Mary Levin, UW

LumiSands cofounders Chang-Ching Tu, left, and Ji Hoo with with a demo showing the warmer, softer hue of the LED bulb (left side) after a film embedded with their red-emitting silicon nanoparticles is placed underneath. The box on the right is an identical, standard LED bulb.

Researchers at the University of Washington have created a material they say would make LED bulbs cheaper and greener to manufacture, driving down the price. Their silicon-based nanoparticles soften the blue light emitted by LEDs, creating white light that more closely resembles sunlight.

The company, LumiSands, started as a graduate student project for CEO Chang-Ching Tu, who received his doctorate in electrical engineering at the UW and just completed a stint as a postdoctoral researcher in materials science and engineering. This spring, the start-up company spun out from the UW Center for Commercialization, a process that its two founders hope will lead to signing a commercialization license for the technology.

LEDs give off light when electrons move through a semiconductor material. They are more efficient than standard incandescent or fluorescent bulbs, but they’re also pricier. That’s partly because within each LED lamp, expensive substances known as rare-earth-element phosphors help to soften the harsh blue light that LEDs naturally emit.

But these rare-earth elements are hazardous to extract and process. China controls nearly all of the market for these materials, which has quadrupled the average price for the past several years.

That’s where LumiSands comes in. The company uses silicon, derived from sand, instead of rare-earth elements to convert part of the blue light emitted by LEDs into greens, yellows and reds. The resulting light looks more like sunlight.

Mary Levin, UW

Researchers use a black light to show the photo-luminescence of their silicon nanoparticles.

The crew of two plans to sell directly to LED-bulb manufacturers that are looking to transition away from increasingly more expensive materials to make the lights.

“Hopefully, manufacturers could substitute traditional rare-earth elements with our material with minimal additional steps,” said Ji Hoo, a UW doctoral student in electrical engineering and co-founder of LumiSands. “It will be cheaper, better-quality lighting for users.”

Incandescent bulbs give off light that’s most similar to sunlight – and easiest on our eyes – but the bulbs are inefficient and produce a lot of heat. Fluorescent bulbs, seen most commonly as long tubes in overhead office light fixtures, are more efficient than incandescent lights, but they contain mercury, posing health and environmental concerns.

LumiSands etches off nano-sized particles from wafers of silicon. The element, which usually doesn’t emit light, can start to glow when its crystalline particle size is smaller than 5 nanometers. The surface is reinforced through a wet-chemistry process. When the red-emitting silicon nanoparticles are added to LED bulbs, the light becomes softer and warmer in hue.

Mary Levin, UW

This device tests the quality and reliability of the silicon nanoparticle phosphors that LumiSands created to use in LED lighting.

“The beauty of our technology is to create a highly efficient fluorescent material by using silicon rather than rare-earth elements or other types of heavy-metal compound semiconductors,” Tu said. “The manufacturing process can be performed in a basic laboratory setting and is easy to scale up.”

LumiSands plans to tweak the red technology before moving on to other colors such as yellow and green, which will enable LEDs to cast a white light with no rare-earth elements.

The company has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Washington Research Foundation and the W Fund. It received an honorable mention in the 2012 Foster School of Business Environmental Innovation Challenge and a top award in the 2012 Jones Milestones/Foster Accelerator mentorship program.

Now, LumiSands is finishing a prototype of the technology and sending samples to lighting industry partners for evaluation. It will apply for competitive phase two NSF funding, which could launch the company toward manufacturing its technology within a year.

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For more information, contact Tu and Hoo at info@lumisands.com or 206-604-4394.

Now, University of Washington researchers have demonstrated that when humans use this technology – called a brain-computer interface – the brain behaves much like it does when completing simple motor skills such as kicking a ball, typing or waving a hand. Learning to control a robotic arm or a prosthetic limb could become second nature for people who are paralyzed.

Jeremiah Wander, UW

This image shows the changes that took place in the brain for all patients participating in the study using a brain-computer interface. Changes in activity were distributed widely throughout the brain.

“What we’re seeing is that practice makes perfect with these tasks,” said Rajesh Rao, a UW professor of computer science and engineering and a senior researcher involved in the study. “There’s a lot of engagement of the brain’s cognitive resources at the very beginning, but as you get better at the task, those resources aren’t needed anymore and the brain is freed up.”

Rao and UW collaborators Jeffrey Ojemann, a professor of neurological surgery, and Jeremiah Wander, a doctoral student in bioengineering, published their results online June 10 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In this study, seven people with severe epilepsy were hospitalized for a monitoring procedure that tries to identify where in the brain seizures originate. Physicians cut through the scalp, drilled into the skull and placed a thin sheet of electrodes directly on top of the brain. While they were watching for seizure signals, the researchers also conducted this study.

The patients were asked to move a mouse cursor on a computer screen by using only their thoughts to control the cursor’s movement. Electrodes on their brains picked up the signals directing the cursor to move, sending them to an amplifier and then a laptop to be analyzed. Within 40 milliseconds, the computer calculated the intentions transmitted through the signal and updated the movement of the cursor on the screen.

Researchers found that when patients started the task, a lot of brain activity was centered in the prefrontal cortex, an area associated with learning a new skill. But after often as little as 10 minutes, frontal brain activity lessened, and the brain signals transitioned to patterns similar to those seen during more automatic actions.

“Now we have a brain marker that shows a patient has actually learned a task,” Ojemann said. “Once the signal has turned off, you can assume the person has learned it.”

While researchers have demonstrated success in using brain-computer interfaces in monkeys and humans, this is the first study that clearly maps the neurological signals throughout the brain. The researchers were surprised at how many parts of the brain were involved.

“We now have a larger-scale view of what’s happening in the brain of a subject as he or she is learning a task,” Rao said. “The surprising result is that even though only a very localized population of cells is used in the brain-computer interface, the brain recruits many other areas that aren’t directly involved to get the job done.”

Several types of brain-computer interfaces are being developed and tested. The least invasive is a device placed on a person’s head that can detect weak electrical signatures of brain activity. Basic commercial gaming products are on the market, but this technology isn’t very reliable yet because signals from eye blinking and other muscle movements interfere too much.

A more invasive alternative is to surgically place electrodes inside the brain tissue itself to record the activity of individual neurons. Researchers at Brown University and the University of Pittsburgh have demonstrated this in humans as patients, unable to move their arms or legs, have learned to control robotic arms using the signal directly from their brain.

The UW team tested electrodes on the surface of the brain, underneath the skull. This allows researchers to record brain signals at higher frequencies and with less interference than measurements from the scalp. A future wireless device could be built to remain inside a person’s head for a longer time to be able to control computer cursors or robotic limbs at home.

“This is one push as to how we can improve the devices and make them more useful to people,” Wander said. “If we have an understanding of how someone learns to use these devices, we can build them to respond accordingly.”

The research team, along with the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Research Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering headquartered at the UW, will continue developing these technologies.

This research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the NSF, the Army Research Office and the Keck Foundation.

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For more information, contact Rao at rao@cs.washington.edu or 206-685-9141 and Wander at jdwander@gmail.com.

U of Washington

A hand gesture changes the TV channel using WiSee technology.

University of Washington computer scientists have developed gesture-recognition technology that brings this a step closer to reality. Researchers have shown it’s possible to leverage Wi-Fi signals around us to detect specific movements without needing sensors on the human body or cameras.

By using an adapted Wi-Fi router and a few wireless devices in the living room, users could control their electronics and household appliances from any room in the home with a simple gesture.

“This is repurposing wireless signals that already exist in new ways,” said lead researcher Shyam Gollakota, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering. “You can actually use wireless for gesture recognition without needing to deploy more sensors.”

The UW research team that includes Shwetak Patel, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering and of electrical engineering and his lab, published their findings online this week. This technology, which they call “WiSee,” is to appear at The 19^th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking.

The concept is similar to Xbox Kinect – a commercial product that uses cameras to recognize gestures – but the UW technology is simpler, cheaper and doesn’t require users to be in the same room as the device they want to control. That’s because Wi-Fi signals can travel through walls and aren’t bound by line-of-sight or sound restrictions.

The UW researchers built a “smart” receiver device that essentially listens to all of the wireless transmissions coming from devices throughout a home, including smartphones, laptops and tablets. A standard Wi-Fi router could be adapted to function as a receiver.

When a person moves, there is a slight change in the frequency of the wireless signal. Moving a hand or foot causes the receiver to detect a pattern of changes known as the Doppler frequency shift.

U of Washington

A change in the wireless signal is shown in real time as a user moves his hand.

These frequency changes are very small – only several hertz – when compared with Wi-Fi signals that have a 20 megahertz bandwidth and operate at 5 gigahertz. Researchers developed an algorithm to detect these slight shifts. The technology also accounts for gaps in wireless signals when devices aren’t transmitting.

The technology can identify nine different whole-body gestures, ranging from pushing, pulling and punching to full-body bowling. The researchers tested these gestures with five users in a two-bedroom apartment and an office environment. Out of the 900 gestures performed, WiSee accurately classified 94 percent of them.

“This is the first whole-home gesture recognition system that works without either requiring instrumentation of the user with sensors or deploying cameras in every room,” said Qifan Pu, a collaborator and visiting student at the UW.

The system requires one receiver with multiple antennas. Intuitively, each antenna tunes into a specific user’s movements, so as many as five people can move simultaneously in the same residence without confusing the receiver.

U of Washington

WiSee technology uses multiple antennas to focus on one user to detect the person’s gesture.

If a person wants to use the WiSee, she would perform a specific repetition gesture sequence to get access to the receiver. This password concept would also keep the system secure and prevent a neighbor – or hacker – from controlling a device in your home.

Once the wireless receiver locks onto the user, she can perform normal gestures to interact with the devices and appliances in her home. The receiver would be programmed to understand that a specific gesture corresponds to a specific device.

Collaborators Patel and Sidhant Gupta, a doctoral student in computer science and engineering, have worked with Microsoft Research on two similar technologies – SoundWave, which uses sound, and Humantenna, which uses radiation from electrical wires – that both sense whole-body gestures. But WiSee stands apart because it doesn’t require the user to be in the same room as the receiver or the device.

In this way, a smart home could become a reality, allowing you to turn off the oven timer with a simple wave of the hand, or turn on the coffeemaker from your bed.

The researchers plan to look next at the ability to control multiple devices at once. The initial work was funded by the UW department of computer science and engineering.

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For more information, contact Gollakota and Patel at wisee-contact@cs.washington.edu.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s standard for emissions from wood-based transportation fuels requires a 60 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions compared to using fossil fuels. The standards don’t just concern greenhouse gases generated when biofuel is burned to run vehicles or provide energy: What’s required is life-cycle analysis, a tally of emissions all along the growing, collecting, producing and shipping chain.

The special Forest Products Journal issue does just that for energy produced in various ways from woody biomass. For instance, two processes for making ethanol reviewed in the issue – one a gasification process using trees thinned from forests and the other a fermentation process using plantation-grown willows – reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 70 percent or better compared with gasoline.  In contrast, producing and using corn ethanol reduces greenhouse gas emissions 24 percent compared to gasoline, according Argonne National Laboratory research published in 2011.

Forest Products Society

A special issue of Forest Products Journal considers 15 processes where woody biomass was turned into liquid fuel, burned directly to create heat, steam or electricity, or processed into pellets for burning

For the publication, researchers from the 17 research institutions that make up the Consortium for Research on Renewable Industrial Materials determined the life-cycle emissions of 15 processes where woody biomass was turned into liquid fuel, burned directly to create heat, steam or electricity, or processed into pellets for burning.

The common advantage of these processes over fossil fuels is that trees growing in replanted forests reabsorb the carbon dioxide emitted when woody biomass burns as fuel in cars or other uses, said Elaine Oneil, a University of Washington research scientist in ecological and forest sciences and director of the consortium. While fossil fuels cause a one-way flow of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere when they burn, forests that are harvested for wood products or fuels and regrown represent a two-way flow, into and back out of the atmosphere.

The processes reviewed have the added advantage of using woody debris not only as a component of fuels but to produce energy needed for manufacturing the biofuel. The fermentation process to produce ethanol, for example, ends up with leftover organic matter that can be burned to produce electricity. Only one-third of the electricity generated by the leftovers is needed to make the ethanol, so two-thirds can go to the power grid for other uses, offsetting the need to burn fossil fuels to produce electricity.

This is among the reasons that ethanol from plantation-grown feedstock using the fermentation process approaches being carbon neutral, that is, during its life cycle as much carbon is removed as is added to the atmosphere, according to Rick Gustafson, UW professor of environmental and forest sciences and a co-author in the special issue.

The researchers looking at the fermentation process also took into account such things as water consumption. They found that the process – which among other things needs water to support the enzymes – uses about 70 percent more water per unit of energy produced than gasoline. A biofuel industry using woody material will be a lot less water intense than today’s pulp and paper industry – still, water use should be taken into account when moving from pilot biofuel production to full-scale commercialization, Gustafson said.

“The value of life-cycle analysis is that it gives you information such as the amount of energy you get in relation to how much you put in, how emissions are affected and the impacts to resources such as land and water,” Oneil said.

In the U.S. last year, some 15 facilities produced about 20,000 gallons of fuels using cellulosic biomass such as wood waste and sugarcane bagasse, according to a U.S. Energy Information Administration website. The administration estimates this output could grow to more than 5 million gallons in 2013, as operations ramp up at several plants.

In the special issue, the biofuels analyzed came only from forest residues, forest thinnings, wood bits left after manufacturing such things as hardwood flooring or fast-growing plantation trees like willow. That’s because, from a greenhouse emissions perspective, it makes no sense to produce biofuels using trees that can be made into long-lived building materials and furniture, said Bruce Lippke, UW professor emeritus of environmental and forest sciences, who oversaw the contents of the special issue.

“Substituting wood for non-wood building materials such as steel and concrete, can displace far more carbon emissions than using such wood for biofuels,” Lippke said. “It’s another example of how life-cycle analysis helps us judge how to use resources wisely.”

The modeling and simulations used for life-cycle analysis in the special Forest Products Journal issue can be used to evaluate other woody materials and biofuel processes in use now or in the future, with the models being refined as more data is collected. The data also will be submitted to the U.S. Life Cycle Inventory Database of the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which has data available for everyone to use on hundreds of products.

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For more information:
Oneil, 206-543-6859, eoneil@uw.edu
Lippke, 206-543-8684,blippke@uw.edu
Gustafson, 206-543-2790, pulp@u.washington.edu

Forty-nine finalist teams and about 600 people will converge on campus this Friday and Saturday for the 2013 National Student Steel Bridge Competition. It’s the largest club event in the nation for civil engineering undergraduates, said Jeffrey Berman, faculty adviser for the UW team and an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering.

U of Washington

University of Washington team members compete during a regional competition this year.

The UW was chosen earlier this year to be the host institution. The Skagit bridge collapse might be discussed during a banquet event, but elements of the competition were set months ago and were not changed after the collapse, Berman said. Many of the student designs, however, will be steel truss structures similar to the Skagit bridge.

“These bridges might look a little different from the Skagit bridge, but most will also be truss bridges because they are very efficient and fast to build,” Berman said.

From 3-6 p.m. on Friday (May 31), each of the 49 student-built steel bridges will be on display on the UW’s Red Square. Students will be judged for the aesthetics of their bridges, which are roughly one-fifth the size of a standard bridge, or about 20 feet long and 4 feet wide.

Then on Saturday, the teams will race to assemble their bridges in the Alaska Airlines Arena at Hec Edmundson Pavilion. During the school year, the teams designed and built prefabricated pieces to fit the competition’s detailed specifications. In the finals, teams will be judged on how fast they can assemble their bridges, how much they weigh and how the structures deform under large loads.

The Saturday portion of the competition will run from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Teams will compete in rounds, and close to 50 local civil engineers and UW alumni will serve as judges. Most of the scheduled events are open to the public.

“The students go through the design and fabrication process themselves,” Berman said. “It’s a really good opportunity to take what they learn in the classroom and actually apply it here in the competition.”

Teams will have to work through a number of realistic constraints as they build the bridges, including a fake river they can’t step in and height-clearance restrictions for traffic. All of the teams have competed regionally before the finals, so the chance of a collapse is relatively small, Berman said.

The annual competition is sponsored by the American Institute of Steel Construction and the American Society of Civil Engineers.

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For more information, contact Berman at jwberman@uw.edu or 206-616-3530. UW student team members are available for interviews; please go through Berman.

Charles Roeder
Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Office: 206-543-6199
E-mail: croeder@uw.edu  
Web: http://www.ce.washington.edu/people/faculty/faculty.php?id=36
Expertise: Gusset plates and steel bracing frames; seismic behavior of steel and composite structures; fatigue of steel structures; temperature effects in structures; movements in bridges; bridge bearings and expansion joints

Jeffrey Berman
Assistant Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Office: 206-616-3530
E-mail: jwberman@uw.edu  
Web: http://www.ce.washington.edu/people/faculty/faculty.php?id=4
Expertise: Steel structures; seismic design and blast considerations for steel structures 

Mark Hallenbeck
Director of the Washington State Transportation Center
Office: 206-543-6261
E-mail: tracmark@uw.edu
Web: http://depts.washington.edu/trac/index.html
Expertise: Urban transportation planning and policy; electronic traffic monitoring; tolls; traffic simulations; intelligent transportation systems 

Anne Goodchild
Associate Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Office: 206-543-3747
E-mail: annegood@uw.edu
Web: http://www.ce.washington.edu/people/faculty/faculty.php?id=14
Expertise: Freight transportation and logistics

John Stanton (email is best)
Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
E-mail: stanton@uw.edu
Web: http://www.ce.washington.edu/people/faculty/faculty.php?id=42
Expertise: General bridge knowledge; earthquake engineering, including seismic isolation; precast and pre-stressed concrete structures; concrete bridges

Marc Eberhard 
Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Office: (206) 543-4815
E-mail: eberhard@uw.edu
Web: http://faculty.washington.edu/eberhard/
Expertise: Reinforced concrete behavior and design; Earthquake engineering; Bridge engineering; Rapid construction

Kate Simonen
Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture
Office: 206-685-7282
E-mail: ksimonen@uw.edu
Web: http://arch.be.washington.edu/school/people/ksimonen
Expertise: High-performance building systems and environmental life cycle assessment of buildings, explaining engineering concepts to non-technical audiences.  

Seaglider was developed in 1997 by researchers at the School of Oceanography and Applied Physics Laboratory. In UW research the device has set records for the distance traveled and time spent alone at sea, using buoyancy to glide up and down through the ocean while using minimal power.

Kongsberg will pick up where previous licensee iRobot left off, handling orders for customers external to the UW. The Norwegian-owned company plans to hire five or six new employees to build Seagliders at its Lynwood facility.  The UW Seaglider Fabrication Center, managed by Fritz Stahr, will continue to employ three full-time staff members and two students to build and service Seagliders for UW researchers, and to service units sold before there was a commercial provider for the technology.

The Boldt decision revisited
Richard R. Whitney, a UW emeritus professor of fisheries, will give a public talk about his role in the Boldt decision, a 1974 ruling that gave Washington tribes an equal share of the state’s salmon catch. The talk is at 4 p.m. Thursday, May 23, in Fishery Sciences 102, and is free and open to the public.

Richard Whitney

Whitney’s talk, “My Fisheries Management Experience with Judge George H. Boldt in his Case United States v. The State of Washington,” will provide a firsthand account of the science and politics of those years. Whitney served as technical adviser to Judge Boldt from March 1974, one month after he handed down the ruling, until 1979, when the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed and affirmed the decision.

Whitney was a UW fisheries professor from 1983 to 1993. He previously held positions at the University of Maryland, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the predecessor to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He is co-author of “Inland Fishes of Washington” and was elected in 2008 to the American Fisheries Society’s Fisheries Management Hall of Excellence.

U. of Minnesota president to speak
Eric Kaler, University of Minnesota president and former UW professor of chemical engineering, will speak on campus Tuesday, May 28, about challenges and opportunities for the nation’s top research universities.

Eric Kaler

Kaler taught at UW for seven years starting in 1982 before moving on to the University of Delaware and later to Stony Brook University in New York. He has been president at Minnesota since 2011.

He will speak to a general audience on “The Future of the American Research University” at 3 p.m. May 28 in the Lyceum of the Husky Union Building for the chemical engineering department’s first Bruce A. Finlayson Lecture. The lecture, the department’s largest event of the year, honors Finlayson, a chemical engineering professor emeritus who previously taught with Kaler. In a separate talk, Kaler will have a more technical presentation on surfactant microstructures at 10:30 a.m. May 28 in the Bill & Melinda Gates Commons (CSE 691) of the Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering.

Both talks are free and open to the public. A reception will follow the afternoon talk at 4 p.m. in the HUB Lyceum.

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The latest version, made public April 9, was developed by a national team with input from thousands of teachers, scientists and other stakeholders, including Philip Bell, director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Science and Math Education and the College of Education, and Andrew Shouse, associate director of the institute.

Bell and Shouse are now advising schools, districts and states about how to implement the standards. They will host two public events May 22 to talk about the vision and the new standards with teachers, scientists, school administrators, parents and others interested in science education.

Bell answered questions about the new K-12 science education standards for UW Today.

Q: Why are science learning standards important?

A: Scientific literacy helps us all make better life choices and decisions. The learning standards set the baseline of what we should all know about science. We were very careful to make sure the learning goals help all youth become scientifically literate and college-ready, so they can transition more seamlessly to college and have more choices about majors they can pursue.

Q: What do the standards look like?

A: There are three dimensions that help define the performances for each standard: disciplinary practices, core ideas of science and cross-cutting concepts that apply to multiple fields of science. The standards describe ways a student integrates these dimensions, but we didn’t lay out specific ways to meet these learning goals, so there’s still a lot of work to do in developing innovative curricula and instruction.

Q: What is different about the latest standards?

A: There are several major changes from the last incarnation of documents that have laid out standards for science education in the mid-1990s:

1. More emphasis on specific disciplinary practices used by scientists and engineers, such as developing and using a model, writing an argument from evidence, engaging in computational thinking and developing causal explanations about the natural world. The eight practices for science and engineering help focus what has previously been described as “inquiry” or “hands-on” instruction.
2. Greater focus on engineering and design. This is particularly important now that there’s an increased emphasis on science, technology, mathematics and engineering and thinking about how to integrate those subjects to solve complex problems. And a greater emphasis on engineering in K-12 is especially important because of the technology industries in the state of Washington and the lack of qualified people for jobs in those fields.
3. More challenging goals for preschoolers and kindergarten students. Research studies show that our youngest learners are capable of thinking that’s more complex than we previously believed, so the new standards have more ambitious learning goals for this age group.

Q: Won’t this just be more work for teachers?

A: I have known many elementary school teachers who feel like they haven’t had as much opportunity to teach science over the last decade because of the increased attention being given to reading, writing and mathematics. The new science standards have greater overlap with the existing standards for mathematics and English language arts so that teachers can teach science in ways that accomplish multiple goals. We hope this will make the lives of classroom teachers more manageable while allowing all students to meaningfully learn about science.

Q: Why should people who don’t want a science career have to meet these standards?

A: The science standards help people develop core knowledge and ways of thinking that can be used in a broad variety of everyday situations and other careers, including the ability to skeptically critique information, build an argument based on evidence and design a solution to fit an everyday need.

Q: How are the standards put into action?

A: Each state will decide whether they’ll try to adopt them and on what timeline. Washington state is working toward adoption, and my sense is there’s a lot of excitement around embracing these standards. The state’s Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction is coordinating the process of figuring out what the new science standards would mean for the state.

Q: Why are you excited about the new science learning goals?

A: It’s an exciting time for helping the public think more deeply about how science and technology relate to their lives and how they can leverage it for their own interests, such as solving problems their communities may be facing. This compels us in a lot of the work that we do.

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For more information, contact Bell at 206-221-3642 or pbell@uw.edu or Shouse at 206-897-1461 or awshouse@uw.edu.

Expensive, state-of-the-art medical devices and surgeries often are thwarted by the body’s natural response to attack something in the tissue that appears foreign. Now, University of Washington engineers have demonstrated in mice a way to prevent this sort of response. Their findings were published online this week in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

Lei Zhang, UW

These images show differences in collagen build-up in two tissue samples. Collagen is labeled in blue. The left image shows a thick collagen wall forming in the presence of a material that’s widely used for implantable devices. In contrast, collagen in the right image is more evenly dispersed in the tissue after the UW-engineered hydrogel has been implanted.

The UW researchers created a synthetic substance that fully resists the body’s natural attack response to foreign objects. Medical devices such as artificial heart valves, prostheses and breast implants could be coated with this polymer to prevent the body from rejecting an implanted object.

“It has applications for so many different medical implants, because we literally put hundreds of devices into the body,” said Buddy Ratner, co-author and a UW professor of bioengineering and of chemical engineering. “We couldn’t achieve this level of excellence in healing before we had this synthetic hydrogel.”

The body’s biological response to implanted devices – medical technologies that often cost millions to develop – has frustrated experts for years. After an implant, the body usually creates a protein wall around the medical device, cutting it off from the rest of the body. Scientists call this barrier a collagen capsule. Collagen is a protein that’s naturally found in our bodies, particularly in connective tissues such as tendons and ligaments.

If a device such as an artificial valve or an electrode sensor is blocked off from the rest of the body, it usually fails to work. Physicians and scientists have tried to minimize this, but they haven’t been able to eliminate it, Ratner said.

Ratner’s collaborator and co-author Shaoyi Jiang, a UW professor of chemical engineering, and his team implanted the polymer substance into the bodies of mice. The substance is known as a hydrogel, a flexible biomedical material swollen with water. It’s made from a polymer that has both a positive and negative charge, which serves to deflect all proteins from sticking to its surface. Scientists have found that proteins appearing on the surface of a medical implant are the first signs that a larger collagen wall will form.

After three months, Jiang and his team found that collagen was loosely and evenly distributed in the tissue around the polymer, suggesting that the mice bodies didn’t even detect the polymer’s presence.

For humans, the first three weeks after an implant are the most critical, because by then the body will show signs of isolating the implant by building a collagen wall. If this hasn’t happened in the first several weeks, it’s likely the body won’t default to an attack response toward the object.

“Scientists have tried many materials, and with no exception, this is the first non-porous, synthetic substance demonstrating that no collagen capsule forms, which could have positive implications for implantable materials, tissue scaffolds and medical devices,” Jiang said.

UW researchers and others have worked for nearly 20 years to find a way to help the body accept implants. In 1996, the National Science Foundation-funded UW Engineered Biomaterials (UWEB) research center opened at the UW, with Ratner serving as director. Since that time, researchers have been trying to make a material that is invisible to the body’s immune response and could eliminate the body’s negative reaction to medical implants.

Now, nearly two decades years later, engineers have found the “perfect” substance, Ratner said.

“This hydrogel is not just pretty good, it’s exceptional,” he said.

The UW researchers plan to test this in humans, likely by working with manufacturers to coat an implantable device with the polymer, then measure its ability to ward off protein build-up.

The research was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, UWEB and the UW Department of Chemical Engineering.

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For more information, contact Ratner at ratner@uw.edu or 206-685-1005 and Jiang at sjiang@uw.edu. Jiang is traveling this week and is available by email.

The University of Washington in collaboration with Washington State University is developing an “academic redshirt” program that will bring dozens of low-income Washington state high school graduates to the two universities to study engineering in a five-year bachelor’s program.

The first year will help incoming freshmen acclimate to university-level courses and workload and prepare to major in an engineering discipline. The students will receive extra advising and a detailed course plan to help lay a strong foundation in engineering. At the UW, they will earn a spot in one of the school’s 10 engineering departments starting their second year.

Dawn Wiggin

Math Academy students from 2012 are shown after a workshop. The summer program at UW could be a feeder program for the new “academic redshirt” initiative.

“Engineering education needs to adapt to the tortoises, not just the hares,” said Eve Riskin, UW associate dean of engineering and program lead for the UW. “We’re talking about investing an extra year in what will hopefully be a 30-year engineering career.”

The initiative, called the Washington State Academic RedShirt in Engineering Program –STARS, for short – is funded by a National Science Foundation grant awarded May 8. Eight other colleges and universities also will receive grants to help increase retention of undergraduates in engineering and computer sciences.

Under the five-year grant, the UW and WSU will enroll 32 freshmen from Washington high schools each year for a total of 320 students after five years. Both universities will hire a person to oversee the program, and they hope to keep it running indefinitely. The first 64 students will begin this fall.

“More and more, we’re seeing students who are bright, but they’ve gone to a high school where the college preparation isn’t good,” said Bob Olsen, a WSU associate dean of engineering and lead of the redshirt program at WSU.

The program specifically targets low-income, motivated high school students in Washington state who are eligible for federal Pell Grants – financial aid based on family income and the cost of attending a university – or go to high schools where a high percentage of the students are on free or reduced-price lunches. Such students usually have a lower retention rate at the university level and are more likely to struggle in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

“Pell Grant students receive engineering degrees at significantly lower rates than non-Pell Grant students,” Riskin said. “This is unfortunate, because low-income students could most benefit from a lucrative engineering career.”

The Mathematics Academy, a summertime month-long intensive at the UW for high school students, could be a feeder for this new program in the state.

The UW will receive $970,000 over five years from the National Science Foundation to offer this program to incoming freshmen, and WSU will receive $700,000. Students in the UW cohort will get at least $2,000 in additional assistance from the College of Engineering as well as funding from traditional scholarship sources. These students will live in an engineering residential community.

The National Science Foundation partnered with Intel Corp. and General Electric Co. to fund the nine institutions for a total of $10 million in a grant called Graduate 10K+. Other funded schools include Cornell University, Syracuse University and California State University Monterey Bay. The Washington program is modeled after the Engineering GoldShirt Program at University of Colorado Boulder, now headed into its fifth year.

The UW will hire a full-time staff member to work with students in the five-year program. Dawn Wiggin and Scott Winter, associate directors in engineering’s student academic services, are collaborators.

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For more information, contact Riskin at riskin@uw.edu or 206-685-2313. She is traveling on Wednesday, May 8, but will be reachable by email.

University of Washington engineers and NanoFacture, a Bellevue, Wash., company, have created a device that can extract human DNA from fluid samples in a simpler, more efficient and environmentally friendly way than conventional methods.

UW/NanoFacture/KNR

Hand-held device for extracting DNA.

The device will give hospitals and research labs a much easier way to separate DNA from human fluid samples, which will help with genome sequencing, disease diagnosis and forensic investigations.

“It’s very complex to extract DNA,” said Jae-Hyun Chung, a UW associate professor of mechanical engineering who led the research. “When you think of the current procedure, the equivalent is like collecting human hairs using a construction crane.”

This technology aims to clear those hurdles. The small, box-shaped kit now is ready for manufacturing, then eventual distribution to hospitals and clinics. NanoFacture, a UW spinout company, signed a contract with Korean manufacturer KNR Systems last month at a ceremony in Olympia, Wash.

The UW, led by Chung, spearheaded the research and invention of the technology, and still manages the intellectual property.

Separating DNA from bodily fluids is a cumbersome process that’s become a bottleneck as scientists make advances in genome sequencing, particularly for disease prevention and treatment. The market for DNA preparation alone is about $3 billion each year.

Conventional methods use a centrifuge to spin and separate DNA molecules or strain them from a fluid sample with a micro-filter, but these processes take 20 to 30 minutes to complete and can require excessive toxic chemicals.

UW engineers designed microscopic probes that dip into a fluid sample – saliva, sputum or blood – and apply an electric field within the liquid. That draws particles to concentrate around the surface of the tiny probe. Larger particles hit the tip and swerve away, but DNA-sized molecules stick to the probe and are trapped on the surface. It takes two or three minutes to separate and purify DNA using this technology.

“This simple process removes all the steps of conventional methods,” Chung said.

The hand-held device can clean four separate human fluid samples at once, but the technology can be scaled up to prepare 96 samples at a time, which is standard for large-scale handling.

UW/NanoFacture/KNR

A close-up view of the portable device.

The tiny probes, called microtips and nanotips, were designed and built at the UW in a micro-fabrication facility where a technician can make up to 1 million tips in a year, which is key in proving that large-scale production is feasible, Chung said.

Engineers in Chung’s lab also have designed a pencil-sized device using the same probe technology that could be sent home with patients or distributed to those serving in the military overseas. Patients could swab their cheeks, collect a saliva sample, then process their DNA on the spot to send back to hospitals and labs for analysis.

This could be useful as efforts ramp up toward sequencing each person’s genome for disease prevention and treatment, Chung said.

The market for this device isn’t developed yet, but Chung’s team will be ready when it is. Meanwhile, the larger device is ready for commercialization, and its creators have started working with distributors.

A UW Center for Commercialization grant of $50,000 seeded initial research in 2008, and since then researchers have received about $2 million in funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Sang-gyeun Ahn, a UW assistant professor of industrial design, crafted the prototype.

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For more information, contact Chung at jae71@uw.edu or 206-543-4355.

Goodchild/Wygonik

This diagram shows how a delivery truck can save on mileage when compared with personal vehicles driving to and from a store.

University of Washington engineers have found that using a grocery delivery service can cut carbon dioxide emissions by at least half when compared with individual household trips to the store. Trucks filled to capacity that deliver to customers clustered in neighborhoods produced the most savings in carbon dioxide emissions.

“A lot of times people think they have to inconvenience themselves to be greener, and that actually isn’t the case here,” said Anne Goodchild, UW associate professor of civil and environmental engineering. “From an environmental perspective, grocery delivery services overwhelmingly can provide emissions reductions.”

Consumers have increasingly more grocery delivery services to choose from. AmazonFresh operates in the Seattle area, while Safeway’s service is offered in many U.S. cities. FreshDirect delivers to residences and offices in the New York City area. Last month, Google unveiled a shopping delivery service experiment in the San Francisco Bay Area, and UW alumni recently launched the grocery service Geniusdelivery in Seattle.

Goodchild/Wygonik

A comparison of carbon dioxide produced per customer for personal vehicles and delivery vehicles. The bars on the left represent a system in which customers choose their delivery times. The right side shows a more efficient system whereby the delivery service sets delivery times.

As companies continue to weigh the costs and benefits of offering a delivery service, Goodchild and Erica Wygonik, a UW doctoral candidate in civil and environmental engineering, looked at whether using a grocery delivery service was better for the environment, with Seattle as a test case. In their analysis, they found delivery service trucks produced 20 to 75 percent less carbon dioxide than the corresponding personal vehicles driven to and from a grocery store.

They also discovered significant savings for companies – 80 to 90 percent less carbon dioxide emitted – if they delivered based on routes that clustered customers together, instead of catering to individual household requests for specific delivery times.

“What’s good for the bottom line of the delivery service provider is generally going to be good for the environment, because fuel is such a big contributor to operating costs and greenhouse gas emissions,” Wygonik said. “Saving fuel saves money, which also saves on emissions.”

The research was funded by the Oregon Department of Transportation and published in the Journal of the Transportation Research Forum.

The UW researchers compiled Seattle and King County data, assuming that every household was a possible delivery-service customer. Then, they randomly drew a portion of those households from that data to identify customers and assign them to their closest grocery store. This allowed them to reach across the entire city, without bias toward factors such as demographics and income level.

They used an Environmental Protection Agency modeling tool to calculate emissions at a much more detailed level than previous studies have done. Using factors such as vehicle type, speed and roadway type, they calculated the carbon dioxide produced for every mile for every vehicle.

Emissions reductions were seen across both the densest parts and more suburban areas of Seattle. This suggests that grocery delivery in rural areas could lower carbon dioxide production quite dramatically.

“We tend to think of grocery delivery services as benefiting urban areas, but they have really significant potential to offset the environmental impacts of personal shopping in rural areas as well,” Wygonik said.

Work commuters are offered a number of incentives to reduce traffic on the roads through discounted transit fares, vanpools and carpooling options. Given the emissions reductions possible through grocery delivery services, the research raises the question of whether government or industry leaders should consider incentives for consumers to order their groceries online and save on trips to the store, Goodchild said.

In the future, Goodchild and Wygonik plan to look at the influence of customers combining their grocery shopping with a work commute trip and the impact of the delivery service’s home-base location on emissions.

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For more information, contact Goodchild at annegood@uw.edu or 206-543-3747.

• Engineering Discovery Days
• Fri., April 26, 9 a.m. – 2 p.m.
• Sat., April 27, 9 a.m. – 2 p.m.

Which is better for electrical storage: A potato, a lemon, an AA battery or a car battery?

If you’re curious, the answer to this question and more will be scattered around the University of Washington campus on Friday and Saturday, April 26-27, during the 2013 Engineering Discovery Days.

College of Engineering Dean's Office

A student gets a hug from the next-generation personal robot at last year’s event.

Friday’s events geared toward school-aged children are at capacity, but families and members of the UW community can stop by on Saturday to see the hands-on exhibits, meet research teams and visit various engineering labs.

Saturday’s program also includes presentations for high school students about each engineering department, admissions and financial aid, and women in science and engineering.

The promenade along Rainier Vista and Drumheller Fountain will be filled with outdoor exhibits, and many of the engineering buildings will house the indoor displays. Look for old favorites such as the glowing pickle exhibit, homemade silly putty and flame movement demonstrations. You may also spot a water rocket, human-powered submarine and a life-sized robot.

Some new exhibits on this year’s program are wool dying, game demonstrations from the Center for Game Science and solar cell-powered toy car races. There will also be a scavenger hunt in which students visit various stations to find answers to baffling and quirky science questions.

Both days are free and open to everyone, but organizers ask that attendees register online. Close to 10,000 visitors are expected over the two days to this nearly century-old UW event.

Organizers recommend avoiding driving on campus during the event. Public transit and parking are available.

Photos from this year’s event will be posted on the Engineering Discovery Days Facebook page.

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David Notkin, professor of computer science and engineering at UW.

David Notkin, University of Washington professor of computer science and engineering, died April 22 at the age of 58. He will be remembered as a gifted mentor and world leader in software engineering.

Earlier this year, the David Notkin Endowed Graduate Fellowship in Computer Science & Engineering was established at the UW in his honor. His family has asked that memorials be sent to several organizations, including this fund that supports graduate students and their studies.

Notkin came to the UW in 1984 after receiving his doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University. He served as chair of the computer science and engineering department from 2001 to 2006, helping to open the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering. He most recently served as the College of Engineering’s associate dean of research and graduate studies.

Notkin’s research was in software engineering, with a particular focus in software evolution. He received a number of awards for his work, including a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award and the UW Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award.

In February, hundreds of Notkin’s friends honored him at Notkinfest, a tribute to his personal and professional contributions. The graduate student fellowship was announced at the event.

A memorial service will be held at Bikur Cholim Cemetery in Seattle at 3 p.m., April 23. All are welcome to attend. More information is on Notkin’s CaringBridge webpage.

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• U.S. Ocean Observatories Initiative
• UW-led regional cabled observatory
• UW Applied Physics Laboratory work building the observatory

The basement lab near the University of Washington campus is, literally, buzzing. High-voltage machines produce energy that will soon run through cables snaking along the seafloor. A dozen engineers hunch over electronics, making alterations or running checks. In one corner, a nitride-coated titanium shaft has been sitting in a bucket of saltwater for four months to test the coating for corrosion. A glass-walled cleanroom prevents contaminants from interfering with seals on housings designed to keep out seawater pressing in at 4,200 pounds per square inch.

This is crunch time for University of Washington preparations to build the world’s largest underwater observatory. The National Science Foundation in 2009 launched the $239 million effort, pending availability of funds and Congressional approval. John Delaney, UW professor of oceanography, leads the project to create a cabled observatory that will bring power and Internet to the ocean floor. This new concept will use remote-controlled instruments and high-bandwidth video to create an enduring, real-time presence in the deep ocean.

Researchers in the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory were tasked by Delaney to build and test the equipment that will make up the observatory. Much of that equipment will be installed this summer. This is the biggest project the 70-year-old marine engineering institute has ever undertaken, said project lead Gary Harkins, a principal engineer with the lab.

“This concept of a real-time observatory will change what we do as ocean engineers, what we will learn how to do, and what ocean scientists can do with these systems now and in the future,” Harkins said.

The cabled observatory, known as the Regional Scale Nodes project, is part of the national Ocean Observatories Initiative, an effort to integrate U.S. measurements of the ocean and seafloor. Other partners will build coastal and global observing networks, manage the data and conduct educational outreach. The Pacific Northwest observatory will span the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate off the Washington and Oregon coasts, the likely source of the next large regional earthquake.

Most of the regional network’s components will be built from aircraft-grade titanium because the material is strong and resists corrosion, which is crucial for electronics that will spend decades in saltwater.

“We are having a notable impact on the non-aircraft market for titanium,” remarked Applied Physics Laboratory engineer Geoff Cram.

Even so, most components must be designed to be switched out for possible repairs or upgrades during the observatory’s projected 25-year lifespan.

Over the past two summers, the backbone cable and high-voltage junction boxes were laid by telecommunications contractors. This summer’s deployments venture into uncharted territories. The team has booked 60 days of ship time on the UW’s Thomas G. Thompson research vessel for three cruises in July and August. Researchers will install lower-voltage cables that run from high-voltage nodes closer to the areas of scientific interest: deep-ocean volcanoes, seismically active plates, and an underwater ridge that seeps energy-rich methane gas.

While the engineering team readies the components, the science team is mapping out the science plan and finalizing the cruise details.

“The timeline isn’t forgiving on this one,” Cram noted.

In design work over the past four years, the engineers have considered how to protect the infrastructure from a possible failure by any of the components – some of which are experimental, and none of which has operated for this long at these pressures. They also have created a common time stamp for all the data, since scientists might want to make precise comparisons of measurements taken by different instruments at opposite ends of the network. They will do their best to protect all the instruments from ships, waves, marine animals and corrosion.

As the team finalizes the design, engineers have to ensure the sensors don’t interfere with each other. They also have to dissipate heat from the electronics, which give off about as much heat as a 60-watt light bulb but, in a tightly sealed housing, could still fry instruments.

“This is a highly integrated system operating in a very challenging environment,” said Applied Physics Laboratory engineer Dana Manalang, who oversees the sensor group. “From an engineering perspective, that makes this a challenging project.”

The team this summer will install about 40 sensors, of 13 different types, now being assembled and tested at the UW. The instruments include:

• A high-definition video and still camera that will provide live footage, starting this summer, to researchers and the public.
• Seismometers to provide early warning of earthquakes or volcanic eruptions.
• Commercial oceanographic sensors, including three precision pressure sensors built by Sea-Bird Electronics of Bellevue, Wash.
• Water samplers built by UW oceanographer David Butterfield. Some samples will be stored until researchers collect them; others will be analyzed in place to detect the seawater’s chemical and genetic contents.
• A deep-water mass spectrometer, developed by Harvard University oceanographer Peter Girguis, that will be installed near the volcano’s caldera
• Chemical sensors, developed by UW oceanographer Marv Lilley, that will go inside the hydrothermal vents. These will be inserted slowly so fragile ceramic parts survive the transition from near-freezing water to 570 ºF (300 ºC) temperatures inside the vent.
• Seafloor pressure and tilt sensors, developed by Bill Chadwick at Oregon State University, that detect pressure buildup below the ocean floor.

UW engineers have designed the system to digitize all this data and send it back to land via the cables in a few thousandths of a second.

Miles of underwater cable will arrive during coming weeks to a UW storage facility on Lake Washington. The engineering team will expand there as it builds components and outgrows its campus lab space.

The next few months will be hectic, said Harkins. Some of the UW researchers will join the telecommunications contractor to run a month-long final check of the backbone cable system from the Newport, Ore. shore station. UW engineers will build and test 10 secondary nodes to drive the instruments that will be installed this summer. Members of the engineering team will work with contractors and scientists to run pressure tests and perform final checks on their instruments.

Yet another team is developing a profiling system that records data in the upper 650 feet (200 m) of the ocean. That system is perhaps the most technically challenging aspect of the whole observatory, researchers said, and won’t be installed until summer of 2014, but initial testing will begin this summer at the UW’s Friday Harbor Laboratories.

Forty-six UW faculty and staff members are putting in long hours on the cabled observatory, including 15 on the science team and 31 on the engineering side.

Whoever you talk to, there’s one common refrain: “This is going to be a very busy summer.”

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For more information, contact Nancy Penrose, UW’s OOI Communications Coordinator, at 206-221-5781 or penrose@ocean.washington.edu.

Researchers at the University of Washington and Boston University led by Jiangyu Li and Yanhang Zhang have discovered that a certain type of protein found in organs that repeatedly stretch and retract – such as the heart and lungs – is the source for a favorable electrical property that could help build and support healthy connective tissues. But when exposed to sugar, some of the proteins no longer could perform their function, according to findings published online April 15 in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Jiangyu Li, UW

The blue spots in this image show where glucose has halted ferroelectric switching in an elastin protein.

The property, called ferroelectricity, is a response to an electric field in which a molecule switches from having a positive to a negative charge. Only recently discovered in animal tissues, researchers have traced this property to elastin and found that when exposed to sugar, the elastin protein sometimes slows or stops its ferroelectric switching. This could lead to the hardening of those tissues and, ultimately, degrade an artery or ligament.

“This finding is important because it tells us the origin of the ferroelectric switching phenomenon and also suggests it’s not an isolated occurrence in one type of tissue as we thought,” said co-corresponding author Li, a UW associate professor of mechanical engineering. “This could be associated with aging and diabetes, which I think gives more importance to the phenomenon.”

About a year ago, Li and collaborators discovered ferroelectric switching in mammalian tissues, a surprising first for the field. Ferroelectricity is common in synthetic materials and is used for displays, memory storage and sensors. Li’s research team found that the wall of a pig’s aorta, the largest blood vessel carrying blood to the heart, exhibits ferroelectric switching properties.

Li said that discovery left researchers with a lot of questions, including whether this property is found in other soft tissues and the health implications of its presence. Observing differences in ferroelectric behavior at the protein level has helped to answer some of those questions.

The research team separated the aortic tissue into two types of proteins, collagen and elastin. Fibrous collagen is widespread in biological tissues, while elastin has only been found in animals with a backbone. Elastin, as its name suggests, is springy and helps the heart and lungs stretch and contract. Ferroelectric switching gives elastin the flexibility needed to perform repeated pulses as with an artery.

When researchers treated the elastin with sugar, they found that glucose suppressed ferroelectric switching by up to 50 percent. This interaction between sugar and protein mimics a natural process called glycation, in which sugar molecules attach to proteins, degrading their structure and function. Glycation happens naturally when we age and is associated with a number of diseases such as diabetes, high blood pressure and arteriosclerosis, a thickening and hardening of the arteries.

The research team has focused solely on the aortic tissues, but this finding likely applies to other biological tissues that have the protein elastin, such as the lungs and skin.

“I would expect the same phenomena will be observed in those tissues and organs as well,” Li said. “It will be more common than what we originally thought.”

Researchers next will drill down even more to look at the molecular mechanics of ferroelectric switching and further try to connect the process with disease onset.

Co-authors are Yuanming Liu, Nataly Q. Chen and Feiyue Ma at the UW, and Zhang, Yunjie Wang and Ming-Jay Chow at Boston University.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the UW and a NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship.

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For more information, contact Li at 206-543-6226 or jjli@uw.edu.

A new procedure that thickens and thins fluid at the micron level could save consumers and manufacturers money, particularly for soap products that depend on certain molecules to effectively deal with grease and dirt. Researchers at the University of Washington published their findings online April 9 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Read the back of most shampoos and dishwashing detergents and you’ll find the word “surfactant” in the list of active ingredients. Surfactant molecules are tiny, yet they are the reason dish soap can attack an oily spot and shampoo can rid the scalp of grease.

Surfactant molecules are made up of two main parts, a head and a tail. Heads are attracted to water, while the tails are oil-soluble. This unique structure helps them break down and penetrate grease and oil while immersed in water. It also makes the soaps, shampoos and detergents thicker, or more viscous.

Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory and UW

A web-like, gel structure is formed after fluid passes through the flow device. The unit of measurement is 1 micron.

Soap manufacturers add organic and synthetic surfactants – and often a slew of other ingredients – to their products to achieve a desired thickness and to help remove grease and dirt. These extra ingredients add volume to the soap products, which then cost more to manufacture, package and ship, ultimately shifting more costs to consumers, said Amy Shen, a UW associate professor of mechanical engineering and lead author of the paper.

The research team’s design could create the same thickening results without having to add extra ingredients.

“Our flow procedure can potentially help companies and consumers save a lot of money,” Shen said. “This way, companies don’t have to add too many surfactants to their products.”

Researchers found that when they manipulated the flow of a liquid through microscopic channels, the resulting substance became thicker. Now, scientists add a lot of salt, or alter the temperature and level of acidity to induce this change, but these methods can be expensive and more toxic, Shen said.

The team built a palm-sized tool called a microfluidics device that lets researchers pump water mixed with a little detergent and salt through a series of vertical posts. The distance between posts is about one-tenth the size of a single human hair. That micron-sized gap squeezes the liquid as it flows, causing it to quickly deform. The end result is a gel-like substance that’s more viscous and elastic.

University of Washington

A diagram showing how the microfluidics device works. Water mixed with salt and soap is injected into a spout (left back). The fluid travels through a series of posts (see enlarged segment) that cause the fluid to thicken.

When researchers looked at high-resolution images of the end product, they saw a series of wormlike rods attaching and intermingling with each other, creating an entangled web. This structure stayed intact after the procedure was complete, which suggests this process can create a permanent, scaffold-like network that could prove useful for biological applications, Shen said. She is collaborating with other UW researchers to try to create stable structures that could house enzymes and other biomarkers for detecting certain diseases.

Shen and her team also discovered that when they pumped a thicker, more elastic fluid through the device, the opposite effect happened – the gel became thinner and more porous. This could be useful in biomedical applications, Shen said, though it hasn’t yet been tested. In theory, a semi-solid gel could be injected into veins, then transform into a thinner liquid, delivering drugs throughout the body.

Researchers hope one eventual outcome will be a scaled-up industrial design of their microfluidics device that could help manufacturers churn out soap products that aren’t filled with an excess of added materials. Shen has presented her initial findings at Procter & Gamble Co.

“What we can provide are all of the important parameters for operating conditions so companies can have an industrial design to achieve their goals,” Shen said.

Research collaborators are Joshua Cardiel and Ya Zhao, UW doctoral students in mechanical engineering; Alice Dohnalkova, senior research scientist at Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash.; and Neville Dubash and Perry Cheung, former post-doctoral researchers in mechanical engineering.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

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For more information, contact Shen at amyshen@uw.edu or 206-708-3411.

University of Washington researchers and scientists at a Redmond-based space-propulsion company are building components of a fusion-powered rocket aimed to clear many of the hurdles that block deep space travel, including long times in transit, exorbitant costs and health risks.

University of Washington, MSNW

A concept image of a spacecraft powered by a fusion-driven rocket. In this image, the crew would be in the forward-most chamber. Solar panels on the sides would collect energy to initiate the process that creates fusion.

“Using existing rocket fuels, it’s nearly impossible for humans to explore much beyond Earth,” said lead researcher John Slough, a UW research associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics. “We are hoping to give us a much more powerful source of energy in space that could eventually lead to making interplanetary travel commonplace.”

The project is funded through NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts Program. Last month at a symposium, Slough and his team from MSNW, of which he is president, presented their mission analysis for a trip to Mars, along with detailed computer modeling and initial experimental results. Theirs was one of a handful of projects awarded a second round of funding last fall after already receiving phase-one money in a field of 15 projects chosen from more than 700 proposals.

NASA estimates a round-trip human expedition to Mars would take more than four years using current technology. The sheer amount of chemical rocket fuel needed in space would be extremely expensive – the launch costs alone would be more than $12 billion.

Slough and his team have published papers calculating the potential for 30- and 90-day expeditions to Mars using a rocket powered by fusion, which would make the trip more practical and less costly.

But is this really feasible?

Slough and his colleagues at MSNW think so. They have demonstrated successful lab tests of all portions of the process. Now, the key will be combining each isolated test into a final experiment that produces fusion using this technology, Slough said.

The research team has developed a type of plasma that is encased in its own magnetic field. Nuclear fusion occurs when this plasma is compressed to high pressure with a magnetic field. The team has successfully tested this technique in the lab.

Only a small amount of fusion is needed to power a rocket – a small grain of sand of this material has the same energy content as 1 gallon of rocket fuel.

To power a rocket, the team has devised a system in which a powerful magnetic field causes large metal rings to implode around this plasma, compressing it to a fusion state. The converging rings merge to form a shell that ignites the fusion, but only for a few microseconds. Even though the compression time is very short, enough energy is released from the fusion reactions to quickly heat and ionize the shell. This super-heated, ionized metal is ejected out of the rocket nozzle at a high velocity. This process is repeated every minute or so, propelling the spacecraft.

In the video below, the plasma (purple) is injected while lithium metal rings (green) rapidly collapse around the plasma, creating fusion.

The UW-MSNW team has successfully demonstrated the metal-crushing process in the UW Plasma Dynamics Laboratory in Redmond. The video below, taken from a 3-D computer simulation, shows three lithium rings as they collapse around plasma material.

The team had a sample of the collapsed, fist-sized aluminum ring resulting from one of those tests on hand for people to see and touch at the recent NASA symposium.

“I think everybody was pleased to see confirmation of the principal mechanism that we’re using to compress the plasma,” Slough said. “We hope we can interest the world with the fact that fusion isn’t always 40 years away and doesn’t always cost $2 billion.”

Now, the team is working to bring it all together by using the technology to compress the plasma and create nuclear fusion. Slough hopes to have everything ready for a first test at the end of the summer.

The Plasma Dynamics Lab – where Slough and colleagues, including UW graduate students, build and conduct experiments – is filled wall-to-wall with blue capacitors that hold energy, each functioning like a high-voltage battery. The capacitors are hooked up to a giant magnet that houses the chamber where the fusion reaction will take place. With the flip of a switch, the capacitors are simultaneously triggered to deliver 1 million amps of electricity for a fraction of a second to the magnet, which quickly compresses the metal ring.

University of Washington, MSNW

The fusion driven rocket test chamber at the UW Plasma Dynamics Lab in Redmond. The green vacuum chamber is surrounded by two large, high-strength aluminum magnets. These magnets are powered by energy-storage capacitors through the many cables connected to them.

The mechanical process and equipment used are reasonably straightforward, which Slough said supports their design working in space.

“Anything you put in space has to function in a fairly simple manner,” he said. “You can extrapolate this technology to something usable in space.”

In actual space travel, scientists would use lithium metal as the crushing rings to power the rocket. Lithium is very reactive, and for lab-testing purposes, aluminum works just as well, Slough said.

Nuclear fusion may draw concern because of its application in nuclear bombs, but its use in this scenario is very different, Slough said. The fusion energy for powering a rocket would be reduced by a factor of 1 billion from a hydrogen bomb, too little to create a significant explosion. Also, Slough’s concept uses a strong magnetic field to contain the fusion fuel and guide it safely away from the spacecraft and any passengers within.

Research partners are Anthony Pancotti, David Kirtley and George Votroubek, all of MSNW; Christopher Pihl, research engineer in aeronautics and astronautics at UW; and Michael Pfaff, a UW doctoral student in aeronautics and astronautics.

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For more information, contact Slough at 425-319-5024 or sloughj@uw.edu.

More videos are available on the fusion-driven rocket’s YouTube channel.

Barcelona Superconducting Center

Alya Red, an electromechanical computational model of the heart developed at the Barcelona Superconducting Center, shows cardiac muscle fibers. UW researchers are seeking ways to strengthen weakened heart muscles through gene therapy.

The potential of gene therapy to boost heart muscle function was explored in a recent University of Washington animal study. The findings suggest that it might be possible to use this approach to treat patients whose hearts have been weakened by heart attacks and other heart conditions.

Michael Regnier, UW professor and vice chair of bioengineering, Charles Murry, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Biology and co-director of the Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine, and Sarah Nowakowski, a UW graduate student in bioengineering, led the study. The findings appeared online March 25 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Normally, muscle contraction is powered by a molecule, the nucleotide called adenosine-5′-triphosphate, or ATP. Other naturally occurring nucleotides can also power muscle contraction, but in most cases they have proven to be less effective than ATP.

Dr. Charles Murry in his heart muscle cell research lab.

In an earlier study of isolated muscle, however, Regnier, Murry and their colleagues had found that one naturally occurring molecule, called 2 deoxy-ATP, or dATP, was actually more effective than ATP in powering muscle contraction.  dATP  increased both the speed and force of the contraction, at least over the short-term.

In the new study, the researchers wanted to see whether this effect could be sustained. To do this, they used genetic engineering to create a strain of mice whose cells produced higher-than-normal levels of an enzyme called ribonucleotide reductase. This enzyme converts the precursor of  ATP, adenosine-5’-diphosphate or ADP, to dADP, which, in turn, is rapidly converted to dATP.

Dr. Michael Regnier holds a model of a heart in one hand, and a hand weight in another.

“This fundamental discovery, that dATP can act as a ‘super-fuel’ for the contractile machinery of the heart, or myofilaments, opens up the possibility to treat a variety of heart failure conditions,” Regnier, an established investigator of the American Heart Association, said. “An exciting aspect of this study and our ongoing work is that a relatively small increase in dATP in the heart cells has a big effect on heart performance.”

The researchers found that increased production of the enzyme ribonucleotide reductase increased the concentration of dATP within heart cells approximately tenfold. Even though this level was still less than one to two percent of the cell’s total pool of ATP, the increase led to a sustained improvement in heart muscle function. The genetically engineered hearts contracted more quickly and with greater force.

“It looks as though we may have stumbled on an important pathway that nature uses to regulate heart contractility,” Murry added. “The same pathway that heart cells use to make the building blocks for DNA during embryonic growth makes dATP to supercharge contraction when the adult heart is mechanically stressed.”

Importantly, the elevated dATP effect was achieved without imposing additional metabolic demands on the cells. That observation suggests that the modification would not harm the cell’s functioning over the long-term.

The study’s findings, the authors write, suggest that treatments that elevate dATP levels in heart cells may prove to be an effective treatment for heart failure.

Read the PNAS scientific article, “Transgenic overexpression of ribonucleotide reductase improves cardiac performance.”

The work was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program.

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BEAT BioTherapeutics, a private company spinout from the UW, has entered into an exclusive global license agreement covering  this technology and is moving forward with clinical development. For more information, visit www.BeatBioTherapeutics.com

A University of Washington team has developed a new method for color-coding cells that allows them to illuminate 100 biomarkers, a ten-time increase from the current research standard, to help analyze individual cells from cultures or tissue biopsies. The work is published this week (March 19) in Nature Communications.

Xiaohu Gao

A cell specimen used for two rounds of testing. In the top panel, two biomarkers are stained green and red, and in the bottom, after the sample has been regenerated, the same biomarkers are stained red and green. This shows that the same tissue can be used for multiple rounds of testing without degrading the tissue sample.

“Discovering this process is an unprecedented breakthrough for the field,” said corresponding author Xiaohu Gao, a UW associate professor of bioengineering. “This technology opens up exciting opportunities for single-cell analysis and clinical diagnosis.”

The research builds on current methods that use a smaller array of colors to point out a cell’s biomarkers – characteristics that indicate a special, and potentially abnormal or diseased, cell. Ideally, scientists would be able to test for a large number of biomarkers, then rely on the patterns that emerge from those tests to understand a cell’s properties.

The UW research team has created a cycle process that allows scientists to test for up to 100 biomarkers in a single cell. Before, researchers could only test for 10 at a time.

The analysis uses quantum dots, which are fluorescent balls of semiconductor material. Quantum dots are the smaller version of the material found in many electronics, including smartphones and radios. These quantum dots are between 2 and 6 nanometers in diameter, and they vary on the color they emit depending on their size.

Cyclical testing hasn’t been done before, though many quantum dot papers have tried to expand the number of biomarkers tested for in a single cell. This method essentially reuses the same tissue sample, testing for biomarkers in groups of 10 in each round.

Scott Manthey

Xiaohu Gao, left, and Pavel Zrazhevskiy in a UW bioengineering lab.

“Proteins are the building blocks for cell function and cell behavior, but their makeup in a cell is highly complex,” Gao said. “You need to look at a number of indicators (biomarkers) to know what’s going on.”

The new process works like this: Gao and his team purchase antibodies that are known to bind with the specific biomarkers they want to test for in a cell. They pair quantum dots with the antibodies in a fluid solution, injecting it onto a tissue sample. Then, they use a microscope to look for the presence of fluorescent colors in the cell. If they see particular quantum dot colors in the tissue sample, they know the corresponding biomarker is present in the cell.

After completing one cycle, Gao and co-author Pavel Zrazhevskiy, a UW postdoctoral associate in bioengineering, inject a low-pH fluid into the cell tissue that neutralizes the color fluorescence, essentially wiping the sample clean for the next round. Remarkably, the tissue sample doesn’t degrade at all even after 10 such cycles, Gao said.

Xiaohu Gao

This figure shows the cyclical process developed in the study. In step 1, the colored balls representing quantum dots of different colors are used to label biomarkers in cell and tissue samples. Step 2 shows how each biomarker can be isolated and separated into distinct images for analysis. Step 3 illustrates how the tissue sample is flushed clean between rounds to begin biomarker testing again.

For cancer research and treatment, in particular, it’s important to be able to look at a single cell at high resolution to examine its details. For example, if 99 percent of cancer cells in a person’s body respond to a treatment drug, but 1 percent doesn’t, it’s important to analyze and understand the molecular makeup of that 1 percent that responds differently.

“When you treat with promising drugs, there are still a few cells that usually don’t respond to treatment,” said Gao. “They look the same, but you don’t have a tool to look at their protein building blocks. This will really help us develop new drugs and treatment approaches.”

The process is relatively low-cost and simple, and Gao hopes the procedure can be automated. He envisions a chamber to hold the tissue sample, and wire-thin pumps to inject and vacuum out fluid between cycles. A microscope underneath the chamber would take photos during each stage. All of the images would be quantified on a computer, where scientists and physicians could look at the intensity and prevalence of colors.

Gao hopes to collaborate with companies and other researchers to move toward an automated process and clinical use.

“The technology is ready,” Gao said. “Now that it’s developed, we’re ready for clinical impacts, particularly in the fields of systems biology, oncology and pathology.”

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Defense, the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation and the UW’s Department of Bioengineering.

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For more information, contact Gao at 206-543-6562 or xgao@uw.edu. He will be unavailable for interviews by phone or email on Wednesday, March 20.

“We are very excited that Mike Bragg will be joining us as our next dean of engineering,” said Young. “He is a renowned expert in aerospace engineering and a proven leader who gets results. Educating engineers is crucial to our economic future in the state, and Mike is a visionary educator who understands this issue.  He is coming from one great engineering program to another, and we are certain he will build on the excellent work being done in the College.”

An aeronautical engineer by training, Bragg has held numerous leadership positions at the University of Illinois, including head of the aerospace engineering department, associate dean for research and administrative affairs, executive associate dean for academic affairs, and interim dean in the College of Engineering.

Bragg taught aerodynamics and flight mechanics at the undergraduate and graduate level and received department, college and university-level recognition for his teaching and advising.  More than 50 graduate students and five post- doctoral researchers received their advanced degrees under Bragg’s guidance.

Bragg’s primary area of research is aircraft icing where he is an international expert on the effect of ice accretion on aircraft aerodynamics and flight safety. He directed over $15 million in externally funded research and published more than 200 research papers.  He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and has received several national awards for his work.

As associate dean for research and administration, Bragg oversaw the administration of all personnel and financial matters in the college, all physical facilities, and administration of the research program and the graduate programs. As executive associate dean for academic affairs he was responsible for all faculty and academic personnel and the strategic management of the over $300 million budget of the college.

He has been instrumental in curriculum innovation in the college, including supervision of the Technology Entrepreneurial Center and is a co-founder of two faculty startup companies at Illinois.

Bragg has grown education programs and championed diversity.  As a department head, he increased the department’s graduate program by 30 percent and more than doubled the percentage of women in graduate school and on the department’s faculty. At the college level he has been instrumental in developing innovative programs to recruit a more diverse engineering faculty.

Bragg received a bachelor’s degree in 1976, a master’s degree in 1977 (both in aeronautical and astronautical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), and a doctorate from The Ohio State University in 1981. He was a faculty member at Ohio State from 1981 to 1989.

His annual salary will be $340,000.

The College of Engineering is developing a new generation of innovators. A national leader in educating engineers, the college has ten academic departments, 5800 students and 40,000 plus engineering alumni.  A leader in research and commercialization, each year the College turns out new products, companies and top-flight graduates, all contributing to the strength of our economy and the health and vitality of our community.

A team led by the University of Washington in Seattle and the Southeast University in China discovered a molecule that shows promise as an organic alternative to today’s silicon-based semiconductors. The findings, published this week in the journal Science, display properties that make it well suited to a wide range of applications in memory, sensing and low-cost energy storage.

Jiangyu Li, UW

Electrical response of the newly developed organic crystal.

“This molecule is quite remarkable, with some of the key properties that are comparable with the most popular inorganic crystals,” said co-corresponding author Jiangyu Li, a UW associate professor of mechanical engineering.

The carbon-based material could offer even cheaper ways to store digital information; provide a flexible, nontoxic material for medical sensors that would be implanted in the body; and create a less costly, lighter material to harvest energy from natural vibrations.

The new molecule is a ferroelectric, meaning it is positively charged on one side and negatively charged on the other, where the direction can be flipped by applying an electrical field. Synthetic ferroelectrics are now used in some displays, sensors and memory chips.

In the study the authors pitted their molecule against barium titanate, a long-known ferroelectric material that is a standard for performance. Barium titanate is a ceramic crystal and contains titanium; it has largely been replaced in industrial applications by better-performing but lead-containing alternatives.

The new molecule holds its own against the standard-bearer. It has a natural polarization, a measure of how strongly the molecules align to store information, of 23, compared to 26 for barium titanate. To Li’s knowledge this is the best organic ferroelectric discovered to date.

A recent study in Nature announced an organic ferroelectric that works at room temperature. By contrast, this molecule retains its properties up to 153 degrees Celsius (307 degrees F), even higher than for barium titanate.

The new molecule also offers a full bag of electric tricks. Its dielectric constant – a measure of how well it can store energy – is more than 10 times higher than for other organic ferroelectrics. And it’s also a good piezoelectric, meaning it’s efficient at converting movement into electricity, which is useful in sensors.

The organic crystal is made from bromine, a natural element isolated from sea salt, mixed with carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen (its full name is diisopropylammonium bromide). Researchers dissolved the elements in water and evaporated the liquid to grow the crystal. Because the molecule contains carbon, it is organic, and pivoting chemical bonds allow it to flex.

The molecule would not replace current inorganic materials, Li said, but it could be used in applications where cost, ease of manufacturing, weight, flexibility and toxicity are important.

Li is working on a number of projects relating to ferroelectricity. Last year he and his graduate student found the first evidence for ferroelectricity in soft animal tissue. He was co-author on a 2011 paper in Science that documents nanometer-scale switching in ferroelectric films, showing how such molecules could be used to store digital information.

“Ferroelectrics are pretty remarkable materials,” Li said. “It allows you to manipulate mechanical energy, electrical energy, optics and electromagnetics, all in a single package.”

He is working to further characterize this new molecule and explore its combined electric and mechanical properties. He also plans to continue the search for more organic ferroelectrics.

The joint first authors of the new paper are Yuanming Liu, a UW postdoctoral researcher in mechanical engineering, and Da-Wei Fu, a doctoral student working with co-corresponding author Ren-Gen Xiong at Southeast University. Other co-authors are Hong-Ling Cai, Qiong Ye, Wen Zhang and Yi Zhang at Southeast University; Xue-Yuan Chen at the Chinese Academy of Sciences; and Gianluca Giovannetti and Massimo Capone at the Italian National Simulation Centre.

The research was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, China’s National Natural Science Foundation and the European Research Council.

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For more information, contact Li at 206-543-6226 or jjli@uw.edu.

Co-directors Vikram Jandhyala and Moe Khaleel

“This collaboration will open up new avenues for research,” said co-director Vikram Jandhyala, UW professor and chair of electrical engineering, who leads the Applied Computational Engineering Lab. “We are creating an interdisciplinary place to work with colleagues at PNNL on data-intensive science and engineering.”

Co-director with Jandhyala is Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Moe Khaleel, leader of the Computational Science and Mathematics research division. The lab will fund the time for Jandhyala and Khaleel to lead the institute.

“The expanded partnership between UW and PNNL will create tremendous new opportunities for both organizations,” said Ed Lazowska, professor of computer science and engineering. “Big data is transforming the process of discovery in all fields. UW and PNNL have significant and complementary strengths.”

Lazowska leads the eScience Institute, created in 2008 to support data-driven discovery at the UW. Many of the roughly dozen UW faculty who will be involved with the new group at its launch are eScience Institute affiliates.

The new institute will initially draw from the UW’s departments of Computer Science & Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Applied Math, but all UW faculty whose work advances data-driven discovery and large-scale computing will be invited to affiliate.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory already has two scientists based at the UW who are conducting Department of Energy research related to big data and nuclear physics. About eight more PNNL researchers are expected to join them in UW’s Sieg Hall by the end of 2013.

Other researchers will join the center but stay in their existing labs.

All institute members will have access to computational resources at both institutions including the UW’s Hyak supercomputer, developed by the eScience Institute and UW-IT, and the Olympus supercomputer as well as other elements of PNNL Institutional Computing. Researchers will also make extensive use of cloud resources.

Jandhyala also hopes to develop relationships with the region’s business and startup communities.

“In the short term, we aim to promote collaboration among university and government scientists who are working with big data,” he said. “In the longer term, we hope this becomes a Northwest hub for advanced computing research.”

Initial projects will include algorithms and software for large graph analyses, smart grid simulation and encryption for cloud computing. The institute will draw on UW expertise in computer science, engineering, applied math and natural sciences, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory expertise in designing high-performance computers and running large-scale environmental simulations.

The two institutions already collaborate on the Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project, which is based at the national lab and includes installations in UW buildings and residence halls.

“Together we’ll be able to do amazing things,” Lazowska said.

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Adapted from the PNNL press release posted at http://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=964.

“I’m honored to have been chosen for this position,” Ramey said. “I’m excited to have the opportunity to keep the college on course during the transition to a new dean.”

Ramey joined the UW in 1983 as a faculty member in what was then known as the Department of Technical of Communication, now Human Centered Design and Engineering. She led the department from 1997 until 2008.

“Dean Ramey has had a distinguished career and is a respected leader in the college,” said UW Provost Ana Mari Cauce. “I am grateful for her willingness to serve as dean during this transitional period and look forward to working with her until a new dean is in place. Having solid leadership during this time is critical to the continuing success of the college.”

The appointment is subject to approval by the Board of Regents.

Judith Ramey

Ramey earned a doctorate at the University of Texas in Austin and went on to become an expert in usability research and testing. In 1990 she founded the nation’s first academic usability testing lab, the UW’s Laboratory for Usability Testing and Evaluation, and served as its director for more than two decades. She is author of numerous research articles including influential papers on the emergence of usability testing, the use of participants’ thinking-aloud in usability testing and, most recently, on the design of better self-service systems.

During her tenure as chair the UW became internationally recognized in the emerging field of technical communication. Ramey led development of the department’s doctoral degree program and its professional master’s program, one of the first to be offered in the College of Engineering. She also helped design a new, interdisciplinary professional master’s in Human-Computer Interaction and Design set to launch in the fall. She is a fellow of the Society for Technical Communication and a member of the Association of Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction, and she has held adjunct appointments in the Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering and the Information School.

A search committee is at work and a new dean is expected to begin in 2013.

Outgoing dean Matt O’Donnell, who arrived in 2006 from the University of Michigan, stepped down at the end of last year. He led the development of the Molecular Engineering & Sciences Institute and construction of the Molecular Engineering & Sciences Building that opened in 2012. During his tenure the college saw an all-time high in research grants and expanded its student body and faculty. About a third of the college’s current faculty members were hired in the past six years, and last year the college announced 11 high-profile faculty recruits in such areas as solar cells, synthetic biology and big data.

O’Donnell will spend this year traveling with his wife Cathy to visit research collaborators in Belgium, Taiwan and Pittsburgh. He is principal investigator for two grants from the National Institutes of Health and will return to his research in medical imaging in the Department of Bioengineering.

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Dr. Mark Snowden, Harborview chief of psychiatry, discusses the implementation of an innovative depression treatment, PEARLS (Program to Encourage Active, Rewarding Lives), with a group of administrators.

UW Training Xchange is on a mission to put more new therapies, tools, and process improvements into the hands of healthcare practitioners and other professionals for the benefit of millions of people. Life-saving advances continually emerge from faculty labs and clinics at the University of Washington, which is one of the nation’s largest recipients of federal research funding for biomedical science.

Most UW researchers publish journal articles about their new findings and proven methods, but many of their readers don’t know how to adopt them. Faculty and graduate students do not have time to set up and promote training programs. To address the innovation adoption gap, the UW is expanding its Training Xchange initiative to enable researchers to transmit their innovations to healthcare workers and other professionals locally and far beyond the Northwest.

Dr. Paul Ciechanowski, director of Training XChange, with Allison Waddell, program manager, in front of the Center for Commercialization sign. Photo by Brian Donohue.

“The UW is one of the nation’s leading centers for health, medical, and bioengineering research, and we’d like to see as many research advances out in the world making lives better for people, rather than sitting on a bookshelf. Training others in their use is a way to do this,” said Dr. Paul Ciechanowski, UW associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and director of the Training Xchange. Ciechanowski co-developed the initiative with Dr. Richard Veith, chair of the UW Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.

Their team created a training infrastructure that helps university researchers translate evidence-based information and methods from their labs and clinics into formats designed for wider dissemination.

Offerings include a range of in-person and online training products through which trainees gain tangible skills and practical knowledge they can put to work immediately.

“Combining our faculty’s expertise with the experience and platform of Training Xchange is a great way to bridge the gap between research and practice,” Veith said.

One major initiative called TEAMcare brings a proven UW faculty intervention to medical clinics. It integrates mental health and medical services for people diagnosed with both depression and diabetes or coronary heart disease. TEAMcare results in better treatment that can save lives. A group led by Dr. Wayne Katon, UW professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, developed TEAMcare with assistance from Training Xchange. Success in promotion and early adoption of  has earned the UW a $1 million award from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to expand the program as part of an $18 million national initiative to foster the widespread implementation of TEAMcare.

Allison Waddell and Zandra Grissom from Training XChange present a poster about the program at a Center for Commercialization’s Innovator Award Ceremony.

“Health professionals are eager to have concrete ways to help their patients, and the Training Xchange infrastructure makes it easier to transmit programs like TEAMcare,” Katon said.

Training Xchange is already at work across the country. It has been teaching health professionals at a major national health system how to reduce debilitating anxiety in patients with an approach developed jointly by UW and UCLA. Clients for Training Xchange programs now include Harborview Medical Center and The Polyclinic in Seattle, the California Institute of Mental Health, the national offices of the Epilepsy Foundation in Maryland and others.

As a program within the university’s Center for Commercialization, more commonly known as C4C, the Training Xchange has expanded from its early focus on healthcare to other training areas, such as education, computer science, and bioengineering.

“Over the coming years, we are committed to seeing more of our research outcomes in practice out in the world,” said Fiona Wills, director of Technology Licensing at C4C. “Training Xchange is a terrific option for our busy researchers to increase the visibility and impact of their innovations.”

“The product that we’re shooting for will have the same fuel characteristics as diesel,” said principal investigator Mary Lidstrom, a UW professor of chemical engineering and microbiology. “It can be used in trucks, boats, buses, cars, tractors – anything that diesel does now.”

The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E, selected the UW-led project in its second major funding round that awarded 66 grants to U.S. universities, businesses and national labs. The Energy Department launched the agency in 2009 to support high-risk, potentially transformative energy research projects.

The UW engineers will work with scientists at the National Renewable Energy Lab and two industry partners. They will target the natural gas associated with oil fields, which is often flared off as waste, as well as so-called “stranded” natural gas reserves that are too small for a pipeline to be economically viable.

The team aims to capture that natural gas and use bacteria to turn its main component, methane, into a liquid fuel for transportation.

“The goal at the end of three years is to have an integrated process that will be ready for pre-commercialization pilot testing,” Lidstrom said.

The four project partners have distinct roles. First, the UW team will develop a version of the bacteria that is even better at converting methane to energy-rich fatlike molecules. Then LanzaTech, Inc., an Illinois-based biofuels company, will develop a way to grow the new bacteria in larger quantities at high efficiency. Next the U.S. National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colo., will devise an efficient way to extract the energy-rich molecules from the microbe’s cells. Finally, partners at Johnson Matthey, a U.K. chemical company, will use chemical catalysts to convert those molecules into diesel.

After establishing a viable method, national lab scientists will work with the industry partners to develop an economic model that predicts manufacturing costs as production scales up.

The bacterium at the center of the effort comes from an alkaline salty lake near Mongolia. Team member Marina Kalyuzhnaya, a UW research associate professor in microbiology, discovered it during her graduate studies in Russia. The microbe can survive in harsh environments, consumes methane and uses it to build cells containing energy-rich lipids. At the UW, the microbe has been evolved to grow unusually fast, making it practical for industrial applications.

Other members of the UW team are research assistant professor David Beck and senior research scientist Ludmila Chistoserdova, both in chemical engineering. The grant starts in February and lasts three years, with project milestones due every quarter.

“It’s exciting,” Lidstrom said. “We have to hit the ground running. It’s very ambitious but we believe this team is strong enough, and we know enough about what needs to be done that we will achieve our goal.”

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For more information, contact Lidstrom at 206-543-2250 or lidstrom@uw.edu.

The article shares newly defined signs for terms like “light-year,” “organism” and “photosynthesis.” It also describes a successful crowdsourcing effort started at the University of Washington in 2008 that lets members of the deaf and hard-of-hearing community build their own guide to the evolving lexicon of science.

A screen capture from the ASL-STEM Forum.

“It’s not a dictionary,” explained Richard Ladner, a UW professor of computer science and engineering. “The goal of the forum is to be constantly changing, a reflection of the current use.”

A scientific and technical dictionary for American Sign Language has existed since the late 1990s.  It is called Science Signs Lexicon, launched by Harry Lang, an early proponent of science in the deaf community and a professor at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology.

But a dictionary can’t include the newest terms, Ladner said, and many graduate students won’t find the specialized terms used in their chosen fields. For example, Ladner helped organize a 2008 workshop where a deaf scientist said only about one-quarter of his field’s specialized terms existed in his native language, American Sign Language, or ASL. Many workshop participants reported that at some point they had had to work with their interpreters to develop their own code words.

That year, with funding from Google Corp. and the National Science Foundation, Ladner’s group launched the ASL-STEM Forum, an online compilation of signs used in science, technology, engineering and math that is more like Wikipedia or the Urban Dictionary.

“The goal was to have one place where all these signs could be,” Ladner said. “We’re not trying to decide on new signs but just collect the ones that are in current use.”

The site lists 6,755 terms from biology, chemistry, engineering, math and computer science textbooks. Of those, about 2,800 have video entries, some with multiple entries. Partnerships with the country’s two largest higher education institutions for deaf and hard-of-hearing students have helped provide content.

Collaborators include Caroline Solomon, a UW alumna and biology professor at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., and Lang and Raja Kushalnagar at Rochester’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf.

Visit the forum to see a sign for “bioengineering,” “integral” and “peer-to-peer,” none of which is listed in the Science Signs dictionary. Terms still seeking an ASL translation include “byte” and “eukaryote.”

Anyone can visit the forum, but to add signs a user must create a free account then record a short video using a computer’s camera that can be reviewed and uploaded. People also can rate and comment on signs uploaded by other users.

Mary Levin, UW

Richard Ladner with students in a 2007 summer computing program.

Ladner hopes the recent article will spur interest and encourage people to suggest more entries among the remaining terms. He is seeking funding to update the site, and hopes it will reach critical mass among ASL speakers in scientific and technical fields.

Between 2006 and 2010, U.S. institutions awarded 301 doctorate degrees in STEM fields to people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing, Ladner said. Because that number includes hard-of-hearing, the number of science PhDs who use ASL is likely much lower. Many members of that community are geographically scattered, and to make matters worse, American Sign Language and British Sign Language have their own technical lexicons.

“I hope ASL-STEM Forum helps more deaf students become scientists and engineers,” Ladner said. “And as more deaf students enter these fields they will hopefully contribute to the forum, making it sustainable and useful over time.”

Now working on the forum at the UW are Kyle Rector, a doctoral student in computer science and engineering, and John Norberg, a UW undergraduate in math who is minoring in ASL. Early members of the UW team include computer science and engineering doctoral students Anna Cavender, now working on accessibility projects at Google, and Jeffrey Bigham, now an accessibility researcher at the University of Rochester in New York; and former UW undergraduates Daniel Otero, Michelle Shepardson and Jessica Dewitt.

Ladner runs a national summer program to encourage deaf and hard-of-hearing students to pursue careers in computer science, and he leads AccessComputing, a larger UW-based national effort to encourage people with disabilities to pursue computing fields. His group is also involved in a number of research projects that combine computing, mobile technology and accessibility.

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For more information, contact Ladner at 206-543-9347 or ladner@cs.washington.edu.

A University of Washington team has developed a versatile platform to simultaneously offer contraception and prevent HIV. Electrically spun cloth with nanometer-sized fibers can dissolve to release drugs, providing a platform for cheap, discrete and reversible protection.

Kim Woodrow, UW

The electrospun fibers can release chemicals or they can physically block sperm, as shown here.

The research was published this week in the Public Library of Science’s open-access journal PLoS One. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation last month awarded the UW researchers almost $1 million to pursue the technology.

“Our dream is to create a product women can use to protect themselves from HIV infection and unintended pregnancy,” said corresponding author Kim Woodrow, a UW assistant professor of bioengineering. “We have the drugs to do that. It’s really about delivering them in a way that makes them more potent, and allows a woman to want to use it.”

Electrospinning uses an electric field to catapult a charged fluid jet through air to create very fine, nanometer-scale fibers. The fibers can be manipulated to control the material’s solubility, strength and even geometry. Because of this versatility, fibers may be better at delivering medicine than existing technologies such as gels, tablets or pills. No high temperatures are involved, so the method is suitable for heat-sensitive molecules. The fabric can also incorporate large molecules, such as proteins and antibodies, that are hard to deliver through other methods.

At a lab meeting last year, Woodrow presented the concept, and co-authors Emily Krogstad and Cameron Ball, both first-year graduate students, pursued the idea.

Kim Woodrow, UW

Fibers stick to a hard surface (top) and then can be removed to create a hollow ring (bottom left). Bottom right shows a closeup of the tiny fibers.

They first dissolved polymers approved by the Food and Drug Administration and antiretroviral drugs used to treat HIV to create a gooey solution that passes through a syringe. As the stream encounters the electric field it stretches to create thin fibers measuring 100 to several thousand nanometers that whip through the air and eventually stick to a collecting plate (one nanometer is about one 25-millionth of an inch). The final material is a stretchy fabric that can physically block sperm or release chemical contraceptives and antivirals.

“This method allows controlled release of multiple compounds,” Ball said. “We were able to tune the fibers to have different release properties.”

One of the fabrics they made dissolves within minutes, potentially offering users immediate, discrete protection against unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

Another dissolves gradually over a few days, providing an option for sustained delivery, more like the birth-control pill,  to provide contraception and guard against HIV.

The fabric could incorporate many fibers to guard against many different sexually transmitted infections, or include more than one anti-HIV drug to protect against drug-resistant strains (and discourage drug-resistant strains from emerging). Mixed fibers could be designed to release drugs at different times to increase their potency, like the prime-boost method used in vaccines.

The electrospun cloth could be inserted directly in the body or be used as a coating on vaginal rings or other products.

Electrospinning has existed for decades, but it’s only recently been automated to make it practical for applications such as filtration and tissue engineering. This is the first study to use nanofibers for vaginal drug delivery.

While this technology is more discrete than a condom, and potentially more versatile than pills or plastic or rubber devices, researchers say there is no single right answer.

“At the time of sex, are people going to actually use it? That’s where having multiple options really comes into play,” Krogstad said. “Depending on cultural background and personal preferences, certain populations may differ in terms of what form of technology makes the most sense for them.”

The team is focusing on places like Africa where HIV is most common, but the technology could be used in the U.S. or other countries to offer birth control while also preventing one or more sexually transmitted diseases.

The research to date was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the UW’s Center for AIDS Research. The other co-author on the paper is Thanyanan Chaowanachan, a UW postdoctoral researcher and longtime HIV expert.

The team will use the new Gates Foundation grant to evaluate the versatility and feasibility of their system. The group will hire more research staff and buy an electrospinning machine to make butcher-paper sized sheets. The expanded team will spend a year testing combinations that deliver two antiretroviral drugs used to treat HIV and a hormonal contraceptive, and then six months scaling up production of the most promising materials.

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For more information, contact Woodrow at 206-685-6831 or woodrow@uw.edu.

Leila Gray

Rie Tatsumi-Koga (right) and Nobu Koga are a wife-and-husband scientific team who research protein design.

The lead authors are Nobuyasu Koga and Rie Tatsumi-Koga, a husband-and-wife scientific team in David Baker’s lab at the UW Protein Design Institute.

The project benefited from hundreds of thousands of computer enthusiasts around the world who adopted Rosetta@home for simulating designed proteins.

Protein molecules start as an unstable, high energy chain of amino acids. This chain then begins folding into various shapes to try to achieve a stable, low energy state.  The end result is its distinctive molecular structure. Rosetta@home volunteers helped the project team to plot this energy landscape from protein structure predictions.

“The structural options become fewer as the interactions that stabilize the protein selectively favor one folding pattern over others,” explained Koga. “This decline in conformation options to eventually achieve a unique, ordered structure is called a funnel-shaped energy landscape,” he said, drawing a tornado-like figure on a whiteboard.  The researchers came up with guidelines for robustly generating this type of energy landscape.

According to Tatsumi-Koga, these rules require the interactions among the residues in the protein’s amino acid chain to consistently favor the same folded conformation in forming its molecular shape. This is made possible, for example, by defining whether a specific unit will form a “right-handed” orientation or its mirror image, and disfavor others.

The researchers, she said, synthesized the proteins they had originally designed and tested “in silico” (on the computer) and physically characterized them through “in vitro” (laboratory test tube) experiments. They also compared the molecular structures of the computer models with these laboratory-derived proteins to see how well they matched.

Koga stressed that the project looked strictly at protein structure. He smiled as he said his group was striving toward a “platonic ideal,” a reference to Plato’s theory of perfect forms.  In our imperfect material world, proteins are not always optimized for their stability, but can be beset by bulges, kinks, strains, and improperly buried parts, and many diseases arise from protein malformations.

During this project, the researchers achieved a library of five ideal structures, but since filing their report have added several more.  To make them accessible to other scientists, the designs have been deposited in the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics and the lab analysis of their chemical structure was put in the Biological Magnetic Resonance Database.

The team was not attempting to create specific new proteins that could carry out particular activities.

However, their design principles and methods, according to their report, should allow the ready creation of a wide range of robust, stable, building blocks for the next generation of engineered functional proteins.  Such proteins would be custom-made for the task, instead of repurposed from proteins with unrelated functions.

Leila Gray

The UW Protein Design Institute is housed at the new UW Molecular Engineering Building.

The hope is that engineered proteins will be useful for drug and vaccine development, especially for formidable viruses like HIV or rapidly changing ones, like the flu.  Proteins designed to exact specifications might also prove therapeutically useful in cleaving mutated genes, and for speeding up chemical reactions important in industry and environmental reclamation.

The Institute for Protein Design, directed by David Baker, was recently established at the UW and aims to design proteins to address 21st century challenges in medicine, energy and technology.

The project, Principles for designing ideal protein structures, was funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the U.S. Department of Energy, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, NIH grant U54 GMO94597. Koga also received a postdoctoral research fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

The Boeing Co.

William E. Boeing, in 1931.

“The University of Washington and the Boeing Company are long-established Pacific Northwest institutions whose histories are closely tied,” said UW President Michael Young.

“For many decades, UW talent and skill have contributed to Boeing’s premier place in global air transportation, while Boeing has built an environment of technical, business and philanthropic leadership that has strengthened the University and our state. We are proud to recognize this amazing partnership in naming our outstanding department of aeronautics and astronautics for Bill Boeing.”

The almost 100-year history began when William Edward Boeing founded the Boeing Airplane Co. in 1916 along the shores of Lake Union and hired two UW engineering graduates to work on his flying machines. Though Clairmont Egtvedt and Philip Johnson were mechanical engineering graduates, they went on to become presidents and general managers of the growing company.

Boeing realized he needed trained aeronautical engineers as well as a facility to test new airplane designs. In 1917 he donated a wind tunnel to the UW, paid for with a personal gift of almost $6,000, on condition that the university would establish an aeronautics curriculum. The department had its early beginnings later that year.

In the 1920s, Boeing wrote on behalf of the university to the Guggenheim Fund for the Advancement of Aeronautics, and in 1928 the fund approved a grant of $290,000 for a building, renovated in 2007, that still houses UW Aeronautics & Astronautics.

The company and the department have grown together. In 1926, all but one member of Boeing’s engineering department were UW graduates. In the 1940s most of Boeing’s engineers still came from the UW, and even today the UW remains a primary supplier of engineering talent for the company. Thousands of UW alumni have gone on to work for the company, and company employees, faculty and students have carried out many joint research projects.

“We are thrilled with the University of Washington’s decision to name its Department of Astronautics & Aeronautics for our founder, William E. Boeing. His name is on every product we design, every service we provide and every task we undertake,” said Ray Conner, president and CEO for Boeing Commercial Airplanes. “His vision and mandate for technical excellence and innovation lives on in the hearts and minds of Boeing employees, and we hope that the students who pass through the College of Engineering will be similarly inspired as they take their places as our future aerospace leaders.”

Through the years, Boeing has invested nearly $80 million in the UW. In the 1980s, the company donated $2 million to upgrade the computer systems of a second wind tunnel, the Kirsten Wind Tunnel, that it helped fund in the 1930s. That tunnel is still operated by students and performs tests for UW students, faculty and external clients. In the 1990s, the company created a major faculty endowment to support engineering teaching and research.

In the past 10 years, nearly $20 million in Boeing funds have gone to the UW’s College of Engineering for research, graduate scholarships and undergraduate student support.

The Boeing Co.

William E. Boeing and pilot Eddie Hubbard flew the first international mail flight to the U.S. on March 3, 1919 from Vancouver, B.C. to Seattle. UW alumnus Clairmont Egtvedt later designed the Model 40 plane that in 1927 won Boeing the contract to deliver mail from San Francisco to Chicago.

“It’s difficult to think of a company that has had a greater impact on the aerospace industry worldwide than the company created by Bill Boeing,” said James Hermanson, professor and chair of UW Aeronautics & Astronautics. “Bill Boeing is considered a founding father of our department, which was one of the first aeronautical engineering programs in the nation.”

“We are thrilled to be able to honor Bill Boeing and recognize the ongoing, vital partnership between the Boeing Company and the Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics, the College of Engineering, and all of the UW,” Hermanson added. “The company that Bill Boeing founded has played a vital role in our community of faculty, students and alumni.”

Today the UW’s aeronautics and astronautics department has an enrollment of 153 undergraduates, 167 graduate students and 17 faculty members. In recent years, UW faculty have collaborated with Boeing on unmanned aerial vehicles and on lightweight, composite materials incorporated in the Boeing 787. Recently the company and the UW launched a joint post-graduate certificate programs for the analysis and design of composite materials and for integrated systems engineering.

The permanent naming honors nearly 100 years of partnership, and specifically recognizes William E. Boeing Sr. as the department’s founding benefactor.

“Both my father and the University of Washington understood very early in the development of commercial aviation how big the industry would become, and how much it would impact people’s everyday lives,” said William E. (Bill) Boeing Jr. “My family and I are very pleased to have the aero department named in his honor to permanently link two aeronautics pioneers.”

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