Fall 2015 - Stevens Institute of Technology

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