Pawliczak, a mechanical engineering doctoral student at Binghamton University, has won several prizes, most recently in October, when she received the Best Student Poster Award during the 56th International Symposium on Microelectronics, held by the International Microelectronics Assembly & Packaging Society in San Diego.

Pawliczak’s research involves electrospray technology — employing electricity to disperse a liquid or fine aerosol — to create a thin (as in nanoparticle thin) film for electromagnetic interference (EMI) protection in electronics manufacturing. The silver film provides a low-cost, space-conscious way to protect against EMI.

“There is a push in the industry to miniaturize devices, from cell phones to hearing aids, so it’s important to maximize the available internal space,” Pawliczak says. “The idea is that electrospray will open the doors for many different applications of this technology.”

Pawliczak conducts her work in the Microfluidics and Multiphase Flow Laboratory of Paul R. Chiarot, professor and chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. This research was a new direction for Chiarot’s group when the Semiconductor Research Corp., a research consortium that promotes collaborations among academic institutions, technology companies and government agencies, presented the research opportunity in 2020.

“Emma took on this project and ran with it, and at this point now has complete ownership of it,” Chiarot says. “She directs it herself, interacts with company liaisons at Texas Instruments, NXP Semiconductors and Intel, and she’s gone on to make great contributions in this space. She is a very careful and thoughtful scientist.”

The New Hampton, N.Y., resident knew from an early age that she wanted to pursue mechanical engineering. “I watched my father bring home drawings and documents throughout my life, coming up with creative solutions to complex problems,” she says. “Instead of looking at obstacles as work, he looked at them like puzzles. So I wanted to be like my dad. I thought I was going to go into construction, but now I work on a much different size scale, in the micro and nano range.”

It was an easy decision to attend Binghamton when she first toured the campus as a high school junior. “It was an immediate connection. I loved the energy of the campus,” she says. “As soon as I got my early action acceptance letter, I confirmed my enrollment the same day.”

Pawliczak received her undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Binghamton in 2020 and then stayed to continue her graduate studies. Her career, so far, includes three peer-reviewed journal publications and seven conference paper publications. She has given more than 20 conference talks and poster presentations across the country.

She hopes to complete her doctorate in 2025.

“I will be interning at Intel this summer and I am extremely excited for the experience,” Pawliczak says. “I often go back and forth between entering industry or pursuing a career in academia, but I look forward to any and all paths my degree may lead me.”

Seniors Jacob Goodman, Alex Blumenthal and Jeremy Gendler are leading the effort, dubbed AeroBing.

They aim to send a rocket past the Kármán line, the international boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space. It’s 100 kilometers — or 62 miles — above Earth’s mean sea level.

Only one school, University of Southern California, has managed to do it so far.

“We’d like to be significantly past the Kármán line, such that we are certain that we were in space,” says Goodman, the project lead. “And by doing that, we would achieve certainty that we were in space and beat the altitude record as well.”

In short, says Gendler: “We’re going to shatter their record.”

The group is working to see if it can have military radar track the rocket’s progress. Guinness World Records may also take an interest.

“The burning question for us is not what’s up there,” Gendler says. “It’s what we’re capable of.”

Goodman, Blumenthal and Gendler have been working on the project for nearly a year, and they bring lots of backyard rocket experience to the endeavor.

“As a kid, I was always doing all sorts of rocketry stuff, launching model rockets,” says Gendler, a Chicago native and chief engineer on the project. “My mom would buy me a kit, and I didn’t want the kit. I wanted to build my own rocket.”

After a family friend who was an Israeli flight engineer came for a visit, Gendler says, he became downright obsessive about building airplanes and launching rockets.

“I went to my local synagogue and asked if they would clear the parking lot for me because I was launching to the moon,” he recalls. “I was indulged by the administrators, but you can imagine that the launch from the South Side of Chicago didn’t happen.”

In the summer before his junior year at Binghamton, Gendler was walking on campus with a friend. He remembers telling him, “Listen, you know what? By the time I’m 25, I want to put something into space.”

So, he says, it felt a bit like destiny when Goodman, a fellow mechanical engineering major from New Rochelle, approached him about the project.

Goodman enjoyed a few minutes of fame early in the pandemic when he built a prototype of a ventilator in his dorm room one weekend using parts he found at Wal-Mart. He has been friends with Blumenthal since they were roommates during their first year at Binghamton.

Blumenthal, a chemistry and materials science major from Easton, Pa., took his first flight lesson when he was about 10 years old and recently earned his pilot license.

He says the team doesn’t have a launch date yet but expects it will be in late spring 2021. Until then, says Blumenthal, chief operating officer for the project, AeroBing will be building and testing many smaller rockets.

“To figure out, OK, does this system work? Are we getting the accurate height? Are our wind models accurate? We’ve got to make a bunch of scale models,” Gendler says. “So this next year, all the way up until the launch, is going to be hundreds of hours of research and several small launches.”

Working with advisor Bruce Murray, professor and chair of mechanical engineering, and additional faculty mentors, AeroBing includes three senior design projects, a signature of the Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science’s undergraduate curriculum.

The students worked on the project all summer, experimenting with fiberglass and running through different mathematical models. “You can simulate it all day and night, but you learn a lot when you actually get your hands dirty and start building it,” Goodman says.

Along with Blumenthal, Goodman and Gendler, another 12 students from STEM majors are on the design team.

Gendler says the group, which is organized like a small company, is a “beautiful hybrid,” with expertise in different areas and a variety of styles of working and thinking. “This symbiosis has given our team such strength,” he says.

AeroBing has a budget of roughly $100,000 and space in the Koffman Southern Tier Incubator in Binghamton. The students have developed a marketing plan, solicited sponsors and established social media channels, so the project requires mastering skills outside of engineering as well.

They’ll also have to clear some bureaucratic hurdles. The Federal Aviation Administration will require the group to apply for permission to launch. The students will be expected to predict the rocket’s trajectory and where it will land.

AeroBing’s rocket, called Ambition-III, will be built in Binghamton. It will likely be launched from somewhere in New Mexico or California.

“If we wanted to launch on the East Coast, it would have to land in the ocean, which is something we really don’t want to do,” Blumenthal says. “So we are going to be going out West for a launch site.”

The team hopes to spread a love for aerospace education and bring some attention to upstate New York.

“We’ve just had a dream to launch a rocket for a while,” Goodman says. “It’ll help us professionally, but that’s really not the end goal here.”

Along the way, he took an internship in Germany, co-founded the College Progressives, built a wheelchair for a cat and conducted research in the clean room at Binghamton’s Center for Advanced Microelectronics Manufacturing (CAMM).

“A lot of people say, ‘Follow your passion.’ I mean, there’s a point to that,” Cadwell says. “But for me, I’ve considered college like a financial investment. I should evaluate what the return would be. That’s partly why I chose engineering. I also thought technology was a really good way to make a large impact on the world, from a humanitarian perspective. I did do something I was interested in, but I was also concerned with making sure I can do something that’s marketable.”

Cadwell decided to go to a SUNY school after his physics teacher at Whitney Point High School told him about the New York State STEM Incentive Program, which provides tuition awards to New York residents attending college in state. He settled on studying electrical engineering at Binghamton with the idea that he could one day design solar panels or medical equipment.

As a sophomore, Cadwell took a class on semiconductors and began learning more about the intersection of engineering and materials science. He enjoyed the subject so much that he served as a course assistant for that class as a junior.

He learned about the CAMM when it appeared on a list of possible senior capstone projects. Every project was given a budget, but that one was listed with zero dollars.

“Now I know they’re not going to give us a project that has no funding,” he says. “So I was thinking that maybe that’s a blank check. Maybe this project has a lot of money and a lot of importance. And I was kind of right about that because we easily spent a few hundred dollars on that project.”

CAMM researchers create flexible electronics by printing with metals on plastics using a roll-to-roll system. The CAMM is also the New York node of NextFlex, a federal initiative to advance flexible hybrid electronics manufacturing, and home to the Center for Flexible Hybrid Medical Device Manufacturing, designated a Center for Advanced Technology by the state.

Cadwell’s senior design group, working under the direction of CAMM Director Mark Poliks, built an inspection platform for use at the CAMM that relied on lights and a microscope camera to detect scratches or dust on rolls of printed electronics.

“One of the challenges is that once you deposit the metal or the insulator, you need to inspect it to see if it’s clean enough,” Cadwell says. “And if you’re patterning wires onto these rolls, you would also want to check and see if the wires are well-formed or if one of the wires is not connected.”

The experience opened new doors for Cadwell, who decided to continue at Binghamton for a graduate degree. The choice was made easier when he received support through the National Science Foundation’s S-STEM Scholarship (Scholarship in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) Program.

With help from Poliks, Cadwell also lined up a three-month internship at Applied Materials in Germany the summer after he finished his undergraduate work.

As a grad student, Cadwell’s research focused on printed radio frequency (RF) electronics. “That’s basically anything wireless,” he says. “Like Wi-Fi radio or anything that you might think of with the Internet of Things or smart appliances.”

Applications could include tags on products so a retailer could have a complete inventory of everything in a store at any given moment. Printed RF sensors could also be attached to a bridge or an airplane to make it easier to monitor vibrations. Such sensors are expected to make it easier and less expensive to monitor patients’ heart rates on a continuous basis, too.

Some of Cadwell’s projects with Poliks involved creating simple radio frequency components using aerosol jet printing. The process is akin to the inkjet printers found in many home offices, though it requires far more precision, and the researchers are using silver nanoparticles rather than the kind of ink you’d get at Staples.

The group created RF components including antennae using metals printed on plastics. These flexible components’ performance was measured, with promising results.

“Once we confirm that we can make the components, then we can put the components together to make devices,” Cadwell says. “But first, we wanted to verify that the components would be able to perform well enough.”

Scott Miller, director of technology for NextFlex, says Cadwell was a critical part of the DataCube project undertaken by Binghamton University, NextFlex and other partners in collaboration with the Air Force Research Laboratory.

“Ryan’s leadership has been clear in the project from the time he joined,” Miller says. “He has demonstrated technical expertise as well as the ability to plan and organize work and collaborate with a diverse team.”

Cadwell accepted a position with a design division of Anaren/TTM just before the coronavirus pandemic began and moved to Syracuse so he could begin work in July.

Anaren makes electronic components for companies such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. The firm’s radar and satellite communications technology has military applications; customers also include cell phone companies.

Poliks, empire innovation professor of engineering, worked in industry for decades and says Cadwell is well prepared for the job. “It has been a privilege to work with Ryan over the last three years,” Poliks says. “He developed expertise in radio frequency design, modeling, fabrication and testing and made significant contributions to several of our research programs.”

Whittingham is one of 83 new members and 16 foreign members announced, bringing the academy’s total U.S. membership to 2,293 and the number of foreign members to 262. He will be inducted during the NAE’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 30.

Membership in the National Academy of Engineering honors those who have made outstanding contributions to “engineering research, practice or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature” and to “the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education.”

“Binghamton is very proud that the National Academy of Engineering has chosen to elect Distinguished Professor of Chemistry M. Stanley Whittingham to its ranks,” Binghamton University President Harvey Stenger said. “Professor Whittingham’s work has fundamentally changed the way the world stores and utilizes energy, making possible a revolution in consumer and industrial technologies. For nearly 30 years, Professor Whittingham has been one of the most visible and productive researchers at the University, and all of us at Binghamton congratulate him on this great honor.”

Whittingham, distinguished professor of chemistry and materials science at Binghamton University, joined the faculty in 1988 after 16 years at Schlumberger-Doll Research and Exxon Research and Engineering Company, where he received the patent for a rechargeable lithium-ion battery.

He has been a pioneer in the development of lithium-ion batteries. He holds the original patent on the concept of the use of intercalation chemistry in high-power density, highly reversible lithium batteries – work that provided the basis for subsequent discoveries that now power most laptop computers.

“It is a great honor to be elected to the National Academy of Engineering,” Whittingham said. “The research I have been involved with for over 30 years has helped advance how we store and use energy at a foundational level, and it is my hope that this recognition will help to shine a much-needed light on the nation’s energy future.”

With 16 patents and more than 300 publications in leading scholarly journals, Whittingham has earned a national and international reputation as a prolific scientist. His research in the area of synthesis and characterization of novel transition metal oxides for energy storage and conversion, separations or as sensors has been continuously supported since his arrival in Binghamton, with over $7 million in federal research grants from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. He now directs the NorthEast Center for Chemical Energy Storage, an Energy Frontier Research Center supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

Whittingham helped to establish the Materials Science and Engineering Program, bringing his creativity and innovation to Binghamton’s graduate curriculum as well as to its laboratories.

Working a great deal with ambient temperature, he and his research group emphasize novel approaches to synthesis that often allow structures to be formed that are unstable under the high temperatures normally used for preparing oxides.

Whittingham has been recognized by his peers with two major awards in recent years. In 2002, he was honored with the Battery Research Award of the Electrochemical Society for his many contributions to “Intercalation Chemistry and Battery Materials.” Two years later, he was elected a Fellow of the Electrochemical Society.

He has also been active in the American Chemical Society, the American Physical Society, the Electrochemical Society, and the Materials Research Society; and served on the editorial boards of several journals, including Chemistry of Materials and the Materials Research Bulletin. He was also the founder and principle editor of the journal Solid State Ionics, one of the two major journals in the field.

Whittingham earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from Oxford University, before coming to the United States as a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University.

“Skin acts as a physical, chemical and microbial barrier. It also helps regulate temperature and enables mechanoreception: the ability to sense touch,” says Guy German, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering whose research focuses almost exclusively on the body’s largest organ.

“[There is] a diverse population of microorganisms that naturally reside on your skin,” he says. “When [skin] becomes ruptured, its barrier function is lost, leaving underlying living tissue exposed to harmful pathogens. These pathogens can cause a variety of diseases and infections.”

German will continue his research into skin with a five-year, $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s prestigious Early Career Development (CAREER) program. His project – “Understanding the Multi-scale Failure Mechanics of Human Skin with Age, Ultraviolet Photodamage and Bacterial Growth” – formally begins in July.

“My first reaction to learning about the award was a combination of happiness that I could support more graduate student research and excitement because the award will enable my lab to explore a new research area that I’m passionate about,” German says. “Overall, this project aims to support up to two graduate students over the five years.”

The fundamental research will explore how aging, ultraviolet light and bacteria weaken skin, cause wrinkles and increase the risk of skin rupture. The results will provide a better understanding of the biomechanical aging process, the onset of skin diseases that could be caused by bacteria in the skin microbiome, and new approaches in skin-based drug delivery in creams and ointments. Some of the results may also have applications related to flexible electronics and energy harvesting.

Much of the current work in the field focuses on macro-testing equipment and treating skin as a homogenous material, but skin is heterogeneous at many length scales, German says, so he plans to look at the tissue microscopically. Experiments will combine immunostaining, mechanical manipulation, high-speed imaging and traction force microscopy to show how skin degrades under a variety of conditions.

The National Science Foundation’s CAREER grants support early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education while leading advances in their fields. German joined Binghamton’s faculty in 2013.

Thanks to Project Lead The Way, an initiative that introduces students to STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — subjects at an early age, Hays chose to research tissue engineering, the process of combining scaffolds, cells and biologically active molecules into functional tissues.

“It was science fiction come to life,” he says.

Now a senior biomedical engineering major at Binghamton University, Hays has a 4.0 average and a place working in the laboratory of Kaiming Ye, a professor and chair of the biomedical engineering department. “He’s a very smart and dedicated researcher,” Ye says. “He works hard, and he can solve a problem very quickly. His interests and his career goals are what made him stand out.”

Binghamton is one of the few universities working on 3D printing as a method of tissue engineering. Essentially, biocompatible material is “printed” in droplets that are then overlapped, eventually creating a bulky organ. This method allows for a lot more control over the “printing landscape,” Hays says.

Other schools, such as Harvard and Stony Brook University, are looking into a barrier in 3D printing known as the oxygen-diffusion limit, which says that a cell can’t survive outside of 100-200 microns from a vessel. “That’s like 1/10th of a millimeter,” Hays says. That’s why certain tissues, like skin and cartilage, lend themselves to the “printing” process more easily. They are relatively avascular, meaning they do not contain blood vessels.

Hays believes that in the next decade tissue engineering will make it possible to 3D print a fully functional organ created with a patient’s own cells or stem cells. For example, beta-islet cells — cells that produce, store and release the insulin hormone — are attacked and destroyed by the body’s immune system in Type 1 Diabetics. Tissue engineering may allow scientists to create beta-islet cells and produce a new artificial pancreas for these patients.

“Hopefully 3D printing will make something like the organ donor list obsolete in the near future,” Hays says.

In the meantime, Hays has found a way to save lives in the present day. He’s an emergency medical technician with the campus ambulance squad, Harpur’s Ferry. In the fall, he administered patient care and CPR that resuscitated someone in cardiac arrest.

“I was happy with how I responded,” Hays says. “It registered, but not emotionally. You realize you have a team. And if you learn how to work with your team, you’re never going to feel alone.”

Hays has been accepted into medical school for the fall, and he also looks forward to the possibility of using his engineering degree to become a biomedical consultant. He says he will always look at problems with an engineering mindset.

Hays and Rushi Shah, a fellow biomedical engineering student and Harpur’s Ferry EMT, realized there was not a device at the basic life support level to monitor respiratory heart rates automatically. They created an invention that they called a “respiratory quantifier,” which can measure and report respiratory rate in real time.

“I thought I would have to choose between biomedical engineering and medical school,” Hays says, “but in the end you don’t have to choose. You can do both.”

Seokheun “Sean” Choi and two of his students developed the device, a microbial fuel cell that runs on the bacteria available in a few drops of dirty water. They report on their invention in a new paper published online in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics.

Choi previously developed a paper-based origami battery. The first design, shaped like a matchbook, stacked four modules together. The ninja star version, which measures about 2.5 inches wide, boasts increased power and voltage, with eight small batteries connected in series.

“Last time, it was a proof of concept. The power density was in the nanowatt range,” says Choi, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. “This time, we increased it to the microwatt range. We can light an LED for about 20 minutes or power other types of biosensors.”

Paper-based biosensors include pregnancy tests and HIV tests. The sensitivity of such tests is limited, Choi says, and a battery like his could allow the use of more sophisticated fluorescent or electrochemical biosensors in developing countries. “Commercially available batteries are too wasteful and expensive for the field,” he says. “Ultimately, I’d like to develop instant, disposable, accessible bio-batteries for use in resource-limited regions.”

The new design folds into a star with one inlet at its center and the electrical contacts at the points of each side. After a few drops of dirty water are placed into the inlet, the device can be opened into a Frisbee-like ring to allow each of the eight fuel cells to work. Each module is a sandwich of five functional layers with its own anode, proton exchange membrane and air-cathode.

Choi’s original matchbook-sized battery could be produced for about 5 cents. The new ninja star device is more expensive — roughly 70 cents — in part because it uses not only filter paper but also carbon cloth for the anode as well as copper tape. The team’s next goal is to produce a fully paper-based device that has the power density of the new design and a lower price tag.

Choi prides himself on involving students in his research, and this paper represents a special triumph for co-author Landen Kwan, who worked on the project during a National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates program at Binghamton in the summer of 2015. Kwan, then a student at Queensborough Community College, is now enrolled at Stony Brook University. Binghamton doctoral student Arwa Fraiwan also contributed to the study, which was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Paul Chiarot, who recently received a five-year, $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious program for early-career researchers, aims to redefine 3D printing at a very fine scale.

His “electrospray” technique puts tiny particles into a solvent and applies them to a surface, creating electronics in a process not unlike an inkjet printer. “The normal way we make things is we put material everywhere and then etch away what we don’t want,” Chiarot says. “You might end up etching away 90 or even 95 percent of the material. If you’re printing, you can just put the material where you want it to be.”

Chiarot says his work will build on existing research strengths at Binghamton. “What we’re trying to do is to control at the smallest length scales what the structure of an individual layer looks like,” he says. “Right now there’s not a lot of control for that. But if you want to be able to get really nice functionality out of a 3D printed part, you want to be able to control what we call structure at the smallest possible length scales.”

That sort of control will enable engineers to produce parts with specific mechanical, electrical, thermal and optical properties, Chiarot notes. Magnetic particles lined up a certain way could be useful for data storage. A thin layer of gold can be both transparent and conductive, which can be useful in solar cell development. Glass particles could be useful for coatings with anti-fogging or anti-frosting properties, too. His group also plans to work with graphene and other carbon-based materials with interesting electrical and thermal properties.

“If you imagine these particles were billiard balls that we just threw together — which is the way we do it now — and you wanted to pass electric current through that, if it’s randomly packed, it won’t do a great job of it,” Chiarot says. “But if we do it the way you line up billiard balls — in an orderly fashion — that should help us get better conductivity, a more efficient device or maybe one that requires less material.”

Chiarot, who received bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Toronto, was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Rochester before joining Binghamton’s faculty in 2011. His current research is a natural evolution of his earlier projects, including work on electrosprays with biological applications and with Kodak on printing technology.

The electrospray system relies on a high-voltage power supply and a small pump, which delivers the material to a nozzle that looks more like a syringe. When the particles come out in the spray, they have a high electric charge, which keeps them apart. It’s like a cloud of solvent with the particles disbursed through it. Chiarot says secondary electric fields can be used to reposition them “in flight.”

The system can cover centimeters of material at a time, and Chiarot envisions having rows of nozzles side by side to scale up the process for manufacturing.

Flat plastic and glass substrates are the “workhorses” of his lab, but Chiarot is also interested in taking a plastic part from a 3D printer and using electrospray techniques to apply coatings onto objects that aren’t so flat or so regular.

The goal of this research is to make electrospray printing a true manufacturing tool, to take it beyond one-centimeter-square samples produced in laboratories or small pieces created as curiosities. “We want to understand this principle fundamentally,” Chiarot says, “and then, using that knowledge, we want to develop a manufacturing technique that can lead to new jobs.”

Customized, small batches of products could be made at a lower cost with 3D printing in the future, he says. And picture the possibilities of a 3D printer somewhere like the International Space Station!

Chiarot knows his technique will be more attractive to manufacturers if there are relatively few special requirements for it. Generally, he says, electrospray can be applied at room temperature with low humidity and clean (but not sterile) conditions.

And he does anticipate a day in the not-too-distant future when manufacturing returns to the United States in a big way. It won’t look like it did 50 years ago, Chiarot cautions: “We need things, both small and large, not just cell phones, but jet engines and replacement parts, too. Manufacturing positions will come back, but it won’t be an assembly line.”

He says he’s excited about preparing his students for that kind of work. Open-source technology for 3D printing has the potential to accelerate innovation, Chiarot says, and students need to be ready to take advantage of the possibilities.

His NSF CAREER award includes an educational component, not only for doctoral students, but also to support undergraduates in the summer. Chiarot will work with a University of Toronto colleague to help staff a summer science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) program for kids there. Two Binghamton students will go this summer. Eventually, Binghamton will launch its own program and Toronto students will come to New York to support it.

“I worked in that program as an undergraduate,” he says. “It’s one of the best jobs you can imagine, and what it encompasses is amazing. It’s good for both young students and for the college students, and I think it will be great to have a program here as well.”

“Increasingly we have global transportation, global communication … and that means we have things that propagate across the world,” Yaneer Bar-Yam, president of the New England Complex Systems Institute, told dozens of faculty, students and administrators who gathered for the event. The study of complex systems can reveal trends, help forecast and avert crises and identify connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena.

The Center for Collective Dynamics of Complex Systems, or CoCo, claims faculty participants from about 15 departments on campus. The researchers study networks ranging from the stock market to the brain, using mathematical modeling to understand and predict their behavior.

“If we want to address the most pressing challenges of our society, we need to bring people of different disciplines together,” said Donald Nieman, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs. “CoCo fits really wonderfully into this paradigm.”

Hiroki Sayama, CoCo director, is an associate professor in Binghamton’s department of systems science and industrial engineering. He’s also the author of a new Open SUNY textbook titled “Introduction to the Modeling and Analysis of Complex Systems.”

At Binghamton, CoCo, which began as an informal group in 2007, has held a seminar series for years. It was formally recognized as an Organized Research Center this summer. Sayama said the researchers have established three key research thrusts:

• Agent-based modeling of socioeconomic dynamics of Greater Binghamton
• Design and evaluation of adaptive power systems
• Applications to social and psychological processes

CoCo also led the establishment of an advanced graduate certificate program in complex systems science and engineering at Binghamton.

Bar-Yam’s talk, which touched on topics such as Ebola and the Arab Spring, included illustrations of how complex systems science can help world leaders, non-government organizations and public health officials anticipate crises. He drew connections between American policies on corn ethanol and global food prices, then used graphs to show the link between those food prices and civil unrest worldwide.

As he shifted his focus to ebola, Bar-Yam noted that pathogen evolution has been disrupted by our global transportation networks. In the past, a virus that was overly aggressive — essentially, one that killed people too quickly — would eventually die out for lack of victims. Now, an aggressive pathogen can “succeed” by jumping to a new location. Statistical models, he argued, aren’t up to the task of predicting these jumps. Indeed, Bar-Yam said, people may be blind to the unreasonable risk of a virus like ebola because of their reliance on statistics.

Bar-Yam’s lecture wasn’t all doom and gloom, however. He also shared some anecdotes about a project involving the use of Twitter to analyze people’s locations and moods in various New York City neighborhoods. “We discovered to our surprise that people in Central Park are happier,” he said, to loud laughter from the audience.

CoCo’s seminar series continues throughout the semester. For details on upcoming lectures and information about the center’s work, visit http://coco.binghamton.edu.

Now the winner of one of America’s most prestigious scholarships, Pereyra plans to spend the summer at the turbine’s base trying to model how waves, currents and water interfere with how wind is turned into energy.

Winning the Barry M. Goldwater scholarship, a $7,500 prize given to 260 undergraduate researchers, is nice, but just a mile marker on the road to something really big: efficient, affordable, green energy.

“We’re hoping to put wind turbines offshore,” said the 20-year-old Binghamton University undergraduate. “The big complication is that rather than a fixed base, it has multiple degrees of freedom.”

Turbine platforms face waves, current, storms and, naturally, the wind. All that can affect the power collected. And as farms crop up, the turbines themselves affect the wind flow to neighboring turbines.

Pereyra won the scholarship — a federal program that honors the late U.S. senator and fosters math, engineering and science advances — based on his academic record and a proposal to research and develop the computational modeling to make turbines more effective.

“I’ve really been pretty passionate about renewable energy since I got here,” said Pereyra, from Westhampton Beach, on Long Island. “I thought about where the problems lie for our society. We’re entirely run off fossil fuels. Why spend resources developing a technology our children are going to struggle to live without?”

His challenge is that much of the existing modeling for wind turbines comes from the offshore oil industry. But the two platforms are very different. Oil rigs are huge and can ignore some forces, higher order wave effects, for example, that would tear a turbine platform apart. Likewise, an oil rig’s size means it must deal with other forces small platforms overcome easily.

Pereyra began learning how to do that during a 2014 internship with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., studying how wind farms are affected, and affect, wind. He’ll continue that work this summer, again with the NREL, dealing with offshore platforms.

“We have to see how that applies to our technology. Sometimes it does; sometimes it doesn’t,” he said. The new models he hopes to develop would be both faster and more accurate.

Pereyra’s first steps in fluid dynamics and modeling came in the lab of Bruce Murray, a professor of mechanical engineering at Binghamton. While there, Pereyra exhibited one of the most crucial traits of a good researcher, Murray said: curiosity.

“He struggled, but he asked lots of questions and figured things out,” Murray said. “Some kids are really just sharp and motivated. And it’s very rare that students that new get into modeling to that extent.”

Sammakia, a distinguished professor of mechanical engineering, is the founding director of the Small Scale Systems Integration and Packaging Center, a New York State Center of Excellence. Editor of the ASME Journal of Electronic Packaging, he holds 19 U.S. patents and has published more than 200 peer-reviewed technical papers. He is also a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and holds a joint appointment in Binghamton’s department of systems science and industrial engineering.

“I am both delighted and humbled to receive this honor from the IEEE,” Sammakia said. “My research has always been motivated by my desire to have an impact on society, to create technology that really makes people’s lives better. This recognition is a sign that I am indeed contributing vital new knowledge to my field.

“It’s also an important validation of the investments Binghamton University has made in small-scale systems research,” he added. “I wouldn’t be able to do the work that I do now without the students, colleagues and facilities that we have here at Binghamton.”

Sammakia, a former IBM senior technical staff member, joined Binghamton’s faculty in 1998. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Alexandria in Egypt and his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University at Buffalo.

The IEEE is the world’s leading professional association for advancing technology for humanity. The IEEE, which has 400,000 members in 160 countries, publishes 30 percent of the world’s literature in the electrical and electronics engineering and computer science fields. It has developed more than 900 active industry standards.

Fellow is the highest grade of membership conferred by the IEEE Board of Directors and is recognized by the technical community as an important career achievement.

A software problem meant human operators were unaware they needed to shunt power around the break. Then they couldn’t keep up with relays commanding to break circuits to prevent overloads. Grid by grid, community by community, the cascading power failure shut down the Northeast United States and much of Ontario, Canada.

Fifty-five million people were left without power, and lost productivity and damaged equipment cost between $6 billion and $12 billion.

Eva Wu’s task is to help prevent that from happening again.

Wu, an expert in control systems and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Binghamton University, is working with New York State Electric & Gas Corp. to understand the best way to monitor and control a power grid that is too complex for current automated equipment to control and sometimes operates too fast for much human intervention.

The federal government has spent $300 million since 2003 to add 1,000 new monitoring devices that are networked and time-synchronized with GPS. Power controllers get system-wide updates 60 times a second, rather than once every five seconds. This also provides the opportunity to make the fast-acting protection system more reliable. “One of the major reliability problems is protection system misoperation,” Wu says.

Current protection systems are designed to protect local equipment, not the entire network. Nothing watching the whole system is capable of making a decision in tenths of milliseconds, which some problems require.

Blink once. Some actions need to be taken 800 times faster than that.

“Part of my research is to make the best use of that information in an automated manner,” Wu says. That means both deciding how to place monitors to greatest effectiveness and how to design a control system that can cost-effectively mitigate the blackout of the power grid, beyond merely protecting local equipment.

To do that, she must measure two concepts: security profile, the ability of the system to respond to a disturbance in a timely manner; and control effectiveness, measuring both how well the system can be observed and how well it can be controlled.

The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority funds Wu’s research. “We certainly are interested in projects that enhance the reliability of the network,” NYSERDA spokeswoman Dayle Zatlin says.

This research has worldwide implications. Sixty million people in Brazil and Paraguay lost power in a cascade failure in 2009. In 2012, the largest blackout in history hit India, cutting power to 620 million people — twice the U.S. population.

“Control systems enabled by new smart devices have the ability to make the system act in a very robust way,” Wu says. “Obviously, we need to do better.”

Binghamton University’s Center of Excellence in Small Scale Systems Integration and Packaging (S3IP) conducts research to advance this vital technology. “S3IP is about developing products and applications that improve the way people live their lives,” Director Bahgat Sammakia says. “It’s that simple. That’s our goal.”

Small-scale systems are electronic systems with features built at the microscale or even smaller. “These are difficult to construct, but also extremely useful,” says Sammakia, a former IBM engineer who is also vice president for research at Binghamton. “When you can build electronic systems at that scale, you can put much more function in a much smaller volume and weight. So your phone now can do what a supercomputer could do three decades ago. That’s where scale becomes really important, when you can have more function in a smaller space at lower power.

“We decided to focus on small-scale systems because that’s where the future is.”

S3IP, established 10 years ago, builds on Binghamton’s Integrated Electronics Engineering Center (IEEC), founded in 1991. The IEEC focuses on electronics packaging. Since then, S3IP has added to its portfolio of research interests. It now boasts centers that address:

• Flexible electronics: The Center for Advanced Microelectronics Manufacturing (CAMM)
• Solar energy: The Center for Autonomous Solar Power (CASP)
• “Green” data centers: The Center for Energy-Smart Electronic Systems (ES2)

It also has three unique, multiuser laboratories that support this work:

• The Analytical and Diagnostics Laboratory (ADL), which offers state-of-the-art instrumentation for electron microscopy, thermal analysis, X-ray analysis, surface and interface analysis and more
• The Nanofabrication Laboratory (NLAB), which focuses on nano-scale research
• The Reliability and Failure Analysis Lab, a facility focused on evaluating reliability of electronic packaging and determination of failure modes

An industry-driven quest for answers

The Integrated Electronics Engineering Center (IEEC) is where it all began, and electronics packaging remains at the core of S3IP’s activities. Those activities are driven by member companies, which provide faculty researchers an opportunity to tackle real-world problems and support their work financially. In turn, these companies obtain access to cutting-edge research and facilities.

From 1996 through 2012, the IEEC’s work led to the creation of 780 jobs as well as the retention of 1,000 positions at New York state companies. The center has had an economic impact of more than $971 million on the state. “The IEEC was our origin, and it remains our key economic engine,” says Daryl Santos, IEEC director.

William Infantolino, associate director of the IEEC, says reliability testing is one of the center’s specialties. It’s an area of growing concern to electronics manufacturers, whose customers now expect, for example, that their cell phones will still work if they’re dropped.

The IEEC can expose parts and devices to accelerated test conditions to see how they perform over time when exposed to elevated temperatures or other stressors. “We can fit a lifetime of on/off cycles into three months,” Infantolino explains. “It gives us an approximation of how a part will perform over time in actual use.”

Some of the most exciting IEEC projects now focus on 3D integration of silicon electronic devices. “That has always been a dream,” Sammakia says, “and now it is becoming real.”

Essentially, in an effort to make devices smaller and help them run faster, companies now are stacking microchips vertically, Infantolino says. Sematech, a consortium of semiconductor companies, is working in this area and has come to the IEEC for assistance with this research. Binghamton experts are conducting mechanical and thermal modeling as well as reliability assessments related to these designs.

“There’s high potential in 3D packaging,” Infantolino says. “It comes down to cost for performance. If the performance and size advantages can justify the cost of the more complex structure, there’ll be a major migration. It’s going to take some time to develop the processes, equipment and supply chain. It’s not going to happen overnight.”

Like the IEEC, the Center for Advanced Microelectronics Manufacturing (CAMM) takes its cue from industry. In fact, the center is based at Endicott Interconnect Technologies, about a 15-minute drive from the University.

In general, the CAMM looks for ways to translate aspects of traditional electronics manufacturing into flexible, roll-to-roll processes. Its 10,000-square-foot facility boasts a panel line for process and product development and an integrated roll-to-roll research line for product development. Much of the equipment found there is available nowhere else in the country.

Roll-to-roll processing is traditionally the domain of paper: Think of the enormous rolls of newsprint on which your local newspaper is printed. The CAMM has helped to expand that domain to include lightweight, thin plastic and, most recently, flexible glass. Corning Inc. collaborated with the CAMM to evaluate its spooled flexible Willow Glass. While glass is the preferred substrate for many kinds of electronics, scientists were unsure about the design rules for equipment that would handle and process flexible glass.

Cynthia Giroux, division vice president and research director for optics and surface technologies at Corning, participates on the CAMM’s executive advisory board and notes the company’s relationship with the CAMM has led to numerous conference presentations and journal articles. “Cost-efficient manufacturing is a necessary step in achieving the goal of high-quality and interconnected electronics that are integrated into everyday objects such as tabletops, walls, appliances and vehicles,” she says. “We look forward to further collaborations with Binghamton University’s S3IP centers to identify flexible electronic device designs and fabrication methods for these emerging applications.”

“That’s the future of the CAMM: to help companies commercialize products,” Sammakia says.

The first product commercialized at the CAMM was a catheter system, and Sammakia envisions the center playing a role in future healthcare research. “S3IP’s role in healthcare research will be tied to electronics,” he says.

Mark Poliks, CAMM technical director and R&D director for Endicott Interconnect, agrees. “There is a huge opportunity for advanced diagnostic and therapeutic medical electronics for use both in and out of the body: high-definition ultrasound probes, wearable MRI coils, neural stimulation, retinal implants and more,” Poliks says. “Even relatively simple monitoring devices such as heart monitors, oxygen sensors or glucose monitors could be reduced to a comfortable-to-wear Band-Aid patch complete with a wireless interface.”

Looking to the future

In addition to healthcare, smart energy is a key focus of research at Binghamton. That emphasis is evident in the work done by the Center for Autonomous Solar Power (CASP) and the Center for Energy-Smart Electronic Systems (ES2).

At CASP, scientists are working to improve thin-film solar cells, build next-generation supercapacitors, conduct reliability studies and develop thermoelectric cells that expand on the fraction of the sun’s energy captured by most solar technology.

Laboratories around the world are engaged in a game of one-upmanship to build ever more efficient solar cells, says Charles R. Westgate, CASP director. Binghamton researchers have entered this race, focusing on cells made with copper zinc tin sulfide (CZTS), which is less costly than the materials used in most cells now on the market. “Among universities, we’re now No. 1,” he says.

The greatest barrier to more widespread use of solar power in the United States is cost, Westgate notes. The development of solar cells from materials that are easier to extract from the earth should address cost concerns and result in processes that are less harmful to the environment.

“We’re meeting only about 1 or 2 percent of our energy needs from solar energy,” he says. “A reasonable goal is to increase that to about 10 percent in the next decade and about 20 percent in the long term.”

ES2, meanwhile, unites researchers from computer science, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and other disciplines in pursuit of “green” data centers. The goal is to reduce energy consumption without sacrificing computing power.

“The whole is bigger than the sum of the parts,” says Kanad Ghose, ES2 site director and chair of the Department of Computer Science at Binghamton. “The center takes a holistic approach when it considers computing, thermal and other challenges.”

ES2 is a National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center with nearly two dozen industry partners, including IBM, Microsoft and Facebook. The center will soon open a data center that’s also a “living laboratory” where new products and ideas can be tested. “Companies can come in, develop best-practice solutions and evaluate them,” Ghose says. “We’ll be developing standards for industry in this lab.”

ES2 researchers will help companies establish the right amount of cooling for a given number of servers, identify new ways to recover and use the waste heat from data centers, and suggest new methods of designing data centers to maximize efficiency.

“We have projects that have short-term consequences as well as projects that have significant long-term consequences,” Ghose says. “The research covers the spectrum from chip-level work to entire data centers. Our goal is to do long-term research and develop technology that can be translated into the real world.”

ES2 also offers interdisciplinary training for graduate students. The research center is quite new, but  graduates have already gone on to positions with industry giant Intel.

“The United States has to invest in computing technology to stay competitive,” he adds. “The future of the country is at stake. Already, some of the fastest computers are in China and not in the U.S.”

At Binghamton University, campus, state and federal investments are evident in a new facility for S3IP. The Center of Excellence will move this year into a $30 million, 114,000-square-foot space that will allow it to expand and consolidate its operations. ES2 will use the facility itself as a lab for “smart buildings,” testing ways to reduce energy consumption through smart lighting, natural cooling and other “green”  innovations.

The building will connect other facilities at Binghamton’s Innovative Technologies Complex focused on biotechnology and engineering as well as a future R&D facility to be devoted to smart energy.

“The S3IP building is going to be the virtual bridge between engineering and science,” Sammakia says. “The IEEC has always done that. Now we will have this building and these labs, and we expect that faculty from chemistry and biology, physics and math will come and partner with engineering.”

David Klotzkin, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Binghamton, says that’s not good enough. He and a colleague, Ian Papautsky, director of the University of Cincinnati’s BioMicrosystems Lab and its Micro/Nano Fabrication Engineering Research Center, have developed a technology to accelerate testing and enhance it in a number of other ways.

Klotzkin is an expert on the properties of light. Much of his research has focused intensely on photonics — the science of photons, elementary light particles — since he earned his PhD in electrical engineering at the University of Michigan.

As a senior engineer at Lasertron Inc., a manufacturer of photonics components, he developed high-speed laser modulation equipment used in multiplexing — the combining of multiple message signals or data streams, such as many television channels or telephone conversations that share a single cable to maximize the use of an expensive resource.

As an American Society for Engineering Education summer faculty fellow at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., he designed circuits that are essential for free-space optical communications. This low-power, high-data-volume alternative to conventional radio frequency communications, with military and civilian applications, is quickly evolving thanks to improved laser technology and compact optical systems.

Klotzkin began collaborating with Papautsky while he was on the faculty at the University of Cincinnati. At the time, Klotzkin was involved in research on organic light emitters, thin films of organic matter on glass that emit light when exposed to an energy source to excite their electrons.

Papautsky, a fellow faculty member, was studying microfluidics, the science of how fluids behave when they are manipulated in tiny spaces. He is a leader in development of what’s called “lab-on-a-chip,” which integrates several laboratory tests on a tiny chip.

With a single inexpensive, disposable lab-on-a-chip, it may be possible to conduct — in the field — tests that, not so long ago, had to be conducted individually in a laboratory remote from where the sample was acquired. It’s also possible to perform those tests simultaneously and quickly, using samples as small as a millionth of a liter.

“In the microfluidics community, we’ve had this idea of small, disposable platforms that could be used for many different tests for a long time,” Papautsky says.

Klotzkin helped him find the way. Since different materials emit different light waves, it is possible to use light to detect the presence of disease-causing micro-organisms such as viruses and bacteria.

“Fluorescence is one of the most commonly used analytic techniques in the biosciences,” Klotzkin explains. Here’s how it works in the typical microfluidic immunoassay: Whatever is being tested — bacteria, viruses or some other type of organic molecules — is tagged with fluorescently labeled antibodies. An excitation light stimulates the dye to fluoresce. The wavelength of the fluorescence — essentially the “fingerprint” of the disease-causing agent — is observed through a filter that suppresses the excitation light.

There was a problem, though. “There was no way to conveniently build filters into the micro system,” Klotzkin says. Consequently, the detector signal emitted by the dye was inevitably overwhelmed by the excitation light.

That is, until he and Papautsky found a simple solution. Using polarizers, they were able to isolate the excitation light from the detector. While the excitation light is polarized, the fluorescence from the dye is emitted with random polarization. Then, when a second polarizer is positioned 90 degrees from the first, the intensity of the excitation light is dramatically reduced as it crosses the two polarizers.

“This solution works with any combination of excitation and emission light,” Klotzkin says, “even if two signals overlap in wavelength.”

Klotzkin and Papautsky published their first paper on their solution in 2007. The following year, Klotzkin joined Binghamton’s faculty. Since then, they have continued to collaborate on lab-on-a-chip models that employ the polarized light approach. They’ve demonstrated the efficacy of this technique with what Papautsky calls “low-hanging fruit,” miniature and portable oxygen sensors for firefighters. Labs-on-a-chip for blood analyses are next.

“We are working toward the goal of putting a ‘lab’ in everyone’s office,” Klotzkin says, “and putting fluorescence in a microchip is one step toward that. More than half of emergency room patients require at least one blood test. With this technology they can get results immediately, from a much smaller volume of blood. Rather than send a vial of blood out to a lab, the doctor can put a drop of blood into a microfluidic system and analyze it instantly.”

Not only do labs-on-a-chip produce potentially life-saving results more quickly, they can perform several tests simultaneously. With patents pending, the engineers’ work may be about to pay off.

“There was a lot of excitement about the lab-on-a-chip idea back in the early 2000s,” Papautsky says, “but then a number of start-ups failed and investors pulled back. Things got even worse when the economy went into recession.” Now that the economy is rebounding, the inventors’ concept could result in a new product in the near future.

When Lam and her students build a model of a production line or an entire system, they’re able to see where there are bottlenecks and idle resources and even where there are activities that aren’t adding value. Such simulations often lead to a company relocating materials or reallocating operators to reduce travel time or material-handling time as well as to new designs for product flow and facility layout. “Activities that don’t add value should be eliminated,” she says. “Inventory should be minimized. We want things to move smoothly and quickly through the system.”

This kind of simulation is especially good for exploring what-if scenarios, says Lam, an associate professor of systems science and industrial engineering at Binghamton. “Building an imitation of how a system and its components work so you can actually see things moving adds depth to the planning stage,” she notes. “That lets you test out an idea and see if you get the benefits you expected. You see what isn’t going to work and how deadlines will be affected. Then you can make changes in the simulation world to see if you can get better results.”

Lam’s simulations allow her to compress time, too. Once a model has been built, using time studies and historical data as well as the relevant physical details, she can simulate how a system will work over the course of a year in just minutes. “Simulation results not only can assist with planning but also often can tell us something new,” she says.  “We can see results faster.”

Visuals, even a simple 2D model, can make a huge difference and are increasingly common in the software Lam and her students use. In fact, newer software packages often include 3D modeling. Such simulations help people visualize the entire system and focus on what’s moving, whether it’s patients moving through a hospital’s emergency room or a printed circuit board moving through an electronics manufacturing line.  “Companies like to see animation,”  Lam says.  “They say,  ‘Show me how it runs.’ Animation is a big deal for communicating.”

She and her students can create simulations in as little as a couple of weeks or, for more complex models, in as much as several months. A typical project takes two to nine months.

“It allows companies to see what they’re not doing so well and where they can improve,” she says. “The bottom line is important. We provide the tools to help them get there.”

Lam’s primary motivation is in seeing a system work more smoothly. “As industrial engineers, we don’t make things, but we try to improve on how things are done,” she says. “Seeing an improvement is gratifying. We have seen significant improvement in return on investment. That’s very important. That’s one of the ways we can maintain the research relationship year after year.”

Cardullo, then a Link Simulation and Training employee, worked on the Apollo program and has decades of experience in simulation for flight and aerospace applications. Since joining Binghamton’s faculty in 1980, he has explored some of the underlying principles of simulation, including mathematical models and signal processing.

“Space simulators are unique, particularly the Apollo simulators,” Cardullo says. “You can train people to fly airplanes and drive cars by having them fly airplanes and drive cars. But you couldn’t train an astronaut to go to the moon by going to the moon. So you had to have a very sophisticated simulator to do that. The astronauts often said ‘just like in the simulator’ as they encountered events.”

In recent years, flight and driving simulators have grown increasingly realistic, with significant improvements in motion cues. Cardullo notes that physiology and biology play a growing role in simulation, as do new ideas about cognition and learning.

“Simulators, I think, are creating better pilots,” he says. “They’re better able to handle complex situations.” Engine failure, like the problem in the 2009 so-called Miracle on the Hudson flight, is a prime example. Most pilots experience engine failure only in simulations. Nevertheless, they are often able to identify it and to respond appropriately because of that training.

Cardullo, a professor of mechanical engineering whose work has been supported by NASA as well as the Office of Naval Research and the Air Force Research Laboratory, earned his master’s degree from Binghamton. He sees applications for his work wherever he goes. A decade ago, he explored the possibility that data from simulators could be used to identify specific pilots, which could be useful in determining whether a pilot had been disabled or was impaired in some way. An avid Red Sox fan, he has also considered taking what he knows about brain waves to see whether they are the reason that some athletes respond faster than others to visual information. Perhaps, he says, there was some scientific truth behind the  “fast eyes” of the late Boston great Ted Williams.

Cardullo is also interested in medical applications of his field, especially in the idea that surgeons benefit from simulation training in much the same way pilots do. Simulators can present malfunctions and difficulties to doctors so that they can become more experienced in dealing with them. (Standard training now often relies on the use of pigs.) Cardullo hopes to build a simulator that would provide tactile sensation to surgeons.  “My hypothesis is that tactile feedback will improve the surgeon’s performance,” he says. Simulation technology may also lead to improvements in the design of surgical robots, Cardullo says, just as it has led to better aircraft.

He wants to examine the complications surrounding robotic surgery done remotely, including questions about satellite and phone connections. “The up-down time can be two seconds,”  he says.  “A lot of simulation research that I’ve done over the years is looking at the effect of that communication delay on human performance. Once you get over about 70 or 80 milliseconds of delay, it affects performance. You can’t have that if somebody’s cutting out someone’s liver.”

Funded in part by the National Science Foundation, the Industry/University Cooperative Research Center in Energy-Efficient Electronic Systems’ primary support will come from the center members with whom researchers will work on projects of mutual interest. Fifteen companies representing the entire supply chain for data centers — from hardware manufacturing and software development to end-users — have signed up as members. The list includes industry leaders such as Microsoft, IBM, Facebook, Commscope, Bloomberg, General Electric, Corning Inc., Endicott Interconnect Technologies, Emerson Network Power and Emerson Delaware Valley Liebert, Verizon, Comcast and Steel Orca.

“The center will address energy efficiencies in a way that has not been tackled before,” said Bahgat Sammakia, interim vice president for research at Binghamton University and E3S director. “By looking at energy efficiency problems holistically — that is, from all angles and across many disciplines — the center will provide the kind of answers that leaders in the electronics industry are looking for. Each of the center’s academic partners has expertise in a particular area and by tapping into these individual strengths, we will collectively find the answers to some of the industry’s most challenging practical problems.”

Binghamton University will be the focal point for this highly collaborative effort; partners Villanova University and the University of Texas at Arlington will have support centers on their campuses as well.

“The Villanova College of Engineering and the Villanova research team are thrilled to be part of the NSF I/UCRC E3S Center. The center gives us an unprecedented opportunity to marry our deep expertise in thermal management of electronic systems with our rapidly emerging expertise in energy sustainability as we seek innovative solutions to energy efficiency in data center design and operation,” said Alfonso Ortega, associate dean for Graduate Studies and Research, and the James R. Birle Professor of Energy Technology at the Villanova College of Engineering.

Focusing initially on data centers, which are becoming one of the nation’s biggest energy-guzzlers, the new center will seek ways to allow electronic systems to monitor and regulate the amount of energy they use. As it stands, the energy spent on running data centers in the United States is about 2.5 percent of the total national energy expenditure, which is enough to power a couple of medium-sized cities for most of the year.

As the number of data centers increases due to growing demand for online services for everything from medical records to shopping, the need for greater energy efficiencies is becoming even more apparent. Lessons learned from reducing energy consumption in data centers will not only save millions of dollars, but will offer solutions to practical energy consumption problems in all areas of the electronics industry — from cell phones and tablets to gaming consoles and e-commerce.

The University of Texas at Arlington has been focusing on data center cooling for a number of years, said Dereje Agonafer, UT Arlington mechanical and aerospace engineering professor and site director for the center.

“The center allows us to significantly expand our mission in energy-efficient systems by focusing on a broad range of multi-disciplinary and collaborative research topics, including air side economizers, sustainability, effects of airborne contaminations on data center equipment, and cooling technologies for future high density interconnect devices,” Agonafer said. “Working with our consortium members gives us leverage into implementing our research activities in products.”

In addition to providing solutions to some of today’s most challenging energy-efficiency problems, the center is looking to the future by providing industry-relevant training opportunities.

“The I/UCRC E3S center is committed to strengthening the United States’ competitiveness in the electronics industry,” said Kanad Ghose, professor and chair of the Computer Science Department at Binghamton and E3S site director. “By attracting talented and motivated students to work with outstanding researchers and industry leaders, we can train the next generation to be the kind of broad-based scientists and engineers that the industry is going to need in the future.”

The center will convene its first official meeting in December 2011 to review an initial lineup of research projects that industry center members have identified as promising. Projects under review include activities associated with energy-efficient scheduling of workload, servers and cooling systems, the design of micro-scale servers, analyzing the effects of airflow and dynamics, and compact models activities. Work on these projects will begin as soon as they have been matched with teams of I/UCRC E3S researchers.

“The NSF I/UCRC Center for Energy Efficient Systems will play a key role in establishing deep partnerships between industry and academia,” said Kushagra Vaid, general manager of datacenter hardware engineering at Microsoft. “Our goal is to jointly deliver breakthrough concepts for next generation cloud infrastructure. Microsoft is proud to be on the advisory board for this research center.”

Roger Schmidt, IBM Fellow and chief engineer for data center energy efficiency at IBM Corp., is equally supportive of the new center.

“This I/UCRC represents a true partnership between industry and academia,” Schmidt said. “It deals with a critical issue for industry, namely the escalating energy budget in data centers. This partnership will allow us to conduct research that is both timely and transformative in close partnership with academia.”

“Consumers are getting pickier,” says Seungbae “S.B.” Park, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Binghamton University. “They say, ‘Hey, my friend dropped Product A more than a dozen times, and it’s still working fine. And I dropped mine once from not very high, and it’s broken. Mine must not be as good.’ Consumers are demanding manufacturers make devices more robust, while at the same time attractive, thin and light.”

Today, manufacturers don’t have to worry about longevity as much as they once did because people don’t expect their cell phones to last more than a couple of years. The biggest challenge is the ability to withstand the impact of being dropped.

The easiest, cheapest way to make a product sturdier is to add thickness and padding, but consumers don’t want fat phones. So manufacturers are looking more deeply into the mechanics of how a phone breaks when it hits the floor. The world’s second-largest cell-phone manufacturer, Samsung, turned to Park to analyze how its products fared.

“During a drop, there are many things happening in a fraction of a millisecond,” Park says. “The manufacturer needs to understand those very high-speed drop sequences.”

To slow down the action, Park and a team of students record drops with a high-speed camera that can take up to 300,000 frames per second. This allows the researchers to see precisely when parts such as chips and solder connections flex and break. They quantify the deformations and enter the data into a computer program so they can simulate drops from all possible positions and look at how all the potential drop energy is consumed — through the case breaking, sound generation, circuit-board flex, etc. They then try to come up with solutions that minimize damage of the critical components inside the case.

“Then we try to understand the best way to rearrange the chip location, model shape, battery position, battery size,” Park says. The battery alone offers numerous possibilities. “With the same amount of juice inside a battery, there are many different ways of making that chunk inside a cell phone — put it up, down, in the middle; chubby or thin and wide. There are many variations we can come up with.”

Finding the ideal balance informs design from the early stages of product development. Park realizes that “designers are designers,” artists who want to create a thing of beauty first and a thing of utility second. His work gives them and the engineers they work with a starting point.

Samsung brought its products to Binghamton several years ago when it joined the Integrated Electronics Engineering Center (IEEC), an organized research center on campus. The center’s engineering advice is second to none, Samsung Senior Engineer Soonwan Chung says.

“Binghamton University is known to have a lot of capability in faculty, facility and industry network,” Chung says. “Professor S.B. Park is so specialized in electronics reliability, and Samsung wanted to get his experience and consult. His research output helped us to make Samsung mobile phones robust in view of mechanical reliability.”

The Samsung-University relationship is a win for everyone, says James Pitarresi, chair of the mechanical engineering department. Samsung receives valuable insights while the University acquires greater visibility. And faculty members gain access to products that won’t be released to the public for a couple of years while providing their students with industry experience.

The relationship also is good for the public because it creates knowledge that is useful across industries. When Park’s group started looking at how cell phones react to drops, Pitarresi was amazed to find that there was hardly any published literature.

“There’s one of two reasons,” he says. “No. 1, it’s because we’re developing products so fast that research hasn’t caught up, and we all have our fingers crossed. Or No. 2, it’s because some companies have done some testing, but they keep it very proprietary. So we’ve been able to do some fundamental work here and publish it, which helps the entire industry.”

It also helps consumers because companies don’t have to spend money repeating investigations already conducted. So Park’s work helps industry make cell phones more reliable and less expensive.

Da Yu, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering who wrote his master’s thesis about the drop impact on reliability, says the Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering’s business connections give him a leg up on his competition. As a student he has already worked on industry issues, sat in on conference calls and learned about real-world needs and methods.

Yu recently interviewed with Apple Inc., whose iPhone revolutionized cell phones, and was offered an internship. The area the company was most interested in was his work on drop impact and reliability.