If you ask Emma Luke ’19 and Owen Clinger ’17 to name the classes that have had the most direct impact on their lives, Communicating Your Professional Identity would be high on that list.

The 2-credit course, limited to 15 students per section, teaches real-life communication skills and strategies to help students present their best professional selves—and to use those skills and strategies to develop fulfilling careers.

Feedback from peers, instructors, and volunteer Real Readers—alumni professionals who can provide a real-world perspective—is a key part of the class. Often Real Readers offer valuable experiences and connections as well.

For example, when Luke was an undergraduate studying biomedical engineering, her Real Reader, Daniel Shedd ’12, provided connections for her to spend a summer as a research assistant at the University of Utah. Moreover, Luke says the resume skills and elevator pitch she developed in the class were “very useful” in applying to graduate school at Utah, where she is pursuing a PhD in biomedical engineering. “I continue to develop and use these skills at conferences and when networking,” she adds.

Clinger, who studied biochemistry and is pursuing a medical degree at the University of Pittsburgh, says, “The course gave me an opportunity to explore and practice professional writing, including how to critically think about the message that you’re sending while tailoring it to your audience, in a way that I don’t think I would have had otherwise.” His instructor, Katherine Schaefer, “went above and beyond to help me even after the course ended,” adds Clinger, who plans to pursue ophthalmology research in academia.

Out of gratitude for the skills and mentoring they received—and a desire to pay those skills forward—both Luke and Clinger are now serving as Real Readers themselves.

Writing pedagogy, career theory, and support from University stakeholders

Communicating Your Professional Identity—WRTG 273—was the brainchild of Robert Clark, former dean of the University’s . His contacts in the private sector told Clark that many college graduates lacked basic skills needed to apply for jobs and internships, such as preparing resumes, and even knowing what to wear and how to conduct themselves during interviews.

A class that could equip students with those skills would not only better prepare students but also give them an advantage in the competition for jobs, internships, and graduate school, Clark believed.

In 2012, he brought the idea to the and to Richard Feldman, then dean of the College. Feldman endorsed the idea and suggested that they tap into the resources of the University’s , whose faculty design and teach the undergraduate primary writing course and offer tutoring in written and oral communications to undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty. There , professor and founding executive director of the program; , lead instructor; and , associate professor, codeveloped the classes.

Jones recalls “coming in once a week on lunch hour to meet with Deb and Catherine to learn the writing pedagogy that we needed in order to design the course very quickly. We were sort of building the plane while we were flying it.”

Initially, a single section was offered as an elective for engineering students in the spring of 2013. But Clark’s goal had always been to make the course mandatory. He sought and won permission from the University’s curriculum committee to phase in the requirement for all Hajim School undergraduates.

“The ramp up was incredibly challenging,” Rossen-Knill says. “We had to find an administrative means to manage a course that had not only many students, but also enough Real Readers to mentor one to two students each, as well as a database where students could learn about and select their Real Readers.”

She credits Andrew Holderbaum, developer and database administrator for WSAP, for helping to overcome those challenges, and for “working very closely with us to meet educational goals.”

From there, the professional identity course took off. Starting in 2015, a similar WSAP course previously created for biology students became part of the program as WRTG 272. Additional sections were created for students in psychology (WRTG 274), math (WRTG 275), political science and international relations (WRTG 276), and, most recently, a cross-disciplinary section (WRTG 277) in 2018.

This academic year, 522 students will take the course. The participation of Real Reader volunteers has grown apace to 240 a semester. Meanwhile, Jones and Towsley have showcased the course nationally, through presentations at professional and academic career development and writing conferences.

“It truly is a unique course in how it brings together writing pedagogy, career and life design, and campus stakeholders, such as the Greene Center, which remains an important partner,” Jones says.

Wendi Heinzelman, dean of the Hajim School, is equally enthusiastic.

“WRTG 273 is a unique and important class for our students,” she says. “I am especially proud of the Real Readers program. I hear from students all the time how beneficial this class and their Real Readers have been for helping them advance in their careers.”

Students explore multiple professional identities

During college, “most students concentrate on developing a student identity,” Rossen-Knill says. “There is not a lot of space for developing a professional identity. And even when there is, students often come in and say they want to be ‘X,’ a singular professional identity.

“One of the goals of this class from the outset was to help students recognize that there can be many different professional identities within a given field,” she says.

Mechanical engineering graduates, for example, might go into academia as faculty members. Or they might enter industry as engineers designing and creating products, or work in management or purchasing.

Real Readers can play an important role in helping students think about all the possibilities ahead of them, Jones says: “A Real Reader is often the student’s first foray into this idea that you can do anything with your major.”

Real Readers help in other ways as well. Clinger, for example, notices that students often fail to make the most of their cover letters and personal statements. “Their writing is often a recitation of their resume or CV that doesn’t let us see them more deeply as people,” Clinger says. “That’s probably the number one thing that I try to help them with, is to open up and be more personable.”

Treating your career as a journey

Clinger, Luke, and Ben Stevens ’01, ’02 (MS), who has been Real Reader since the program began, say they also help students address a host of anxieties associated with deciding their next step.

For example, should I take a job or apply to graduate school?

Luke advises students to “really think about their long-term career goals before committing to attending graduate school. It is a long, hard process and enthusiasm and drive to conduct research are essential when pursuing a PhD,” she notes.

Stevens says there are plenty of options to pursue in industry that don’t require a PhD. “And if you do that for a couple of years, and then decide to go back for a PhD, you might find a much better graduate program because university researchers often prefer a student with industry experience,” he says.

What if I make the wrong choice?

Stevens, a director of chemistry, manufacturing, and controls (CMC) policy and advocacy for GSK, has worked for several companies since graduating.

“I try to walk students through the fact that—myself being a perfect example—our career is often more of a journey than a destination. It’s always good to have an idea of what you want to do, but it’s usually not going to be your final step.”

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When optical beams, consisting of photons, travel through fibers, they cause vibrations that generate acoustic waves, consisting of phonons. The phenomenon, called Brillouin scattering, has been harnessed by researchers to optomechanically “couple” acoustic waves with light waves. This coupling allows information carried by photons to be transduced, or converted, to the phonons, which travel nearly a million times more slowly than light waves.

Opto-acoustic coupling has enabled researchers to read and manipulate the transduced information more easily. To date, however, many of the Brillouin scattering techniques researchers have used rely on standard fiber geometries that cause acoustic waves to die out quickly, limiting the efficacy of the coupling.

Now, using an optical fiber with a micron-sized waist, researchers have demonstrated how to couple propagating optical waves and long-lived acoustic waves, with strong optical-acoustic��interactions.

“This is a unique and desirable combination that has not previously been achieved,” says Wendao Xu, a PhD candidate in the research group of , assistant professor at Rochester’s . Xu is the lead author of a describing the breakthrough.

The breakthrough enables information carried by a light pulse to be temporarily stored in slowly propagating acoustic waves long enough for a second pulse of light to “read” the information. The achievement could have applications for light storage, radio-frequency photonics filtering, and optical delay lines.

The research received Best Presentation Award at the WOMBAT 2022 Workshop on Optomechanics and Brillouin Scattering at the , where it was presented by coauthor Arjun Iyer, also a PhD candidate in .

“Wendao, Arjun, and our collaborators at the University of Tokyo did a great job in demonstrating the promise of this new platform and we are all excited as we begin focusing on next generation devices and real-world applications,” Renninger says.

Brillouin scattering in optical fibers: overcoming challenges

“The amplitude of the acoustic wave keeps decreasing as it travels,” Xu explains. “Basically, all the high-impact Brillouin scattering that people are dealing with right now produce strong interactions, but the acoustic waves are high in frequency, in the gigahertz range. The higher the frequency, the shorter the wave can actually travel before it dies out.”

Xu’s tapered optical fiber device achieves both strong interactions and longer acoustic lifetimes. It consists of a multi-mode glass fiber with the cladding (coating) removed. By heating the center of the fiber and simultaneously applying mechanical tension to stretch the fiber at both ends, Xu and his collaborators produced a tightly confined, symmetrical “waist” in the fiber.

This waist provides “an ideal optomechanical overlap yielding the strongest Brillouin coupling strengths observed to date from a fiber taper, and comparable to the largest optomechanical coupling strength for any system,” the paper notes.

Moreover, the lifetime of the phonons that the device generates—about 2 microseconds—is long enough that information carried by a light pulse can be temporarily stored in this slowly propagating acoustic wave for a relatively long period of time, before a second pulse of light reads the information.

A tapered optical fiber device

According to Iyer, Xu’s achievement is twofold. “One is the system, the tapered fiber device, which supports an acoustic wave family that people didn’t pay a lot of attention to previously,” he says. “The other is the process itself, using an interaction between two different optical spatial modes to get what we wanted.”

The process—including the physics involved in achieving strong interactions with long phonon lifetimes—could be adapted and applied immediately to improve existing technologies, he says. For example, detecting and filtering out unwanted radio frequencies in photonic filters, or producing fiber-optic transmission delays to compensate for delay differences in optical fiber systems.

The tapered fiber system, on the other hand, while useful for research, is likely too fragile for real world applications outside the lab, Iyer says. “These are micron-sized filaments of glass that are just hanging there,” he says.

However, the researchers are already exploring ways to package the system for real world applications, Iyer says.

Other collaborators include Lei Jin and Sze Y. Set at the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Tokyo. The research was supported with funding from the Ģ����ý and National Science Foundation. The Ģ����ý’s Integrated Nanosystems Center provided expertise and assistance with the SEM (scanning electron microscope) characterization of the taper device.

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Silicon, the standard semiconducting material used in a host of applications—computer central processing units (CPUs), semiconductor chips, detectors, and solar cells—is an abundant, naturally occurring material. However, it is expensive to mine and to purify.

Perovskites—a family of materials nicknamed for their crystalline structure—have shown extraordinary promise in recent years as a far less expensive, equally efficient replacement for silicon in solar cells and detectors. Now, a study led by , a professor of at the Ģ����ý, suggests perovskites may become far more efficient.

Researchers typically synthesize perovskites in a wet lab, and then apply the material as a film on a glass substrate and explore various applications

Guo instead proposes a novel, physics-based approach. By using a substrate of either a layer of metal or alternating layers of metal and dielectric material—rather than glass—he and his coauthors found they could increase the perovskite’s light conversion efficiency by 250 percent.

Their findings are reported in .

“No one else has come to this observation in perovskites,” Guo says. “All of a sudden, we can put a metal platform under a perovskite, utterly changing the interaction of the electrons within the perovskite. Thus, we use a physical method to engineer that interaction.”

Novel perovskite-metal combination creates ‘a lot of surprising physics’

Metals are probably the simplest materials in nature, but they can be made to acquire complex functions. The Guo Lab has extensive experience in this direction. The lab has pioneered a range of technologies transforming simple metals to pitch black, superhydrophilic (water-attracting), or superhydrophobic (water-repellent). The enhanced metals have been used for solar energy absorption and water purification in their recent studies.

In this new paper, instead of presenting a way to enhance the metal itself, the Guo Lab demonstrates how to use the metal to enhance the efficiency of pervoskites.

“A piece of metal can do just as much work as complex chemical engineering in a wet lab,” says Guo, adding that the new research may be particularly useful for future solar energy harvesting.

In a solar cell, photons from sunlight need to interact with and excite electrons, causing the electrons to leave their atomic cores and generating an electrical current, Guo explains. Ideally, the solar cell would use materials that��weaken the ability of the electrons to recombine with the atomic cores.

Guo’s lab demonstrated that such recombination could be substantially prevented by combining a perovskite material with either a layer of metal or a metamaterial substrate consisting of alternating layers of silver, a noble metal, and aluminum oxide, a dielectric.

The result was a significant reduction of electron recombination through “a lot of surprising physics,” Guo says. In effect, the metal layer serves as a mirror, which creates reversed images of electron-hole pairs, weakening the ability of the electrons to recombine with the holes.

The lab was able to use a simple detector to observe the resulting 250 percent increase in efficiency of light conversion.

Several challenges must be resolved before perovskites become practical for applications, especially their tendency to degrade relatively quickly. Currently, researchers are racing to find new, more stable perovskite materials.

“As new perovskites emerge, we can then use our physics-based method to further enhance their performance,” Guo says.

Coauthors include Kwang Jin Lee, Ran Wei, Jihua Zhang, and Mohamed Elkabbash, all current and former members of the Guo Lab, and Ye Wang, Wenchi Kong, Sandeep Kumar Chamoli, Tao Huang, and Weili Yu, all of the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics, and Physics in China.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Army Research Office, and the National Science Foundation supported this research.

Stela Ciko ’25 chose to attend the because of its reputation as a Tier 1 research institution.

“I knew it would offer a lot of research opportunities in whatever field I chose to study, and I wanted research to be a big part of my undergraduate experience,” says the computer science major.

She was able to start substantive work in the lab the summer after her first year.

That’s not unusual at the lab, known as ROC (“Rock”) H-C-I. Housed in the , it has given students like Ciko invaluable opportunities to apply computer science to projects that directly help people.

Sammy Potter ’25 didn’t think he would get a chance work in a research lab for at least a couple of years. Then, during his first year at the University, he met Masum Hasan through the . Hasan, a PhD student in the ROC HCI lab, was looking for someone with experience in 3D technology, something Potter had. “I jumped at the opportunity,” Potter says.

Since then, “I’ve had a great experience as an undergraduate hire,” he adds. “ROC HCI is a very friendly community, and I feel respected and that I have an equal voice.” The lab also helped him see new possibilities, giving him exposure to “a new field that I might not have considered otherwise.”

ROC HCI seeks a diverse representation of undergraduates

The Rochester Human-Computer Interaction lab is co-led by associate professor and assistant professor .

Hoque, who joined the University in 2013, gained international recognition after his at MIT demonstrated for the first time how humans could improve their face-to-face interpersonal skills with a virtual assistant. He has received multiple awards, and more than $9.6 million as a principal investigator to support a broad range of projects.

Bai, who joined the University in 2018, earned a PhD at Cambridge University and did postdoctoral work at Carnegie-Mellon. Her research includes developing learning technologies to support AI (artificial intelligence) literacy for K–12 students and teachers, assistive technology for deaf child communication, and human-AI collaboration in social reasoning.

Both place a high priority on bringing a diverse representation of undergraduates into the lab. There are multiple reasons for doing so, they say.

• The continuing underrepresentation of women and minorities in computer science hurts the field. “Imagine a lab dominated by one particular group of individuals, and not recognizing the problems that females or minorities might associate with a technology that we are developing,” Hoque says. “Or not having someone with a disability coming in and helping us understand how a technology may create more problems for them.”
• The interdisciplinary nature of the research makes it “really important for us to bring in students from a lot of backgrounds, such as psychology, brain and cognitive sciences, digital media studies, and economics,” Bai says.
• Engaging undergraduates in research helps build a pipeline to address the shortage of US students applying for PhD programs in the field.

Undergraduates at ROC HCI have coauthored papers

Human-computer interaction (HCI) is broadly defined as the design and implementation of computer technology to improve and provide novel interfaces between computers and the people who use them.

Projects that ROC HCI undergraduates have participated in include:

• Multiple interactive platforms, including and , to help individuals improve their social skills by simulating face-to-face conversations
• , an avatar to help physicians and patients communicate better, especially about end-of-life decisions
• A analyzing facial gestures to detect whether people are lying
• to elevate the creativity of social networks
• of potential cases of PTSD based on free-hand sketches
• An that can automatically screen for Parkinson’s disease using a standard webcam

These human-computer interaction projects have resulted in more than 50 publications in the last five years alone. Many include undergraduate students as coauthors.

For example, two recent ROC HCI papers—“,” presented at the 10th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), and “,” presented at the 30th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM)—received best paper nominations. More than half of the coauthors on these papers are current or former undergraduates. One of the students, Adira Blumenthal ’24 (T5), recently received an honorable mention in the Computing Research Association’s (CRA) program for 2023.

Undergraduates work closely with graduate student mentors

“I have been very impressed with the quality of undergraduate students and the commitment of our graduate students to mentor them,” Hoque says.

Day to day, students work mostly with the graduate students in charge of projects.

Ciko, for example, works with PhD student Adiba Proma on a project that involves building a where shared computational data about climate change and natural disasters from labs around the world can be gathered in one place for easy access by other researchers.

The project involves reading papers that involve machine learning, an area new to Ciko. Proma “was very good at guiding me through the entire process,” she says.

Potter works with Hasan primarily on two projects in the lab: creating a more sophisticated hand tracking system for Parkinson’s disease detection and a more versatile natural acting virtual avatar than the one used in SOPHIE for conversations with patients.

“As an undergrad I was surprised by the amount of freedom he gave me to figure things out on my own,” Potter says. “I appreciate being able to bring my own ideas to our projects.”

Luke Gerstner ’20, a data science major, joined ROC HCI to fulfill a requirement to do summer research at the University as part of his participation in the McNair Scholars program. He ended up working in the lab during his last two years at the University, contributing to a couple of published papers. One of them involved extracting facial expressions from videos to compare the expressions by gender to detect deception. Gerstner worked closely with Gazi Naven, a fellow undergraduate.

“We went through many revisions, and spent some late nights working in the lab, working with graduate students, and getting feedback from Ehsan on the paper. It was a really great project. And a great learning experience,” Gerstner says.

Gerstner is now a data scientist and software engineer with Rosen USA, part of an international company that specializes in inspection devices for pipelines and other complex technical systems.

Weekly ROC HCI team meetings provide another valuable learning experience for undergraduates.

Caleb Wohn ’22, now an implementation consultant at Fast Enterprise LLC, says, “I think I learned even more from the weekly lab meetings and especially the paper readings, where a grad student would present a paper relevant to the lab’s research and explain all its important concepts and lessons.”

And, he adds, “I learned how to communicate in the research community.”

The academy or industry?

Just as an internship can help students decide if want to pursue careers in industry, a research experience can similarly help someone determine if they foresee a future in academia.

Blumenthal, for example, was attracted to the lab because of her interest in accessibility and assistive technologies. One of her projects involved interviewing 177 people with Parkinson’s disease, asking if they would approve of the use of filters to remove the tremors from their body or voice during videoconferencing, and whether this would raise ethical concerns.

However, despite having won an award for a paper, she often felt there was not enough time to broaden the scope and potential impact of projects, because of pressure to get papers published quickly. She plans to look for a job as a software engineer either in the production of assistive technology or in making general products more accessible.

Still, the opportunity to talk directly to people with Parkinson’s about their concerns and involve them in the development process was “meaningful and impactful, and something that will be really important going forward,” Blumenthal says.

Skills ‘you can’t get from a class, or even an internship’

Wohn has already experienced how skills he gained at ROC HCI translate to private industry.

“I just finished working on a report that is automatically generated for users, showing information they need to make decisions and work through certain processes,” he says. “This project was pretty much exactly like what I did for the SOPHIE project.”

In both projects, he met with experts in a non-technical field to figure out how he could build a tool that would provide them with useful information. “Communicating with non-technical people, interpreting feedback, and presenting my work turned out to be extremely useful skills I learned from working with the lab.”

There’s one more life lesson he learned there. Projects in the lab usually take months, sometimes even a year or more to complete. They entail patience and planning many undergraduates don’t practice anywhere else.

Says Wohn: “When you’re an active participant in planning out a project and have to consider things a year or two years down the line, that’s something you can’t get from a class, or even an internship.”

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“Why the Russian Military Is Bogged Down by Logistics.” “Allies Fail to Agree on Sending Tanks to Ukraine.”

These recent headlines underscore the importance of logistics in warfare. Which weapons and supplies are needed? In what quantity? And equally importantly, what is the most economical way to get these supplies to the right places, and at the right times, to soldiers in front lines spread over hundreds, even thousands of miles?

A team of Ģ����ý electrical and computer engineers believe their invention—a simple computing device like no other—can help solve military logistic optimization problems in complex battles in the future.

To that end, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense, recently awarded the researchers a —one that could total $6.1 million over five years—to develop two novel Ising machines.

Ising machines that outperform quantum computers?

Named after German physicist Ernst Ising, the Ising model describes how atoms in natural magnets or spin glasses assume one of two values—spin up or spin down—to arrange themselves in the lowest energy state. Ising machines are designed to mimic and further refine this process to find optimal solutions to so-called combinatorial optimization problems, which involve large numbers of competing alternatives. Moreover, in such problems, the number of possible solutions increases exponentially as the number of independent variables increases.

The machines would be tested on combinatorial optimization problems posed, for example, when supplying dozens, even hundreds of combat units, says the project’s principal investigator , a professor of electrical and computer engineering. They could also be used in many commercial applications, such as finding efficient routes for package deliveries, generating test patterns to detect faults in chips, and efficiently correcting errors for 5G wireless radios.��

Compared to conventional computers, “our devices have a much simpler architecture,” Huang says. “It can only solve these kinds of optimization problems. We cannot do Zoom calls on it. So, it’s a very special-purpose machine. But it’s extremely good at what it does.”

The devices are still in the early stages of development by the Rochester team, which includes , , , , and , also faculty members in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. One of the devices, however, has undergone extensive simulations, which show that it would solve moderately sized optimization problems several orders of magnitude faster than conventional computers—and at far less energy, Huang says.

Compared to already existing $15M quantum annealers (a type of quantum computer), the simulated device will be “dirt cheap” to build and will be compatible with already existing CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) ��integrated circuits, he adds.

Huang is confident the device will outperform even quantum computers in speed and power in solving optimization problems “at least in the current [noisy intermediate-scale quantum] era,” he says. Moreover, unlike quantum computers, which require cryogenic conditions, both devices his team proposes will operate at room temperature.

Leveraging nature’s laws of physics instead of conventional computation

Many occurrences in nature—for example, an object falling to the ground—can be modeled by writing and solving differential equations, according to Huang. “This suggests that nature itself is effectively solving these differential equations somehow,” he says.

Ising machines attempt to directly use the computation performed by nature. This is sometimes called “nature-based computing” or “physical computation.”

Various Ising machines have been developed to date, including optics-based, quantum designs. However, all of them have important practical constraints imposed by their design, Huang says. Some have only near-neighbor coupling capabilities across the various spins, also called nodes. Others use conventional computing to emulate coupling, thereby losing efficiency; yet others require elements that are hard to integrate on a chip.

The first Ising machine the Rochester team is developing is based on a . Pioneered by Huang and Ignjatovic and their former PhD students Richard Afoakwa and Yiqiao Zhang, it would provide coupling across all nodes without emulation while using elements that are easy to integrate on a chip. “I call it the world’s first Ising machine without major drawbacks,” Huang says.

At this point, the researchers have simulated the device at tens of thousands of nodes. “When you get to a very large scale—hundreds of thousands of nodes or more—we might run into a potential delay issue that could limit its performance,” Huang says.

As a more futuristic alternative, the team will also develop a second, optics-based Ising machine that Huang and Lin started to explore almost six years ago. Higher-speed optics-based machines have the potential to address critical path delay issues. However, large-scale photonic systems tend to be “more challenging to build simply because they are as yet not supported by a mature fabrication technology,” Huang says. “So, this will be more of a high-risk, long-term solution.”

A third part of the grant, headed by Huang and Mateos, involves developing software/hardware codesign to efficiently map problems to the two hardware platforms. And if fully funded, the project will support the equivalent of 12 PhD students or six PhD students and three postdoctoral associates across the researchers’ labs.

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A typical fusion experiment at the Ģ����ý’s (LLE) lasts about 3 millionths of a second. Sixty pulsed laser beams travel 216 feet to converge upon a plastic-coated ball of deuterium and tritium fuel less than 1 mm in diameter.

Ideally, this onslaught of lasers, by subjecting the fuel capsule to extreme pressure, would cause the capsule to uniformly implode at speeds reaching 360 kilometers per second, and the deuterium and tritium isotopes to fuse and ignite into a controlled burn. Instead, execution of this carefully orchestrated scheme is hindered by several complications, including instabilities and mixing between the capsule and the fuel plasmas, which are at very different temperatures and densities. These factors interfere with the laser’s ability to achieve the compression needed for ignition.

Scientists know that viscosity can be critically important in the implosion. With support of a $590,000 grant from the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, Ģ����ý researchers hope to demonstrate ways to measure—and thereby better understand—how viscosity dissipates energy in these plasmas.

According to , principal investigator and an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, the findings could lead to improvements in the design of experiments aimed at achieving fusion and a better understanding of the dynamics of warm dense matter in the formation and evolution of planets, including Earth.

Experiments will be conducted at Rochester’s Omega facility and at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University. LLE, home to the Omega facility, is the largest university-based US Department of Energy program in the nation and an international destination for training scientists to work with powerful laser systems. LLE has partnered closely on developing laser-driven implosion techniques with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Researchers at LLNL’s National Ignition Facility recently announced they were the first to achieve ignition—in effect, producing more fusion energy than the energy delivered to the target to initiate the reaction.

Researchers will test particle forcing, corrugated shock

Viscosity is a property caused by internal frictions that limit the ability of certain fluids—think of maple syrup, for example—to flow easily. The viscosity of maple syrup or other fluids can be easily measured at ambient conditions by directly manipulating the material in benchtop experiments.

“But when we have materials that we’re shooting at on Omega, we can’t do that,” Shang says.

“And therein lies the challenge. We have to figure out ways to measure this property implicitly—by observation.”

Shang and her team will demonstrate two techniques that they hope can serve as “go-to tools” for other scientists interested in studying the role of viscosity in plasmas at high energy densities.

The first tool, particle forcing, involves placing particles in the targets used in high-energy-density experiments, then observing how they accelerate over time. “Much as if I were to throw a ball through the air, there will a combination of forces acting on the particles, some of which have a viscous effect,” Shang says. The team plans to produce an acceleration model by piecing together myriad X-ray radiography images of the particles’ motion during high-energy-density experiments.

The other approach, corrugated shock, involves measuring the profile of a rippled shock over time in high-energy-density experiments. The speed at which the ripple flattens can be measured with VISAR, an interferometry technique, and can be matched with models of how viscosity modulates a rippled shock.

“We are doing these experiments with plastics, which are used for fusion targets, and also with silica, which makes up rocky planets like Earth and others in our solar system,” Shang says.

Training a new generation of scientists on powerful laser systems

Co-principal investigators for the project are Hussein Aluie, associate professor of mechanical engineering; Riccardo Betti, LLE’s chief scientist; Danae Polsin and Ryan Rygg, also scientists at LLE; and Arianna Gleason, staff scientist at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

Two PhD students co-advised by Shang and associate professor of mechanical engineering Hussein Aluie will take lead roles in conducting the corrugated shock and particle tracking experiments. Nitish Acharya will take the lead on corrugated shock, and Afreen Syeda will perform that role with particle tracking.

Acharya has been a graduate research assistant since August 2018. Prior to that, he earned a BE degree in mechanical engineering from in Nepal, then worked with E&T Groups in that country as a mechanical engineer before coming to Rochester.

Syeda came to Rochester in fall of 2019 after she received a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering from Hyderabad and a master’s degree in aerospace engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur.

“Four or five years ago, a lot of the work they were doing was scaffolded by the co-PIs,” Shang says. “Now they’ve reached the point where we’re doing the handoff and letting our students drive the bus.”

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Four graduate students—Jeffrey Baron, Bridget Fleming, Elif Karakaya, and Christian de Mouilpied Sancto—are inaugural recipients of . Offered by the , the grants provide doctoral candidates an opportunity to conduct thesis research in archives and communities abroad.

Available to doctoral students in English, history, philosophy, and visual and cultural studies, the awards of $3,000 to $8,000 are intended to help scholars explore “the interconnected nature of our world, from climate and natural resources to trade and intellectual exchange, in the past as in the present.” The awards also stress the importance of accessing primary and unpublished source material as the “foundation of building new knowledge and promoting epistemic fidelity in the humanities.”

, the Ani & Mark Gabrellian Director of the Humanities Center, says he is “thrilled” to announce the recipients. “Between the four of them, they will be covering Europe from east to west, conducting research in Turkey, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom.”

For example, Baron, a PhD candidate in the , will conduct research at several archives in Spain to support his dissertation examining Spanish treasure law as it transformed around 1492.

“The legality of treasure excavations both before and after 1492 has left a rich documentary heritage that can provide insights into mechanisms of Spanish bureaucracy that fostered the dismantling of much of the archaeological landscape of both Iberia and pre-Columbian Latin America,” Baron writes in his prospectus. He anticipates the documents will help support his working argument that, “rather than a reckless gold frenzy, the Spanish search for wealth in colonial Latin America was overseen by a careful and deliberate process of licensing and legal authorization that evolved out of medieval treasure-hunting practices,” Baron writes.

Fleming, Karakaya, and Sancto are each PhD students in the (VCS).

Fleming studies women’s artistic and curatorial practices in art collectives in the former Yugoslavia during the postwar era. Her current research focuses on the (SKC), a collective that formed in 1968 in Belgrade, in present-day Serbia, as a result of the local student protest movement.

She will visit museums and archives and conduct interviews in Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, and Italy to better understand the “kinds of political agency that were both afforded and denied women as a result of working in a predominately male collective,” Fleming writes.

She wants to understand why female leadership at SKC left the center to work for public television in 1980, whether television was a more effective platform for expressing political agency in the public sphere, and what this contrast suggests about “art’s shifting role in Yugoslavia, especially given its��unique brand of socialism.”

Karakaya examines the displacement of the Arab, Greek, and Armenian communities that accompanied the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War, and the legacy of that displacement up to today. Her research focuses on “how these immigrants and their second- and third-generation descendants remember and memorialize their former homelands,” Karakaya writes.

She will examine photography collections, books, manuscripts, maps, and sketches, as well as interview artists or their acquaintances in France, Germany, and Greece to study the varied representation of former Ottoman towns in different visual regimes.

Sancto studies the history of environmental sound media in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He is particularly interested in how technological inventions like omnidirectional microphones, artistic movements like , new interdisciplinary concepts like soundscape, and a “burgeoning awareness of environmental degradation instigated new kinds of global dialogue among artists, musicians, scientists, and policymakers.”

He will visit France, Germany, Lithuania, England, Canada, and South Korea to consult printed texts, artworks, musical scores, correspondence, ephemera, and sound recordings.

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How do you integrate the advantages of a benchtop laser that fills a room onto a semiconductor chip ?

A research team co-led by Qiang Lin, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the , has set new milestones in addressing this challenge, with the first multi-color integrated Pockels laser that:

• Emits high-coherence light at telecommunication wavelengths
• Allows laser-frequency tuning at record speeds
• Is the first narrow linewidth laser with fast configurability at the visible band

The project, described in , was co-led by John Bowers, distinguished professor at University of California/Santa Barbara, and Kerry Vahala, professor at the California Institute of Technology. Lin Zhu, professor at Clemson University, also collaborated on the project.

The technology “has the potential to reshape the landscape of integrated photonics,” write co-lead authors Mingxiao Li, a former PhD student in Lin’s at Rochester’s , and Lin Chang, a former postdoctoral student at University of California/Santa Barbara.

It will pave the way for new applications of integrated semiconductor lasers in LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) remote sensing that is used, for example, in self-driving cars. The technology could also lead to advances in microwave photonics, atomic physics, and AR/VR.

A ‘fully on-chip laser solution’

Integrated semiconductor lasers have been at the core of integrated photonics, enabling many advances over the last few decades in information technologies and basic science.

“However, despite these impressive achievements, key functions are missing in current integrated lasers,” Li says. “Two major challenges, the lack of fast reconfigurability and the narrow spectral window, have become major bottlenecks that stall the progression of many evolving applications,” Chang adds.

The researchers say they’ve overcome these challenges by creating a new type of integrated semiconductor laser, based on the . The laser is integrated with a lithium-niobate- on-insulator platform.

The new technology includes these beneficial features:

• Fast frequency chirping, which will be invaluable in LiDAR sensor systems, which measure distance by recording the time between emission of a short pulse and reception of reflected light.
• Frequency conversion capabilities that overcome spectral bandwidth limitations of traditional integrated semiconductor lasers. This will “significantly relieve” the difficulties in developing new wavelength lasers.
• Narrow wavelength and fast reconfigurability, providing a “fully on-chip laser solution” to probe and manipulate atoms and ions in atomic physics, and benefit AR/VR and other applications at short wavelengths.

Other coauthors from Lin’s group include postdoctoral associate Yang He and graduate students Jingwei Lin, Shixin Xue, Jeremy Staffa, Raymond Lopez-Rios, and Usman Javid.

The research was supported by funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Defense Threat Reduction Agency-Joint Science and Technology Office for Chemical and Biological Defense, and the National Science Foundation.

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Rochester researchers set ‘ultrabroadband’ record with entangled photons
Engineers have taken advantage of the quantum entanglement phenomenon to generate unprecedented bandwidth and brightness on chip-sized nanophotonic devices.

Rochester leads development of novel integrated photonic COVID-19 sensor
The inexpensive, portable device could help safeguard against future pandemics and detect viruses and infections in underserved populations.

Researchers report breakthrough in miniaturizing light-based chips
A Rochester team demonstrates a new way to control light as it moves through integrated circuits, paving a research avenue in communications, computing, and photonics research.

Ten projects supported with seed funding from the this year demonstrate how machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) are transforming the way Ģ����ý researchers—across all disciplines—address challenging problems.

“I’m very excited about the wide range of collaborative projects we are able to support this year,” says Mujdat Cetin, the Robin and Tim Wentworth Director of the institute. “These projects tackle important and timely problems on data science methods and applications, and I am confident they will lead to significant research contributions and attract external funding.”

The awards, approximately $20,000 each, help researchers generate sufficient proof-of-concept findings to then attract major external funding.

This year’s projects involve collaborations among engineers, computer scientists, a historian, a biostatistician, and experts in brain and cognitive sciences, earth and environmental science, and palliative care. Their projects include a totally new kind of computing platform, new virtual reality technologies to improve doctor-patient conversations and help people overcome color vision deficiency, and machine learning techniques to make it easier for people to add music to their videos and to enhance AR/VR immersive experiences based on the unique geometry of each user’s anatomy.

The 2022–23 funded projects and their principal investigators are:

• Ising Boltzmann Substrate for Energy-Based Models
  Co-PIs: Michael Huang, professor of electrical and computer engineering and of computer science, and Gonzalo Mateos, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and of computer science and the Asaro Biggar Family Fellow in Data Science
• A Data-Driven, Virtual Reality-based Approach to Enhance Deficient Color Vision
  Co-PIs: Yuhao Zhu, assistant professor of computer science, and Gaurav Sharma, professor of electrical and computer engineering, of computer science, and of biostatistics and computational biology
• Audiovisual Integration in Virtual Reality Renderings of Real Physical Spaces
  Co-PIs: Duje Tadin, professor and chair of brain and cognitive sciences and professor of ophthalmology and of neuroscience; Ming-Lun Lee, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering; and Michael Jarvis, associate professor of history
• Personalized Immersive Spatial Audio with Physics Informed Neural Field
  Co-PIs: Zhiyao Duan, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and of computer science, and Mark Bocko, Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and professor of physics and astronomy
• Computational Earth Imaging with Machine Learning
  Co-PIs: Tolulope Olugboji, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences, and Mujdat Cetin, professor of electrical and computer engineering and of computer science, and the Robin and Tim Wentworth Director of the Goergen Institute for Data Science
• Improving Deconvolution Estimates through Bayesian Shrinkage
  PI: Matthew McCall, associate professor of biostatistics
• Building a Multi-Step Commonsense Reasoning System for Story Understanding
  Co-PIs: Zhen Bai, assistant professor of computer science, and Lenhart Schubert, professor of computer science
• Versatile and Customizable Virtual Patients to Improve Doctor-Patient Communication
  Co-PIs: Ehsan Hoque, associate professor of computer science, and Ronald Epstein, professor of family medicine and palliative care
• Machine Learning Assisted Femtosecond Laser Fabrication of Efficient Solar Absorbers
  Co-PIs: Chunlei Guo, professor of optics, and Jiebo Luo, Albert Arendt Hopeman Professor of Engineering
  Rhythm-Aware and Emotion-Aware Video Background Music Generation
  PI: Jiebo Luo, Albert Arendt Hopeman Professor of Engineering

Find more information about each of the .

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Curiosity and a hunch lead Medical Center physician to data science
With a master’s degree in data science, geriatric oncologist Erika Ramsdale brings a new dimension to research at her clinic.

New training in AR/VR tech gives Rochester doctoral students an edge
A $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation will establish a structured, well-rounded training program for University scholars applying augmented and virtual reality in health, education, design, and other fields.

 

Three senior undergraduate students in the Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences are being honored with the Wells Award, given each year to high-achieving Hajim students who also excel in a humanities field, as determined by the highest GPAs at the end of their junior year.

This year’s recipients are

• Valerie Battista, a double major in computer science and music who has been a member of multiple University choral ensembles and studies carillon;
• Danielle Getz, a chemical engineering major and environmental humanities minor focused on tackling climate change;
• Jameson (Max) Morris, an audio and music engineering major and music minor who performs with multiple ensembles and harbors an interest in music history and theory.

The award is named after Robert W. Wells ’39, a mechanical engineering alumnus who became a top executive at Westinghouse—and felt strongly that engineers “need the balance of the humanities” to be competent in their field.

Open curriculum gives Battista room to explore software engineering and music

When Valerie Battista found out that students could learn to play the atop Rush Rhees Library, she couldn’t resist. “I’ve loved music for as long as I can remember,” she says.

Early on in her studies at Rochester, Battista was selected as a recipient of the Suzanne J. O’Brien Book Award, which recognizes students who excel academically and in leadership roles in their first year at the College. It is often a good predictor of students who will make the most of their opportunities at the University.

Battista learned how to code in 8th grade; an introductory course in Java, soon after she arrived on the Rochester campus, “was the springboard to go on to more classes,” she says. Next summer she will begin working as a full-time software engineer for T. Rowe Price in Maryland, working with the same manager she had during an internship last summer.

In addition to her major in computer science, Battista has also been able to pursue her passion for music to the fullest. She has been a member of the University Chamber Singers since the fall of her first year, and she has also sung with the Treble Chorus and the Schola Cantorum, two ensembles that include River Campus and Eastman students as well as musicians from the Rochester community. She started taking carillon lessons the spring semester of her first year, and despite interruptions due to COVID, she’s been playing the carillon ever since.

“I came in hoping to minor in music,” Battista says. However, thanks to the University’s unique open curriculum, “I am going to be able to double major in it, because the flexibility of the program here has allowed me to take enough classes.”

Getz, a Grand Challenges Scholar, gains added perspective from humanities classes

Danielle Getz is “really motivated when I have awesome people I am working with, who are passionate and excited,” she says. “That’s what I love about the URochester.”

Getz decided in high school that she wanted to dedicate herself to mitigating climate change. This summer she worked in the of on cutting edge research addressing the problem. Some of her favorite courses in the humanities, she says, have “made me a more intentional and considerate engineer.”

During a first-year class she learned about the Grand Challenges Scholars program, which encourages undergraduates to choose one of s and tailor their academic program to address the problem by demonstrating in research, interdisciplinary study, entrepreneurship and innovation, global perspectives, and service.

Getz signed up, and in addition to her major, she is completing a minor in . The humanities courses she’s taken complement her research in the Porosoff lab by helping her look at environmental problems from different angles, and “consider the people affected, and not just the science,” she says.

After graduation she plans to pursue a PhD, apply for a professorship, “have my own lab, study what I’m curious about, and lead a good team of students.” But she’s not ruling out “whatever opportunities come my way,” Getz says.

Whatever the pathway, she’s eager to join the ranks of the people she learned about in high school who are trying to mitigate the effects of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

“I want to have a meaningful impact.”

Music history and theory enable Morris ‘to communicate with musicians from many genres’

Jameson “Max” Morris knows what it is like to be on both sides of the microphone. He has recorded and mixed tracks of performances by some of the same student ensembles he performs with, including the University’s rock repertory ensemble, chamber orchestra, and wind symphony, which counts towards his minor in music.

When the COVID pandemic forced the cancellation of in-person concerts, student music ensembles at the URochester had to find novel ways—other than live performances—to reach their audiences. Individual video and audio soundtracks of each performer had to be pre-recorded, then stitched together into seamless, virtual presentations.

For Morris, an audio and music engineering major and student, the opportunity to work on this technique with senior lecturer Stephen Roessner, a Grammy Award-winning audio engineer, was an invaluable learning experience.

So was the opportunity to explore music more broadly through the music theory and history classes he has taken as part of his minor. He especially enjoyed a class that analyzed the major orchestral pieces that have defined different periods in music history, for example, the Also Sprach Zarathustra tone poem by Richard Strauss.

“I am much more confident now analyzing music performed on a large scale,” Morris says. “When you’re recording in a studio, obviously you need a lot of technical knowledge, but it also important to really know music, to be able to communicate with musicians from many genres.”

After completing his major this year, he will stay at Rochester to complete a master’s degree in electrical engineering designed specifically for audio and music engineers. He will then head to Nashville, where an internship with the famous Blackbird recording studio this summer cemented his desire to become an audio engineer.

Read more

The art and science of sound
University’s $3 million investment in a new state-or-the-art recording studio is a major milestone for Rochester’s audio and music engineering program.

What engineers and humanists can learn from one another
Both engineers and humanists thrive when they cultivate critical thinking skills and problem-solving.

Rochester’s Grand Challenges Scholars frame their research in a broad context
Now in its fifth year, the program adds entrepreneurship, global experience, interdisciplinary study, and service to students ”solution-oriented” tool kit.