,” says Olga Petrova, director of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Partnerships.

The NENY consortium includes the Office of the Broome County Executive, Broome-Tioga Workforce, C4V and iM3-NY, the Community Foundation for South Central New York, Cornell University, Electrovaya, FuzeHub, IncubatorWorks, Intertek, NY-BEST, Raymond Corp., Rochester Institute of Technology, the Southern Tier 8 Regional Board, SUNY Broome Community College, The Agency (Broome County IDA), the Research Foundation for SUNY and Three Rivers Development Corp. Additional Hub partners include organizations representing New York State, economic development, workforce development and equity, industry, trade, manufacturing, start-ups, and more.

“I am so heartened to see how our University’s and region’s focus on batteries and energy storage solutions – something I’ve dedicated my entire professional life to – has achieved this level of attention and support from our federal government,” says Stan Whittingham, distinguished professor and Nobel laureate. “Thank you, Senator Schumer, for your vision and unwavering advocacy. This Tech Hub designation is just what is needed to take our coalition’s work to the next level and beyond. I am confident we will become the clean energy hub for the United States.”

The U.S. battery manufacturing industry relies on often-unstable global supply chains. NENY is focused on strengthening the domestic supply chain and lessening innovation losses. One way to bring manufacturing back to the United States is to expand prototyping and pilot testing infrastructure, which will be available at NENY’s Battery-NY Technology and Manufacturing Development Center. The planned Battery-NY facility is a stand-out initiative of NENY’s overall goal to establish the U.S. as a global leader in battery innovation and manufacturing, with the Tech Hub designation supporting further key infrastructure expansions.

“I created the Tech Hubs program in my CHIPS & Science Bill, always with Upstate New York in mind, because I knew with federal investment we could write a new chapter for Upstate New York,” Schumer says. “With Tech Hubs, we can breathe new life into our cities with the industries of the future. And nowhere is that more true than in Binghamton.”

In conjunction with the announcement, the Department of Commerce is launching a second Tech Hubs Notice of Funding Opportunity, which allows NENY and other designated Tech Hubs to apply to receive between $40-$70 million each for implementation funding, totaling around $500 million.

“The designation of an EDA Tech Hub will ignite synergies sparked under New Energy New York between technology and industry and cast a transformative light on workforce development by cultivating an ecosystem where skills flourish, careers thrive and the future of the battery industry gleams with unprecedented potential,” says Stacey Johnson, director of workforce development for NENY.

This venture brings Binghamton University faculty and other partners together to conduct academic and clinical research in areas such as biomedical research — particularly neurosciences — and computer science. Research applications include studies of the human brain, which will deepen a scientific understanding of brain disorders, from Alzheimer’s disease to autism.

It also enables UHS to offer cutting-edge clinical diagnostics for its patients. Clinical applications of the scanner include diagnosis of brain disease and disorders, cardiovascular disease and orthopedic injuries. It will also offer the capability for patients to receive cardiac MRIs locally, rather than traveling to larger cities such as Syracuse, Rochester and New York City.

“As the two largest employers in the region, UHS and Binghamton University have a history of working together to serve and invest in the community,” says John M. Carrigg, president and chief executive officer of UHS. “This partnership between UHS and BU, and specifically this scanner, will open new avenues of research for faculty and provide UHS physicians and patients with the latest advanced diagnostic imaging technology available in the industry.”

MRI-centered research is a cross-disciplinary pursuit that blends expertise in physics, anatomy, physiology, neuroscience and advanced data processing sciences. The center will enable faculty to expand on cross-disciplinary collaborations and work with UHS physicians to address new research questions that MRI technology can answer.

“This public-private partnership will benefit the community by providing the most advanced imaging technology in the region,” University President Harvey Stenger says. “This project is in alignment with the research strategy outlined by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul in her latest State of the State message, and will enhance our ability to attract external funding, as well as build research partnerships with industry and other universities.”

Binghamton University’s Brain and Body Imaging Research Center was established in 2021 in partnership with UHS and is led by Binghamton Professor of Psychology J. David Jentsch.

“About 50 years ago, MRI was invented by SUNY researchers,” Jentsch says. “Today, we’re bringing a 21st-century version of the technology to the Southern Tier. It will have a transformative impact on our ability to make scientific discoveries that advance human health and to offer the most sophisticated training opportunities to Binghamton students.”

The center will make both organizations more competitive in attracting and retaining research-active faculty and physicians. It also represents a new avenue to kindle collaborations between Binghamton faculty and UHS physicians working on research projects that advance the understanding of human health.

The National Science Foundation announced Sept. 13 that it has awarded $15 million over five years to establish and implement the Interior Northeast Region I-Corps Hub, known as IN I-Corps. The region, which stretches from New Hampshire to West Virginia, includes portions of the United States that are largely rural, economically underserved and working to restore economic vitality. IN I-Corps aims to expand the nation’s geography of innovation by creating a cohesive innovation ecosystem that delivers inclusive models of education and workforce training designed for and by innovators in rural regions and small cities.

“To be a part of this cohort of premier research institutions, whose dedication to innovation is so outstanding, is truly exciting,” says Per Stromhaug, associate vice president for innovation and economic development at Binghamton University. “The ecosystem that the Interior Northeast I-Corps Hub will support and expand is sure to create lasting effects for the entrepreneurs we will assist, as well as our region.”

Founded by the National Science Foundation in 2011, I-Corps programming nationwide empowers researchers to combine their technical and scientific knowledge with an entrepreneurial mindset to develop new technologies and startups that benefit society. The I-Corps curriculum addresses the knowledge gap between the skills needed to develop an innovative technology in a lab and the skills needed to bring that technology to market. With a core tenet of customer discovery, participants in I-Corps courses work to connect with potential customers and ensure the solutions they’re developing fill an existing market need.

Binghamton University will be joined by hub partner institutions Dartmouth College, Rochester Institute of Technology, SUNY Buffalo, Syracuse University, University of Pittsburgh, University of Rochester, University of Vermont, West Virginia University and Hub lead Cornell University. Each institution will be hosting regional I-Corps courses and contributing to programming and curriculum strategy.

The IN I-Corps Hub joins nine other I-Corps Hubs within the National Innovation Network, expanding the geographical reach of the network and promoting economic growth and science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) talent development within rural communities and the small cities on their boundaries. The hub will offer regional courses designed to support geographically dispersed participants in learning the I-Corps method of customer discovery and applying it to real-world opportunities while remaining connected to their home institutions and communities.

Binghamton University has been an active member of the National Innovation Network (NIN), with its Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Partnerships heading up the Innovation Binghamton I-Corps Site for over five years.

“I-Corps has been tremendously valuable to our research community,” says Olga Petrova, assistant director of Binghamton University’s Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Partnerships, site director and I-Corps instructor. “It is incredibly rewarding to watch our professors and students take their real-world learnings from the I-Corps training back to their labs and research programs, leading to increased grant funding, startup activity and development of technologies with amazing societal benefits.”

A mission-critical element of the IN I-Corps Hub’s approach to entrepreneurship is the creation and administration of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility initiatives. STEM researchers in underrepresented groups face heightened barriers to success, and creating equitable access to resources and talent development is crucial to ensuring the most innovative deep-tech developments are being discovered and amplified. Hub leadership and partners are working to create opportunities to support the development of STEM research talent who are women, veterans, people of color and individuals with disabilities. These initiatives will include collaborations with organizations like the National GEM Consortium’s Inclusion in Innovation Initiative (i4) and Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf.

The IN I-Corps Hub will officially launch Jan. 1, 2023. Details are forthcoming for STEM researchers interested in learning about opportunities to participate in regional I-Corps courses at a Hub institution.

The projects supported by this year’s CAREER awardees will address pressing challenges related to batteries, cloud computing, nanobots and soft electronics.

Hao Liu, assistant professor of chemistry, will continue his research into sodium-ion batteries.

Lithium-ion batteries power smartphones and tablets, laptops and electric cars. But the silvery metal lithium isn’t so easy to obtain. Sodium-ion batteries are an affordable and promising alternative.

“It’s very cheap and much more abundant than lithium,” Liu explains.

Batteries of this type would be a boon for the growing renewable energy sector, since the forces that generate power are intermittent.

“The sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow, and this requires energy storage on a much larger scale,” Liu says.

On the periodic table of elements, sodium is directly below lithium. They are members of the alkali metal group and share many characteristics. So do the batteries made from them, although there are differences, too.

Rechargeable batteries rely on the intercalation reaction, in which ions are inserted or removed from the layers that make up the electrodes. Because sodium ions are physically larger than lithium ions, however, these layers are more likely to collapse when ions are removed during use, compromising the battery’s structural integrity. After a few recharges, the battery begins to lose storage capacity as a result.

It’s a problem that Liu hopes to solve with structural pillaring, which would insert specific ions into the layers, a bit like how pillars in a building hold the stories together, he says.

Seunghee Shin, assistant professor of computer science, conducts research that may reduce the communication time between smart devices and the cloud.

His idea is to shorten the distance between our devices and the information they need by creating a series of memory caches along the route, which would make cloud-based programs run faster. The innovations rely on technology such as SmartNICs and non-volatile memory.

A network interface card, or NIC, is a hardware component that connects a computer to a network, almost always using Ethernet. The latest SmartNICs include advanced processing and memory capabilities that improve the user experience. Non-volatile memory (NVM) can retain stored information in memory chips even after the power is removed. It is often used for secondary or long-term storage not accessible to a device’s central processing unit.

Shin believes SmartNICs and NVM can be leveraged for improved cloud computing.

“The cloud server is so far away over the network Ethernet — you have to go there and grab the data and bring it back,” he says. “However, we have a much, much stronger NIC now, which can do a lot more in your local machine.”

Shin’s research could change the way that hardware and software are designed, complementing each other to satisfy software demands.

Kaiyan Yu, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, hopes to advance nanorobots.

Research into nanotechnology has grown exponentially in recent years. But because of the size involved — one nanometer is a billionth of a meter, smaller than a strand of human DNA — current techniques cannot independently manipulate large numbers of nanoscale objects precisely the way you might see in a sci-fi movie.

Yu will study ways to overcome these limitations.

She is trying to manipulate many micro- and nanoparticles with controlled three-dimensional poses and characteristics into functional devices, interconnects and other useful components for a variety of applications, such as building nanorobots that can deliver drugs directly to cells.

“Right now, because of manufacturing limits, it’s really hard to build this kind of nanorobot with a lot of sensors, strong actuators and on-board batteries, and also have them communicate with each other,” Yu says.

Her research will investigate the use of electric fields to control the movements of multiple nanoparticles in a three-dimensional microfluidic environment. Each tiny wire could then go a different way to perform its own task.

In the short term, Yu hopes her work will support engineering tools for large-volume automated control of microscopic objects for smart small-scale factories that could produce useful nanorobots and nanodevices.

Ultimately, she also has a much bigger goal in mind. “We can facilitate the computational power and mimic the energy-efficient structure of the calculations in our brain,” she says. “I won’t build a human brain for this project, but hopefully I can do that in the future.”

Pu Zhang, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, conducts research that could advance soft electronics, devices that can bend or stretch without breaking.

One critical challenge is finding new materials that are highly conductive like metals yet remain super-stretchable, so researchers have sought solutions from a variety of different angles.

Zhang has an intriguing solution to the problem: Use liquid metal networks in rubber that can deform easily while remaining highly conductive.

His NSF-funded research will build on experiments that Zhang has done on gallium-indium alloy, which has a melting point around 15 degrees Celsius (60 degrees Fahrenheit). That means it is liquid at room temperature. Using a fabrication process Zhang developed at Binghamton, he was able to produce liquid metal network composites with an ultra-low amount of liquid metal, but still maintain high electrical conductivity.

Ultimately, the goal would be to use an alloy of gallium, indium and tin with a melting point of minus 20 degrees (minus 4 Fahrenheit) that could function during winter in colder climates.

“We’ve achieved over 10-fold reduction of liquid metal consumption, compared to similar materials developed by others. So our new material is much cheaper and lighter-weighted,” Zhang says. “Existing technologies can make liquid metal fibers that are thicker than 100 microns, while we can make them 10 times thinner at 10 microns.”

CAREER Award-winning projects include an educational component as well as rigorous research goals.

Liu plans to expand public knowledge of electrochemical energy storage and prepare undergraduate and graduate students for the clean-energy workforce.

Shin’s proposal includes coaching students so they can be engineers capable of creating hardware/software co-designed systems.

Yu, who will create STEM-focused outreach programs in local schools, says she especially wants to inspire more women and members of underrepresented communities to enter engineering and other science-related fields.

Zhang, meanwhile, plans to establish a soft electronics inventor lab for undergraduates, giving them access to raw materials such as rubber compounds, silver pens and liquid metal.

Reporting by Chris Kocher and Jennifer Micale.

The award opens up two opportunities to the University, says U.S. Sen. Majority Leader Charles Schumer, who advocated for the proposal. It provides $500,000 in technical assistance funding that the University will use to develop its proposal to turn the Southern Tier into an energy technology hub. It also allows the University to compete in Phase 2 of the challenge.

“This award will make the New Energy NY project eligible for up to $100 million in federal funding to transform the Greater Binghamton area and broader upstate New York region, create thousands of jobs, fuel the innovation necessary to combat climate change, and importantly, strengthen a critical area of the U.S. domestic manufacturing supply chain,” Schumer says. “I am proud to have fought for the New Energy NY project to be selected for Phase 1 and I will continue to fight tooth and nail to secure the final award and supercharge this growing area of the Upstate New York economy.”

This initiative will not only create jobs and improve the regional economy; it’s also crucial to our nation’s energy goals and energy security efforts, says chemist M. Stanley Whittingham, Binghamton University distinguished professor and 2019 Nobel laureate.

“Our NENY proposal can turn our region into an energy technology hub that has the potential to turn out advancements that will have national and global impacts,” Whittingham says.

With the appropriate support, Binghamton can become a national hub for battery innovation, manufacturing and workforce development, University President Harvey Stenger said. “We thank Sen. Schumer for his support on this as well as all that he does for our University and we thank the EDA for understanding and supporting our vision and providing us the necessary resources to move this forward,” he said.

The University has a track record of successful collaborations with industry partners, says Bahgat Sammakia, vice president for research at Binghamton. “We’re fortunate to have an experienced, well-respected innovator like Stan leading the way and pushing our region and our country to take bold action for a more environmentally friendly future,” Sammakia says.

Binghamton was chosen by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration (EDA) for the project, which will bring together the University, SUNY Broome Community College, Rochester Institute of Technology, NY-BEST and others to develop a proposal for Phase 2 of the competition. The proposal will focus on expanding research, development, testing and workforce assets to meet the demand of the emerging battery manufacturing industry in the Southern Tier and upstate New York.

“Binghamton University is honored and excited to lead a coalition of premier organizations from across New York State to help the U.S. meet the critical and growing demand for domestic battery products,” says Per Stromhaug, associate vice president of the Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Partnerships and regional economic competitive officer for the project.

If fully funded, the project estimates that as many as 8,000 jobs would be created during a 10-year period.

Schumer said that the Build Back Better Regional Challenge received 529 Phase 1 applications from across the United States, and the New Energy NY project was one of 60 proposals selected as a Phase 1 awardee.

In Phase 2, the EDA will award 20 to 30 regional coalitions $25 million to $75 million, and up to $100 million, for projects to grow new regional industry clusters or scale existing ones through planning, infrastructure, innovation and entrepreneurship, workforce development, access to capital and more.