University of Washington bioengineers have developed the first structure to grow small human blood vessels, creating a 3-D test bed that offers a better way to study disease, test drugs and perhaps someday grow human tissues for transplant.

The findings are published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"In clinical research you just draw a blood sample," said first author Ying Zheng, a UW research assistant professor of bioengineering. "But with this, we can really dissect what happens at the interface between the blood and the tissue. We can start to look at how these diseases start to progress and develop efficient therapies."

Researchers made a functional microvessel that spells the letters "UW." The white bar measures 100 micrometers, about the width of a human hair.

Y. Zheng, U. of Washington

During a period of two weeks, the endothelial cells grew throughout the structure and formed tubes through the mold's rectangular channels, just as they do in the human body.

When brain cells were injected into the surrounding gel, the cells released chemicals that prompted the engineered vessels to sprout new branches, extending the network. A similar system could supply blood to engineered tissue before transplant into the body.

After joining the UW last year, Zheng collaborated with the Puget Sound Blood Center to see how this research platform would work to transport real blood.

Engineered microvessels can form bends and T-junctions, like this one. The blue dots are the nuclei of the cells in the vessel walls, and the red lines are the cell junctions. Smooth muscle cells (green) wrap and tighten around the vessels, just as they do in the human body.

Y. Zheng, U. of Washington

The engineered vessels could transport human blood smoothly, even around corners. And when treated with an inflammatory compound the vessels developed clots, similar to what real vessels do when they become inflamed.

The system also shows promise as a model for tumor progression. Cancer begins as a hard tumor but secretes chemicals that cause nearby vessels to bulge and then sprout. Eventually tumor cells use these blood vessels to penetrate the bloodstream and colonize new parts of the body.

When the researchers added to their system a signaling protein for vessel growth that's overabundant in cancer and other diseases, new blood vessels sprouted from the originals. These new vessels were leaky, just as they are in human cancers.

"With this system we can dissect out each component or we can put them together to look at a complex problem. That's a nice thing—we can isolate the biophysical, biochemical or cellular components. How do endothelial cells respond to blood flow or to different chemicals, how do the endothelial cells interact with their surroundings, and how do these interactions affect the vessels' barrier function? We have a lot of degrees of freedom," Zheng said.

The system could also be used to study malaria, which becomes fatal when diseased blood cells stick to the vessel walls and block small openings, cutting off blood supply to the brain, placenta or other vital organs.

"I think this is a tremendous system for studying how blood clots form on vessels walls, how the vessel responds to shear stress and other mechanical and chemical factors, and for studying the many diseases that affect small blood vessels," said co-author Dr. José López, a professor of biochemistry and hematology at UW Medicine and chief scientific officer at the Puget Sound Blood Center.

Future work will use the system to further explore blood vessel interactions that involve inflammation and clotting. Zheng is also pursuing tissue engineering as a member of the UW's Center for Cardiovascular Biology and the Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine.

Other co-authors are UW physics senior Samuel Totorica; Abraham Stroock, Michael Craven, Nak Won Choi, Michael Craven, Anthony Diaz-Santana and Claudia Fischbach at Cornell; Junmei Chen at the Puget Sound Blood Center; and Barbara Hempstead at Weill Cornell Medical College.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the American Heart Association, the Human Frontier Science Program and Cornell University.

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For more information, contact Zheng at 206-543-3223 or yingzy@uw.edu.

Beth Kolko had heard about the event from a former student. That evening led to an invitation to visit a hacker space in Seattle's Sodo district. Over time, she discovered a vibrant research community that existed completely outside the university where she'd spent the previous 20 years.

"It changed my world," said Kolko, a UW professor of Human Centered Design and Engineering. "I thought, it would be great if that energy could be in the university."

Beth Kolko with two 3-D printers built by past classes. She made the course sign herself, and came up with the class motto as she was programming the design.

Mary Levin, UW Photography

Now it is. Kolko's experimental research course, Hackademia, brings the hacker spirit to campus. Its mission: "Building functional engineers, one blinky LED at a time."

After two years developing the course, Kolko recently gave talks in Berlin and at Harvard University, and will present it next week at the International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems and at a summer participatory design conference. Seattle's Awesome Foundation just gave $1,000, and Microsoft gave $10,000.

Initially, Kolko's interest in hacking was extracurricular. She's no stranger to adventure – she studied technology adoption in central Asia and is developing low-cost ultrasound for midwives in Africa.  Kolko learned to solder, and about circuit boards and batteries. She went on to build a sensor that detects flooding in her basement and sends her a text message (and one to her neighbor, in case she's out of the country).

The class emerged more slowly. In 2009, Alexis Hope, then an undergraduate, described feeling a gap between more and less technical students in the College of Engineering.

Kolko wondered again, this time more seriously, if she could harness the hacker ethos – and use it to study how informal research communities develop.

Students in the Winter 2012 course.

In winter 2010 five students, including Hope, signed up to help build a 3-D printer from a kit. Thus was born Hackademia. Its goal is to guide students to become makers, builders, tinkerers. In other words, old-school hackers.

The lab is a small room on the third floor of Sieg Hall, filled with tools mostly scavenged at garage sales. Kolko's hoping to expand to accommodate the current 30-plus students.

"We need an interdisciplinary space where students can work on tangible things," Kolko said. "If you're doing soldering on a board, you don’t want to put it in your backpack."

This quarter, for the first time, the focus is on software rather than hardware. One student is making a visual tool for Wikipedia edits. A few art students are building online portfolios. A group is building a light for a campus dorm that changes color in response to posts from the UW Alert Twitter account.

At a recent class meeting, students huddle over laptops in small groups. Instructors circulate to offer advice.

"What's your biggest obstacle right now?" Kolko asks a group.

"Code," answers one student. "Code," agrees another member.

"Did you ask the Internet?" Kolko prods. Then she gets some specifics, and suggests a starting point where the group might find answers.

The atmosphere is non-hierarchical. In many cases, the students teach one another. In one case Kolko suggests that students look for a primer on YouTube then watch it together so they can ask each other questions.

Beth Kolko and master's student Alexis Hope together conceived of Hackademia. They hold a student-built 3-D printer and an octopus that was created with it.

Mary Levin, UW Photography

Hope has helped to develop the course. She is coordinating this quarter's offering with fellow Human Centered Design and Engineering master's students Behzod Sirjani and Nikki Lee.

Each quarter begins by teaching the students basic skills, technical terms and standard processes for building things.

"People talk about science literacy as being really important," Kolko said. "I would say that engineering literacy is the same way."

Kolko is careful to distinguish Hackademia from other programs that encourage students to major in science, math and engineering.

"There's a huge cohort of people doing fabulous work in that area," Kolko said. "The unserved population that I see is people who are a little bit older, don't necessarily want to make engineering into their career, but still want to have some skills to be able to participate in what the knowledge economy has become – which is, you know, messing around with hardware and software. And you shouldn't have to be an accredited expert to do that."

Kolko envisions the course as a place where a student of any major can get a taste of electrical engineering or computer programming, and leave feeling empowered and connected to resources to learn more.

Former participant Jarman Hauser, a professional master's student and assistant program director at Washington Mesa, testifies to its success.

"I went into the class thinking that I wasn’t very technical because I wasn’t into computer programming, so I’d probably be taking a back seat or be more of a passive learner," he said. "But the way that the class was structured, everybody brought something different, and we combined all of our thoughts and ideas and tools to make a project."

Hauser's still working on a couple of things he started in the class, and has borrowed techniques for his outreach work with local schools.

Hackademia is now recruiting students for an autumn quarter offering focused on 3-D printing and computer-aided design.

With the new grants, Kolko also hopes to bring her hacker evangelism outside the university, to senior centers and immigrant community groups.

"This is the most fun thing I've done as a professor," Kolko said.

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For more information, contact Kolko at 206-685-3809 or bkolko@uw.edu.

Drops of red and blue liquid move along the upper and lower surface of the vibrating UW platform at speeds up to 1 inch per second. This combined image shows drops as they move toward the center and merge.

Karl Bohringer, UW

"This allows us to move drops as far as we want, and in any kind of layout that we want," said Karl Böhringer, a UW professor of electrical engineering and bioengineering. The low-cost system, published in a recent issue of the journal Advanced Materials, would require very little energy and avoids possible contamination by diluting or electrifying the samples in order to move them.

The simple technology is a textured surface that tends to push drops along a given path. It's inspired by the lotus effect – a phenomenon in which a lotus leaf's almost fractal texture makes it appear to repel drops of water.

"The lotus leaf has a very rough surface, in which each big bump has a smaller bump on it," Böhringer said. "We can't make our surface exactly the same as a lotus leaf, but what we did is extract the essence of why it works."

A drop of liquid sits on the textured silicon surface that has arced rungs to guide the drop, and a grid of pillars to keep the drop in the channel.

Karl Bohringer, UW

Researchers used an audio speaker or machine to vibrate the platform at 50 to 80 times per second.  The asymmetrical surface moves individual drops along predetermined paths to mix, modify or measure their contents. Changing the vibration frequency can alter a drop's speed, or can target a drop of a certain size or weight.

"All you need is a vibration, and making these surfaces is very easy. You can make it out of a piece of plastic," Böhringer said. "I could imagine this as a device that costs less than a dollar – maybe much less than that – and is used with saliva or blood or water samples."

A close-up of the UW surface showing the arc edges and adjacent pillars.

Karl Bohringer, UW

The type of system is known as a "lab in a drop": all the ingredients are inside the drop, and surface tension acts as the container to keep everything together.

A student tried using a smartphone's speaker to vibrate the platform, but so far a phone does not supply enough energy to move the drops. To better accommodate low-energy audio waves, the group will use the UW's electron beam lithography machine to build a surface with posts up to 100 times smaller.

"There’s good evidence, from what we’ve done so far, that if we make everything smaller then we will need less energy to achieve the same effect," Böhringer said. "We envision a device that you plug into your phone, it’s powered by the battery of the phone, an app generates the right type of audio vibrations, and you run your experiment."

Co-authors of the paper are former UW undergraduate Todd Duncombe and former UW graduate student Yegȃn Erdem, both at the University of California, Berkeley; former UW postdoctoral researcher Ashutosh Shastry, now at Corium International in Menlo Park, Calif.; and Rajashree Baskaran, a UW affiliate assistant professor of electrical engineering who works at Intel Corp.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, Intel and the UW's Technology Gap Innovation Fund.

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For more information, contact Böhringer at 206-221-5177 or karl@ee.washington.edu.

In 2011 they were the underdogs. This year, an article on the results referred to a UW "dynasty."

In a contest that has roots and top teams from the military, the eight students from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering stand out. Several have bushy hair, one member wears five-toed shoes, all have a sense of humor.

"We do our best to entertain ourselves during the competition, and I think that gives us a leg up," said senior Ian Finder, one of three students from last year's team. "We don't appear to take it as seriously as we do."

Ian Finder and Lars Zornes during the competition.

"They're a lot of fun, and they're funny," said Kadenko, who traveled with the team and acted as team manager and morale builder. "I am so proud of them."

The national contest, hosted by the University of Texas at San Antonio, brought together winners of 10 regional events. It took place over two nine-hour days on April 20 and 21.

"There's plenty of stressful moments. As a team, we shout a lot. But at the end of the day we're cracking jokes, we're all happy," Finder said.

"We're there to have fun," Baba-Weiss said of the exhausting schedule. "As corny as it sounds, that's why we all do it."

Teams acted as a web hosting company, Go Mommy (a play on the popular Go Daddy web host) that had to keep their company running despite a constant barrage of attacks.

Landon Meernik (background), Cullen Walsh and Karl Koscher at this year's competition.

Contest organizers try to throw students off guard. This year's equipment included firewall routers built by Juniper, rather than the Cisco routers that most students were familiar with.

"Right away one person from every team, which on our team was Lars, bolted out of the conference room, went up to their hotel room and started doing a crash course on Juniper routers," Kadenko recalled.

While some teams have intense training regimens, Team Hillarious kept its laid-back style. Twice-a-week practice sessions started in January. Recruiting happened informally, as did the choice of final team members. Kadenko was responsible for securing the room in Sieg Hall, scavenging decommissioned equipment, and stocking the snack fridge.

At one point during the contest the attacking team said they would give students a short break if students sent a photo of themselves looking sad. The UW sent a photo of someone making a sad face beside a screen showing that all its systems were running smoothly.

At another point, the UW team noticed that the red team was in its system and used the opportunity to send the attackers a note with a message not fit for publication, Finder said.

In March the team took first place in the 5th Pacific Rim Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Contest, held at Highline Community College and hosted by the UW's Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity.

"The first year [they won nationals] might have been a fluke," said regional contest founder and organizer Barbara Endicott-Popovsky, research associate professor in the UW's Information School. "To have it happen two years in a row sends a serious message about the Pacific Northwest, and I think it's about creative problem-solving."

She described the winning team as representing "iconoclastic Northwest geek grunge," something she said the computer-security world could use more of.

Companies and government agencies attend a recruiting session just after the competition. But all the UW team members already have jobs at Microsoft, Boeing, Facebook and Seattle-area startups.

"I don't think there's a single person [on our team] that's there for networking or job offers; that's a bonus," said Sackler, the team captain.

This year for the first time the winning team will also have a spot in the Capture the Flag competition at DefCon, the premier hacking conference held in Las Vegas. In three months they will try to fend off the world's top security experts and hackers.

"We are terrified," Sackler said. "Our goal is to keep a single machine with a working operating system at the end of that competition."

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For more information or to reach team members, contact Kadenko at melody@cs.washington.edu or 206-616-1068.

Researchers at the University of Washington have studied vessel walls and found the cells pull more tightly together, reducing vascular leakage, in areas of fast-flowing blood. The finding could influence how doctors design drugs to treat high cholesterol, or how cardiac surgeons plan their procedures.

Their paper will be published in an upcoming issue of the American Journal of Physiology - Heart and Circulatory Physiology.

A layer of cells that coat the pulmonary artery grown on a bed of silicon microposts. After being exposed to a rapid flow, the cells make tighter junctions and tug more strongly on their neighbors.

Nathan Sniadecki, University of Washington

"Our results indicate that these cells can sense the kind of flow that they’re in, and structurally change how they hold themselves together," said lead author Nathan Sniadecki, a UW assistant professor of mechanical engineering. "This highlights the role that cellular forces play in the progression of cardiovascular disease."

It's known that the arteries carrying blood are leakier in areas of slow flow, promoting cholesterol buildup in those areas. But medical researchers believed this leakage was mostly biochemical – that cells would sense the slower flow and modify how proteins and enzymes function inside the cell to allow for more exchange.

The new results show that, like a group of schoolchildren huddling closer in a gust of wind, the cells also pull more tightly together when the blood is flowing past.

"The mechanical tugging force leads to a biochemical change that allows more and more proteins at the membrane to glue together," Sniadecki said. "We're still trying to understand what's happening here, and how mechanical tugging leads more proteins to localize and glue at the interface."

Sniadecki's group looks at the biomechanics of individual cells. For this experiment, they grew a patch of human endothelial cells, the thin layer of cells that line the inner walls of arteries and veins and act as a sort of nonstick coating for the vessels' walls. They grew the patch on an area about the width of a human hair, manufactured with 25 by 25 tiny flexible silicon posts.

A simulation of the posts that support the heart cells. Light blue is 1 nanometer of deflection, while dark red means the post is deflected by 2.5 nanometers.

Nathan Sniadecki, University of Washington

Knowing how cells respond to blood flow could help find new drugs to promote this tugging between cells. Better understanding of the interaction between blood flow and heart health could also guide surgeries.

"People could do simulations so a surgeon goes, ‘Ah, I should cut here versus over here, because that reconstruction will be a smoother vessel and will lead to fewer complications down the line, or as I put this stent in, put it here and make it more aerodynamic in design,'" Sniadecki said.

Co-authors are Lucas Ting, Joon Jung, Benjamin Shuman, Shirin Feghhi, Sangyoon Han, Marita Rodriguez in the UW's department of mechanical engineering, and Jessica Jahn at UW Medicine.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the UW Medical Student Research Training Program and the UW Royalty Research Fund.

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For more information, contact Sniadecki at 206-685-6591 or nsniadec@uw.edu.

On this weekend’s centennial, many are revisiting the story of the disaster and trying to piece together how it happened.

Two University of Washington engineers play a key role in a documentary airing for the first time Sunday on the History Channel. The program sets out to test a leading theory about why the ship sank – that substandard rivets failed and caused the hull to rip open.

The RMS Titanic, which sank on April 15, 1912.

The program follows a 2010 expedition by a group of researchers and naval historians to create the first complete map of the 15-square-mile wreck site. Experts studied the maps to come up with new theories about why the ship failed.

Last fall, naval historians traveled to Seattle with a camera crew to test the failed-rivet theory.

Brian Flinn, a UW research associate professor of materials science and engineering, used his expertise in materials testing and failure to help carry out the experiment.

The historians first obtained aged steel from a ship built in the same era as the Titanic that sank in Puget Sound.

Brian Flinn (center) and naval historians inspect a turn-of-the-century steel sample.

History Channel

“If you just went and bought normal steel today, it wouldn't behave in the same way,” Flinn said. “The chemistry of steel has evolved quite a bit over time.”

Ballard Forge then replicated the joint geometry of that time to recreate a section of the hull, and created three samples about the size of a large door.

“Some of the previous work had only tested relatively small mock samples, maybe 10 or 12 inches long, with a few rivets,” Flinn said. “What they wanted to do was a much bigger sample, with much more complex joint geometry.”

Testing took place in the UW’s Structural Research Laboratory. The lab’s three-story Baldwin machine can apply up to 2.4 million pounds of pressure to samples as tall as 25 feet.

Brian Flinn and Vince Chaijaroen load a sample in the UW's Structural Research Lab.

History Channel

Vongsant “Vince” Chaijaroen, longtime manager of the structures lab, operated the machine, moved samples with a forklift and welded pieces to hold them in different geometries.

The team tested three different configurations with different rivets, consulting between tests to refine their technique. Their results, while not rigorous enough for publication in a scientific journal, suggest that the rivet theory might not be the only explanation for why the Titanic sank.

“It was really fun to be able to test these materials that were made 100 years ago, and able to reform them and make these fairly accurate samples to represent how that material would behave,” Flinn said.

The tests last year were done on the sly, and the conclusion of the show is under tight wraps. National reviewers were unable to view the last 15 minutes, and neither Flinn nor Chaijaroen has seen the whole program.

The two UW engineers will join scores of other viewers Sunday night to see the results.

“Of course, I will be watching,” Chaijaroen said. “That's something that I'm not going to miss.”

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For more information, contact Flinn at 206-616-9068 or bflinn@uw.edu and Chaijaroen at vchaijar@uw.edu or 206-543-7433.

More information about the Titanic

UW Today story on the Structural Research Lab

Robert Winglee has spent years developing a magnetized ion plasma system to propel a spacecraft at ultra-high speeds, making it possible to travel to Mars and return to Earth in as little time as 90 days. The problem is that cost and other issues have dampened the desire to send astronauts to Mars or any other planet.

In this artist’s conception, a magnetized beam of ionized plasma is applied to a spacecraft headed on an interplanetary journey. The same technology could be used to remove dead satellites and other debris from Earth orbit.

University of Washington

But Winglee, who heads the University of Washington’s Earth and Space Sciences Department, believes his problem might actually be a solution to the problem of space junk crowding the orbital paths around Earth.

A magnetized-beam plasma propulsion device (mag-beam for short) in Earth orbit would be able to use a focused ion stream to push dead satellites and other debris toward Earth’s atmosphere, where they would mostly burn up on re-entry. The idea has drawn interest, and some funding, from the U.S. Defense Department.

“Our proposal was that we could mitigate a whole region of space rather than work with individual pieces one at a time,” Winglee said.

As a propulsion method, mag-beam would interact with a specialized receptor on a spacecraft, pushing it to speeds perhaps greater than 18,000 miles per hour. Satellites orbiting Earth don’t have those specialized receptors, but Winglee said applying the beam directly to the satellite would still provide enough momentum to move a satellite toward the atmosphere.

A geosynchronous orbit, one in which a satellite returns to the same position above the Earth each day, “is very valuable space, but it’s full of dead satellites,” he said. For decades, communications satellites have been placed in orbits from hundreds of miles to several thousand miles above sea level to create a fixed point in the sky for ground installations to communicate with satellites. Many of those satellites have ceased to function, though they continue in their orbits.

That might not sound like such a big problem, but as space gets more crowded with gadgets, the chance of a collision between two satellites becomes even greater. Then, instead of two larger objects to worry about, satellites worth vast sums of money – and perhaps even space vehicles such as the International Space Station – would have to navigate through a cloud of debris. Even a tiny washer or screw traveling at 6,700 miles per hour in Earth orbit could cause serious damage to another object.

Using a mag-beam to clean up the debris is feasible now, Winglee said, and could be accomplished through a standard satellite mission costing perhaps $300 million.

The technology would not be useful for pushing near-Earth asteroids or comets away from the planet, he said, because they have too much mass for the mag-beam to be effective.

Meanwhile, Winglee and his students continue research in his Johnson Hall laboratory on the possibility of placing mag-beam units in orbit around Earth and around a planet such as Mars that humans might want to explore. With a unit on each end – one to give a spacecraft a high-velocity push on its journey and the other to slow it at its destination – a mission to Mars could be accomplished in as little as 90 days, rather than the 2.5 years it would take with conventional means.

“We’re continuing on a shoestring budget, and we’re modeling what the system can do over longer distances,” Winglee said.

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The students did not disappoint. A presenter sporting a tie and dress shoes rolled a solar-powered electric bike on stage. Another carried a hunk of rubber and mustered the enthusiasm of a used-car salesman to pitch an idea for rubber lane dividers. One maker of a smartphone-controlled LED promised office workers everywhere could use it as “a direct replacement for the buzzing, flickering, hated fluorescent tube.”

Members of the team Green Innovative Safety Technologies (GIST), won first prize and $10,000 for developing a recycled alternative to concrete highway jersey barriers.

University of Washington

“The students are tackling bigger problems, and I think they’re being fearless about it,” said Connie Bourassa-Shaw, director of the UW Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. “When you actually have to build a prototype, it’s an incredibly difficult process.”

This year’s competition, put on by the Foster School of Business in partnership with the College of Engineering and the College of the Environment, was the largest ever, with 32 applicants. For the first time the organizers held a screening round to winnow the field to the final 23 presenters.

“This is about the right size,” Bourassa-Shaw said. “You want the judges to see the prototypes, to engage with the students and to provide some feedback.”

The College of Engineering provided $25,000 in prototype funding for UW teams, and Washington Research Foundation donated $5,000 to fund prototypes for non-UW entrants. The Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship held a fall quarter course and optional winter-quarter resource nights.

The teams included 98 students split about evenly between undergraduates and graduates, from five colleges and universities. Each team had to be led by students from a Pacific Northwest institution.  This year's field included the first out-of-state team, from the Oregon Institute of Technology.

The grand prize of $10,000, from the UW’s Center for Commercialization, went to Green Innovative Safety Technologies (GIST), the highway lane dividers made of recycled rubber tires. Team members are UW undergraduates Hin Kei Wong in mechanical engineering, Lloyd Pasion in civil and environmental engineering and Ricky Holm in business; and civil and environmental engineering graduate student Jessica Tanumihardja.

Second prize went to Barrels of Hope, billed as a safe, affordable and environmentally friendly house built from parts that fit inside a rain barrel, to be used in emergency situations. The four UW business graduate students and one civil and environmental engineering undergraduate claimed the $5,000 prize from Puget Sound Energy.

Many other teams will pursue their ideas, even if they didn't win. EcoSel, an eBay for land management and conservation, is conducting a pilot project on the UW campus. The team for Scout Aviation’s unmanned drone aircraft, designed to perform inspections on wind-energy turbines, is talking to a major wind turbine supplier who is a former employer of one of the members. Vampp has submitted an app to the Apple store that consumers could buy to tame the so-called “vampire appliances” that consume power even while in sleep mode.

Last year, Schwartz advised a graduate student team, Carbon Cultures, that turns forestry waste into fertilizer; this year he advised an undergraduate team, OmniOff, which developed a nontoxic alternative to Teflon nonstick coatings.

This year was an experiment, Schwartz said, on how to offer this experience to more students.

“I need to figure out how to make it scalable, to offer it to maybe a quarter to a half of our students as an alternative to our traditional design coursework,” he said.  To do that, Schwartz is considering establishing an alumni innovation fund, or providing graduate students with time to advise undergraduate student teams.

Schwartz's team, OmniOff, won an honorable mention and a $2,500 prize. The other two honorable mentions went to UrbanHarvest, which proposes to grow hydroponic vegetables on commercial buildings’ rooftops; and LumiSands, which developed a nanoparticle-based coating to improve the quality of LED light.

More than 100 judges volunteered their time. Teams are judged on the quality of their prototype and pitch, as well as their potential environmental impact.

“It’s a great opportunity for the students to showcase their ideas, and it’s wonderful for the investor and the business community to learn about them,” said judge Susannah Malarkey, executive director of the Technology Alliance. “The fact that they’re required to have a prototype is fabulous."

For many teams, this is just one venue to pitch their idea. LionTail Cycles founder Henry Kellogg, a senior in mechanical engineering, has already sold a few of his solar-powered electric bike conversion kits. His team plans to travel to California in April for CalTech’s First Look West competition, and to enter the UW’s Business Plan Competition in May.

“I love this competition,” said UW alumnus Daniel Rossi, executive director of the Northwest Entrepreneur Network, whose team placed second the 2009 competition. “It forces us to find a hole in the clean-tech market, and plug it with a solution.”

UW Information Technology recently completed its survey of technology use and attitudes among faculty and students. The results provide a snapshot of where the UW is going in its use of technology and has proven helpful in identifying both opportunities and obstacles. Similar surveys are conducted every three years to spot trends and identify ongoing issues.

“We’re seeing greater variety in the use of technology in classes of different sizes,” says Cara Giacomini, research manager with UW-IT. “We see students using more technology-based tools with their classmates – well beyond those assigned by their teacher.”

The survey revealed very few obstacles to access for obtaining technology. But students would like to see more places where they can plug in laptops, more consistent wireless access, and more choices among places to use mobile technology. “This is especially true of informal places on campus,” Giacomini says. “”Students want more convenient electrical outlets and more places that don’t become oversaturated when a bunch of students are using wireless devices.”

Faculty and TAs, for their part, would like to see more consistent classroom technology, so that as classes move from one room to another over the course of a year the teacher can use one design for the classroom experience that works in different settings. ”They’d like more classrooms that are not only adequately equipped but also support more flexible uses of facilities,” she says. “Many classrooms are configured for one model of teaching, and using another model can require moving heavy tables, for example, to allow students to work in small groups or plug in laptops.”

Students were somewhat critical of the way faculty use technology when it comes to the availability of online information: they’d like to see all material related to a single course online in one area, preferably MyUW. “We find that standards for posting information online vary a lot from department to department,” Giacomini says.

This year, for the first time, the survey included a substantial group of researchers. The survey showed that the key issue for faculty across a broad range of disciplines is data management. As datasets grow – whether in science, engineering or in humanities fields such as art history – the increasing need for storage is creating challenges. Most researchers are still addressing these needs by adding storage on their own personal computer. Faculty typically rely on local support – from a departmental expert or from colleagues – when they have questions.

The study also reconfirms a fact, that faculty frequently bring their research into the classroom. “Today’s technology raises some intriguing possibilities for using the same technology that faculty are using for collaboration among their peers and incorporating into classroom instruction,” Giacomini says.

The survey revealed no major obstacles for faculty and students acquiring knowledge about how to use technology: Both groups rated themselves relatively high in mastery. Most feel very comfortable with their ability to understand the “how to” of technology, but the survey suggests much less confidence in addressing the issue of “when and why,” Giacomini says.

The entire survey is available at http://www.washington.edu/lst/research/research_projects/2011techsurveys.

The Greenroads Foundation made the award last month to the Meador Kansas Ellis Trail project, which was recognized for doing things such as using low-energy LED streetlights, managing storm water with porous concrete, and accommodating cyclists and pedestrians.

A toilet seat plaque embedded in the completed sidewalk.

City of Bellingham

When project engineer Freeman Anthony with the City of Bellingham heard that a local nonprofit was replacing hundreds of toilets, he called up his regular ready-mix concrete company.

"They said: 'Yeah, I think we can do something with that,'" Anthony said. "'We'll throw it through the crusher and see what we come up with.'"

The project ended up using about 5 tons of toilets, roughly a quarter of the volume in one section of the sidewalk. Perhaps a bigger achievement is that the project incorporated as much as 80 tons of recycled concrete in sidewalks, curbs and gutters, and pushed the roadway asphalt's recycled content up to 30 percent. Overall, it qualified for a Greenroads silver certification.

Greenroads aims to offer a roadway equivalent to the popular LEED rating system used for green buildings. Principal investigator Stephen Muench, a UW associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, said Greenroads is the only roadway accreditation system that is actively certifying projects.

Jeralee Anderson and Steve Muench present a Greenroads silver plaque to Freeman Anthony, a project engineer with the City of Bellingham.

"It's a big milestone for us," said Jeralee Anderson, who this week defends her UW doctoral work developing the Greenroads system. The certification, she noted, marks the culmination of many years of work.

After first unveiling the rating system in 2010, the team worked with the UW's Center for Commercialization to launch a nonprofit company based in Redmond. The company is the caretaker of the Greenroads Rating System and provides independent, third-party certification of sustainable roadway projects. The foundation has sponsorship from eight companies in the transportation and construction industries.

Anderson acts as executive director of the Greenroads Foundation, and former UW master's student Craig Weiland works as the principal project engineer.

The Bellingham road is the first official Greenroad, but dozens of projects have already been case studies for the research team. Those evaluations offered informal feedback on a project's sustainability while helping the team design a rating system that gave meaningful results without requiring an excessive amount of paperwork.

Over the next few months, Anderson and Muench estimate they will certify at least three more roads. The 12 projects now under contract include eight in Washington and one each in California, Colorado, Nevada and Texas. The foundation is negotiating with managers for another 10 to 20 projects that would like to pursue certification.

"I'm really happy where we're at with the Greenroads Foundation. I think the number of projects we're reviewing is about right," said Muench, who's currently on sabbatical leave and contributing time to the nonprofit. "I'd like that number to grow in the next year, and I think it will."

A number of international collaborations are under way. Closest to completion, Muench said, is a project that would establish a rating system tailored to South African roadways and then apply those methods to South African projects.

The foundation also is developing an accreditation process for people to become certified experts on the Greenroads system. That program is expected to launch late this year.

On the research side, Muench currently works with a half-dozen other students on sustainable roadways. One doctoral student is developing a framework for a rating standard that would work for any country in the world. Another doctoral student is creating a simple energy and greenhouse gas calculator specifically tailored to road projects that will be made available as a free online tool.

UW research contributing to Greenroads is funded by Transportation Northwest, the State Pavement Technology Consortium, the Western Federal Lands Highway Division and the Oregon Department of Transportation.

"I think Greenroads has really done a great job of building a comprehensive assessment for building better roads, I don't think you'll find a better one out there," Anthony said. "I really hope to see it flourish."

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For more information, contact Muench at stmuench@uw.edu or 206-616-1259.

See also Greenroads press release: "Greenroads Foundation certifies world's first Greenroad"

University of Washington scientists say the event has some important lessons for the Pacific Northwest – most notably, not that a similar event can happen here but that it WILL happen here, and that this region is still much less prepared than Japan was a year ago.

An aerial view of Minato, Japan, one week after a magnitude 9 earthquake and subsequent tsunami devastated the area in March 2011.

U.S. Marine Corp

When the quake struck, Jody Bourgeois, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences and an expert on tsunamis, was working with colleagues at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, on Japan’s northern island. She was perhaps 300 miles from where the quake started, yet the shaking was so intense that she became physically ill from the motion.

“I was in a safe place, and I knew I was in a safe place, but to feel this prolonged shaking – it had to be three minutes, at least. And for the first several hours we didn’t know how big it was,” Bourgeois recalled.

It turned out to be very big, a magnitude 9, one of the five most powerful earthquakes ever recorded. Scientists believe a giant quake of the same magnitude struck the Cascadia subduction zone off the coast of Oregon, Washington, British Columbia and northern California in January 1700, though there were no instruments to record it.

But as big as the Japan quake was, most people still survived, Bourgeois said, “and for reasons of preparedness.”

“Even the most prepared country was not up to this major tsunami,” she said. “The Pacific Northwest coast has made a lot of progress (in the last 20 years), but there’s a lot more that can be done.”

She noted that various engineering solutions have been undertaken to protect the Japanese from tsunamis, including large walls along the shoreline.

In some places tsunami waves reached higher than 100 feet, and in some they traveled inland as far as 6 miles. Engineering mitigation solutions helped in some areas, and in others they made matters worse.

Bourgeois related the story of a group of Japanese students in their early teens who had been drilled on what to do in a major earthquake and an ensuing tsunami. When the shaking hit, they gathered up elementary school students and began making their way to higher ground, collecting stragglers as they went. Then they realized the spot they had picked, the one that was part of their drills, was not high enough and they moved twice more to reach safety.

In the Northwest, she noted, there are areas of particular vulnerability – places like Ocean Shores and the Long Beach Peninsula – where there is little chance of getting to high ground in time to escape an onrushing tsunami.

An aerial view of Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force personnel and disaster relief crews searching Sukuiso, Japan, for victims of a magnitude 9 earthquake and subsequent tsunami.

U.S. Navy

She endorses suggestions from scientists and emergency managers that those communities need to invest in evacuation towers where people can flee following a coastal earthquake, or else accept the fact that many people will die. She also advocates regular drills for tsunami evacuation, something that now occurs in only a few places.

“No one likes to think about disaster all the time, but it’s not hard to have drills,” Bourgeois said.

Such drills shouldn’t be restricted to the coast. The Puget Sound region also can be vulnerable to tsunamis generated from large earthquakes on the Seattle fault or a number of other faults that criss-cross the region. In her research, Bourgeois has explored sedimentary evidence for tsunamis in various areas around the Sound, including several sloughs in the Everett area.

Yet she notes that tsunami evacuation signs, fairly common along the Pacific Coast, are seldom if ever seen in the Puget Sound area. Signs alerting people to the danger are good, she said, but education is even more important.

“I don’t even think people in the Seattle area are aware a tsunami can happen here. If you are on the beach at Alki (in West Seattle) and experience an earthquake, you should be aware that when the shaking stops it isn’t necessarily over,” she said.

Another lesson from Japan is to be prepared for the possibility that nearly an entire fault could break at one time, a dangerous prospect, said John Vidale, an Earth and space sciences professor and director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network. Because emergency managers in Japan did not understand that possibility, they were prepared only for a magnitude 8 earthquake from the fault that ruptured. The resulting quake released 32 times more energy.

He noted that the UW is part of a collaboration to build an earthquake early warning system along the West Coast, but that in the 2011 quake Japan’s early warning system proved to be seriously outdated because it relied exclusively on seismometer readings.

“GPS is the better tool but it was not in routine use when the early warning system was designed and it hadn’t been incorporated at the time of the 2011 earthquake,” Vidale said.

In addition, he said, the danger from the shallow part of the subduction zone was greatly underestimated. Scientists thought that area didn’t bear any strain, but during the quake the shallowest part of the fault moved as much as 260 feet, displacing a huge amount of sea water.

“Our confidence in making specific predictions about the details of impending earthquakes has been shaken,” Vidale said.

He also noted that the earthquake was uncommon, possibly the most powerful to strike Japan in 1,000 years. Preparing for such an event is extremely costly, Vidale said, and the United States “is not nearly so prepared, and rather is gambling to save money.”

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A team of more than 40 students is competing in the EcoCAR 2 competition, an international contest sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and General Motors Co.

Over the next 2 1/2 years the students will take a 2013 Chevy Malibu, strip out the motor and drive train, and turn it into a low-emissions vehicle with a 50-mile electric range. Once the battery runs out it turns into a hybrid with 50 mpg fuel efficiency.

UW EcoCAR team members at an April workshop in Austin, Texas. From left: Josh Wilke, Rafael Vertido, Ken Pizzini, Trevor Fayer, Nick Wilson, Trevor Crain, Tyler Rose, Rich Wurden and Michael Abowd.

The UW is one of 15 teams selected from hundreds of  hopefuls to participate in the three-year contest. After passing a series of milestones, the completed vehicles will be put through their paces at the GM proving grounds in Arizona and Michigan. Teams will be judged on their ability to design a fuel-efficient, low-emissions vehicle that still meets consumer demands for a driver-friendly car.

Some schools, like Purdue, Penn State and Ohio State universities, have a long tradition of entering automotive contests. While the UW competes in the Formula SAE contest, this is its first time entering a competition to design and build a consumer vehicle, which members say involves a very different set of design constraints and tools.

“We’re building the facilities from the ground up, which is a whole new set of challenges,” said Tyler Rose, a UW MBA student and the team’s outreach coordinator.

Trevor Fayer and Trevor Crain, both first-year master’s students in mechanical engineering, are the technical leads. They first got involved in automotive research through a senior-level mechanical engineering capstone design project that became known as Voltaic Drive Systems, the winning entry in the Foster School of Business’ 2011 Environmental Innovation Challenge.

Mechanical engineering professors Brian Fabien and Per Reinhall encouraged Fayer and Crain to submit an entry for the EcoCAR challenge; the two faculty members now act as the team’s co-advisers.

The EcoCAR 2 team’s membership is mostly different from the Voltaic team, and it will try a completely different technical approach. Team leaders have recruited roughly 35 engineering students and five business students so far.

“This is really a student-led competition,” Fabien said. “The faculty advisers are just that. Once in a while we get in the lab and tinker with the toys, but it’s incredible how the students have just risen to the challenge and taken over.”

The team is installing a hydraulic vehicle lift, an auto machine shop, and a network of computers equipped with the same computer-automated design tools that GM uses to design its cars. These will belong to the UW when the contest is over. The team hopes the facility, which it’s calling the UW Advanced Vehicle Technology Research Lab, will allow UW students to conduct more research on alternative vehicles.

General Motors engineering mentor Michael Abowd (3rd from left) presents the $25,000 EcoCAR 2 seed money. From left: UW professors Brian Fabien and Per Reinhall; Abowd; team members Tyler Rose, Trevor Fayer and Trevor Crain.

Competition sponsors provided $25,000 of startup funds, which was matched by the UW’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. Now the team is looking for local sponsors to provide cash and in-kind donations for the construction phase.

The UW’s vehicle design, unveiled last week, is a plug-in hybrid that incorporates both an electric motor and a small backup diesel motor.

“Instead of having all of your drive train under the hood, you have an electric motor on the rear wheels and a gas motor on the front wheels,” Fayer explained. “You can use them separately or combined, in unique fashions, and gain some efficiencies. They’re linked through the road rather than directly to each other in a gear train.”

The UW team consults about once a week with partners at GM and the Department of Energy, and members travel to five-day workshops several times a year.

The contest acts as a recruiting tool for automobile manufacturers. Over the 10 such contests sponsored by the Energy Department, some 98 percent of the thousands of students involved have gone on to work in the automotive industry, Fayer said, and the pattern is likely to continue.

“We went to a workshop with eight students, and we came back with six job and internship offers,” Fayer said.

Since last fall’s kickoff, the UW team has focused on designing its energy-storage system. When the vehicle arrives this summer, students will start dismantling the car and installing new parts. In a little more than a year they expect to have a fully functioning, licensed automobile.

“It’s been a whirlwind up until now,” Rose said, “but when we get the vehicle, things are really going to take off.”

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For more information, contact Rose at 310-699-2323 or mtylerrose@gmail.com.

A group of University of Washington researchers has launched a unique experiment matching science students with those in design. The new Design Help Desk, similar to a writing help desk, offers scientists a chance to meet with someone who can help them create more effective figures, tables and graphs.

“In modern publications, up to half of the space can be taken up by figures,” said principal investigator Marco Rolandi, a UW assistant professor of materials science and engineering. His group studies materials at the nanometer scale, and much of the data is ultimately contained in microscope images.

“As a new faculty member, I was spending a lot of time teaching my students how to make figures for publications, even though I myself didn’t have any formal training,” Rolandi said.

It was a case of the blind leading the blind, he said. Rolandi sought out collaborators on campus, and eventually funding from the National Science Foundation, to create support that until now didn’t exist – and to study how well it works.

The free service runs Mondays and Wednesdays from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Center for Nanotechnology offices in Fluke Hall. It’s primarily aimed at graduate students in science and engineering, but is open to anybody at the UW who needs help with graphs, figures or other material that conveys complex information.

“We are becoming a more visual culture,” says Karen Cheng, a UW associate professor of design (who also completed a bachelor’s in chemical engineering). Still, most science visuals “could use significant improvement from a visual point of view,” she said. “It’s just not a field where design has been part of the training.”

This hasn’t always been the case. In Galileo’s time, scientists were also trained in art. These days, scientists often produce a graph using Microsoft Excel or PowerPoint’s default settings – which might look fine to them, but may have fundamental design problems.

Meanwhile, even journals are focusing on the importance of figures, often asking authors to improve them before publication.

“It’s not just about looking pretty. It’s about conveying complex information in a clear way,” Cheng said.

The Design Help Desk also is a study funded by the National Science Foundation about how to better communicate science.

Postdoctoral researcher Yeechi Chen (left) poses as a client meeting with design graduate student Andrew Salituri. As Salituri sketches out design ideas, a video camera records the interaction for use in the group's study.

Mary Levin, UW Photography

“We want to see whether learning how to design figures and arrange visual elements in space might help scientists better understand or conceptualize what they are trying to communicate,” Rolandi explained. “That’s actually quite novel, because there aren’t many examples of research where the interaction between scientists and designers is observed.”

Clients who arrive for a session at the Design Help Desk are first greeted by postdoctoral researcher Yeechi Chen, who earned her doctorate in physics at the UW and has completed a UW certificate course in natural science illustration. Chen can act as an intermediary between the scientist and the designer, and reassure new clients that scientists are involved in the project.

During the half-hour session, the scientist client and design consultant are alone in the room. The designer first asks the scientist about his or her goals – timeline, stage in the design process, publication venue, and main points to convey. The designers typically use pen and paper to sketch out their ideas.

The session is videotaped for use in the group’s study, if the client agrees. One camera records the face-to-face interaction, while a second camera on the ceiling records the sketching and hand movements.

In a typical session, Andrew Salituri, a UW master’s student in design, or Kinsey Gross, the other design consultant, works to help scientists bring some clarity to the complex information. They try to impart some basic design principles, and create a visual hierarchy so that many elements can be included without having clutter.

Andrew Salituri (left), a graduate student in design, Kieran O'Mahony (center), a postdoctoral researcher in materials science with a background in education research, and Yeechi Chen (right), a postdoc in materials science with a background in physics, are on the UW team studying data visualization. The white poster is a nanotechnology poster designed by a UW art student.

Mary Levin, UW Photography

Kieran O’Mahony, a UW postdoctoral researcher in materials science and engineering with a background in education research, will analyze the video and study the interactions between the designers and the scientists. He’s looking for "aha!" moments, where knowledge is being transferred. One of the goals of the grant is to see whether this type of setting helps transmit design skills to scientists, and to find out how scientists learn about design.

The team hopes to discover what techniques work best to support classes or workshops teaching design skills to scientists, and at the same time provide a service to science students.

“There are some excellent writing centers at the university,” Rolandi said. “It seems strange to have support just for writing, because writing is only half of the story.”

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For more information, contact Rolandi at 206-221-0309 or rolandi@uw.edu and Cheng at 206-685-2773 or kcheng@uw.edu.

The incubator is one key element in a larger commercialization initiative announced by President Michael Young today that will double the number of startups produced by the UW – from an average of 10 a year to 20 – during the next three years.

Renuka Prahabakar talks about her firm Envitrum – one of the first startups that will take advantage of the business incubator space – with the Center for Commercialization’s Merina Bigley and Xconmy reporter Curt Woodward.

Mary Levin/U of Washington

The UW Center for Commercialization New Ventures Facility, which opened today, showcases the UW’s commitment to spinning out an increasing number of companies built around UW research. The incubator will be led by the UW Center for Commercialization New Ventures program and is located in UW’s Fluke Hall.

The space will initially host 15 companies and when finished will have space for 25 startups, providing 11,500 square feet of lab space and 11,500 square feet of office space.

Among the first UW startup companies occupying the space will be:

• Nexgenia – A company using polymer-based nanotechnology that improves the speed and sensitivity of clinical laboratory tests for the diagnosis of infectious diseases, cancer and metabolic disorders.
• Envitrum – A startup with a process that converts low-value waste glass into versatile green building materials.
• VIxim – A company developing scalable simulation software for cloud environments including SimX for computation-based encryption and WaveSearch for accelerated graph diffusion.

“The opening of this new incubator signals our commitment to strengthening entrepreneurship at the UW,” Young said. “We’ve been providing the mentorship and are now going the next step in providing the space for faculty and students to work alongside highly successful and experienced Washington entrepreneurs on UW spin-outs.”

An invited guest talks with the Center for Commercialization’s Maren Ohaks, associate director of New Ventures, and Linden Rhoads, UW vice provost for commercialization.

Mary Levin/U of Washington

The UW has fostered university-based innovations to help create more than 260 companies in Washington state. Young hopes to strengthen that position in the future with a renewed focus on fostering the entrepreneurial spirit.

“We all want to see National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health research result in tremendous new therapies and treatments,” said Young. “The reality is that commercialization is a major undertaking that requires space, capital, expertise and passion. We want UW to be the best place in the world to do research. We want researchers doing the important work in key translational areas to choose to come to UW and stay here.”

The UW is dedicated to maximizing its contribution to the Washington state economy by spinning out innovations in life sciences, clean technology, alternative energy and information technology. The UW incubator will help increase the quantity and quality of Washington technology companies by priming some of the most promising UW early-stage startups for outside investment and success.

“An on-campus facility is just critical,” said Linden Rhoads, UW vice provost for commercialization. “Housed here, a startup’s product development team has a much better chance of interacting with the UW faculty and graduate students who originally conceived the core technology or concept. In addition, a major goal is lowering the overall cost of product development by leveraging university expertise and infrastructure.”

UW technology startups are a major driver for the state’s economy. These startups have the potential for high growth. They create jobs and offer careers to Washington citizens.  Moreover, they pay state taxes, attract outside investment, increase exports and spawn even more entrepreneurial activity both inside and outside the university.

UW President Michael Young at the grand opening of the business incubator launched by the UW’s Center for Commercialization, or C4C.

Mary Levin/U of Washington

Companies that will occupy the New Ventures Facility are spin-outs that the Center for Commercialization deems as having significant commercial promise. Often, they are the incorporation of projects that have worked closely with the center for several years, following a program-based process that culminates in producing spin-outs.

“You can’t overestimate the value of the synergy that comes from working alongside other entrepreneurial teams, even just operationally,” said Thomas Schulte, president of UW startup Nexgenia. “A company may be developing an entirely different kind of product, but it still has to figure out how to market the product, who to retain for intellectual property counsel, how to attract outside funding. Having Internet access, standard office equipment and meeting space all included, saves us money and a lot of distractions from advancing our new venture.”

The new incubator joins the ranks of technology startup incubators at peer research institutions including those at the MIT, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin, Georgia Tech, UC San Diego and University of Utah.

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For more information:
Reach Rhoads via Debbie Woo, communications, 206-616-9540, woodeb@uw.edu
Woo also has contact information for spokesmen of startups VIxim, Nexgenia and Envitrum, which are among the first to join the incubator

Patrick Shelby, director of UW’s New Ventures, introduces Vikram Jandhyala chair of UW electrical engineering department and co-founder of VIxim, one of the first startups negotiating for space in the New Ventures Facility.

Mary Levin/U of Washington

The researchers found that the wall of the aorta, the largest blood vessel carrying blood from the heart, exhibits ferroelectricity, a response to an electric field known to exist in inorganic and synthetic materials. The findings are being published in an upcoming issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.

Electrical response overlaid on the inner aortic wall.

Jiangyu Li, UW

“The result is exciting for scientific reasons,” said lead author Jiangyu Li, a UW associate professor of mechanical engineering. “But it could also have biomedical implications.”

A ferroelectric material is an electrically polar molecule with one side positively charged and the other negatively charged, whose polarity can be reversed by applying an electrical field.

Ferroelectricity is common in synthetic materials and used for displays, memory storage, and sensors. (Related research by Li and colleagues seeks to exploit ferroelectric materials for tiny low-power, high-capacity computer memory chips.)

In the new study, Li collaborated with co-author Katherine Zhang at Boston University to explore the phenomenon in biological tissues. The only previous evidence of ferroelectricity in living tissue was reported last year in seashells. Others had looked in mammal tissue, mainly in bones, but found no signs of the property.

The new study shows clear evidence of ferroelectricity in a sample of a pig aorta.  Researchers believe the findings would also apply to human tissue.

In subsequent work, yet to be published, they divided the sample into fibrous collagen and springy elastin and studied each one on its own. Pinpointing the source of the ferroelectricity may answer questions about how or whether it plays a role in the body.

“The elastin network is what gives the artery the mechanical property of elasticity, which of course is a very important function,” Li said.

Ferroelectricity may therefore play a role in how the body responds to sugar or fat.

Diabetes is a risk factor for hardening of the arteries, or atherosclerosis, which can lead to heart attack or stroke. The team is investigating the interactions between ferroelectricity and charged glucose molecules, in hopes of better understanding sugar’s effect on the mechanical properties of the aortic walls.

Another possible application is to treat a condition in which cholesterol molecules stick to the inside of the channel, eventually closing it off.

“We can imagine if we could manipulate the polarity of the artery wall, if we could switch it one way or the other, then we might, for example, better understand the deposition of cholesterol which leads to the thickening and hardening of the artery wall,” Li said.

He cautions that medical applications are still speculations, and require more research.

“A lot of questions remain to be answered, that’s an exciting aspect of the result,” Li said.

Co-authors are Yuanming Liu and Qian Nataly Chen at the UW, and Yanhang Zhang and Ming-Jay Chow at Boston University.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Army Research Office, the UW’s Center for Nanotechnology and a NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship.

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

See also an American Institute of Physics article about the finding and an American Physical Society commentary about the research.