News
Jul 30, 2026
MIE PhD Wins ASME SHTC HTD K-9 Best Presentation Award
Xuguang Zhang, MS’22, PhD, mechanical engineering, advised by MIE Associate Professor Yi Zheng, received the ASME SHTC HTD K-9 Best Presentation Award at the ASME 2026 Summer Heat Transfer Conference for his presentation, “Additively Manufactured Hybrid Cooling Designs for High Performance Li-Ion Pouch Cell Thermal Management,” which details battery safety research developed through an ongoing collaboration with the NASA Glenn Research Center.
Jul 30, 2026
New AI Design Framework Uses Light to Pack More Data Into Ultrathin Materials
MIE/ECE Professor Yongmin Liu was awarded a $448K NSF grant for “Pushing the Multiplexing Limit in Metasurfaces via Physics-Informed and Data-Driven Approaches.”
Jul 30, 2026
Patent for a Rapid Breath Test Technology to Instantly Detect Airborne Viruses
ECE Distinguished Professor Nian Sun was awarded a patent for “Devices and methods for detection of viruses from exhaled breath.”
Jul 30, 2026
New All Terrain Robot Snuffs Out Wildfires With Liquid Nitrogen
MIE Professor Yiannis Levendis and a team of students have developed an all-terrain, mobile prototype robot that utilizes a residue-free cryogenic spray to safely suppress and smother dangerous wildfire hotspots before they expand out of control.
Jul 30, 2026
Launching Satellites to Bring High Speed Internet to Remote Areas
ECE Professor & Associate Dean for Research Josep Jornet is leading a first-of-its-kind satellite mission called TeraLink to test space-based sub-terahertz wireless technologies, aiming to pave the way for high-speed 6G connectivity in remote areas and disaster zones.
Jul 30, 2026
Advancing High Sensitivity Hybrid Magnonic Sensors
ECE Assistant Professor Xufeng Zhang, in collaboration with Wei Zhang from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was awarded a $655K NSF grant for “Hybrid Active Magnonic Magnetometry with Enhanced Resolution (HAMMER).”
Jul 30, 2026
Powering the Next Generation of Light Sources
ECE Assistant Professor Sunil Mittal and Professor Srinivas Tadigadapa were awarded a $550K NSF grant for “On-Chip Functionalized Glass Bubble Resonators for Generating Classical and Quantum Light.”
Jul 28, 2026
The Growing Clash Between Modern Digital Infrastructure and Local Resources
The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence data centers is triggering an intense public and political backlash across the United States, as communities confront the massive noise, land use, and escalating energy and water resource demands highlighted by ECE Professors Josep Jornet and David Kaeli.