In the news

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – New contact lens technology to help diagnose and monitor medical conditions may soon be ready for clinical trials. A team of researchers from Purdue University worked with biomedical, mechanical and chemical engineers, along with clinicians, to develop the novel technology. The team enabled commercial soft contact lenses to be a bioinstrumentation tool for unobtrusive monitoring of clinically important information associated with underlying ocular health conditions. The team’s work is published in Nature Communications. The Purdue Research Foundation Office of Technology Commercialization helped secure a patent for the technology, and it is available for licensing.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – If you want power, you lose battery life. If you want battery life, you lose power. That’s the situation facing users of most electronic devices – and it’s also the dilemma for electronics manufacturers. Purdue University innovators have come up with an invention to help. “Battery life technology, for the most part, has not been able to keep up with the other technology that requires the battery,” said Saeed Mohammadi, a professor of electrical and computer engineering in Purdue’s College of Engineering. “Complementary metal-oxide semiconductor [CMOS] is a battery-powered semiconductor chip inside computers and devices that stores information. CMOS requires a lot of power from the computer which, in turn, reduces the battery life.”

“You see, nature is unpredictable. How do you expect to predict it with a computer?” said American physicist Richard Feynman before computer scientists at a conference in 1981. Forty years later, Purdue University engineers are building the kind of system that Feynman imagined would overcome the limitations of today’s classical computers by more closely acting like nature: a “probabilistic computer.” The team believes that a probabilistic computer may sooner solve some of the problems a quantum computer would solve, since it wouldn’t need entirely new hardware or extremely cold temperatures to operate. On that list of problems to solve more efficiently than with classical computers are optimization problems – the ability to calculate the best solution from a very large number of solutions, such as identifying the best route for goods to travel to market.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – IdentifySensors Biologics, a Purdue University-affiliated technology firm developing a rapid diagnostic platform for detecting pathogens, including SARS-CoV-2, has entered into a new partnership with Purdue Research Foundation and will open an office in Purdue’s Discovery Park District. As the COVID-19 pandemic was about to break around the globe, IdentifySensors, the parent company of IdentifySensors Biologics, had approached Purdue to help it develop a nanosensor designed to detect spoilage and specific pathogens in the food supply chain. When the pandemic became apparent, the company pivoted to start working with Purdue researcher Lia Stanciu, associate head and professor of materials engineering, to develop a rapid diagnostic platform for detecting SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Purdue University innovators have created technology aimed at replacing Morse code with colored “digital characters” to modernize optical storage. They are confident the advancement will help with the explosion of remote data storage during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Morse code has been around since the 1830s. The familiar dots and dashes system may seem antiquated given the amount of information needed to be acquired, digitally archived and rapidly accessed every day. But those same basic dots and dashes are still used in many optical media to aid in storage.

Zubin Jacob, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, has won the Indian Institute of Technology - Bombay Young Alumni Achiever Award 2021. This honor is given to exceptional IITB alumni from around the world below the age of 40. Jacob is being recognized for exceptional contributions in academia to the field of Photonics. The award winners are from diverse fields including academia, industry, start-ups, arts and entertainment, as well as social service. Jacob is one of five recipients in 2021.

Purdue professor Mark Lundstrom, who served as acting dean for College of Engineering for the past year, has contributed not only to minds in his classrooms at the University but to nanotechnology research and outreach around the world, and his service has been recognized with an Order of the Griffin presented by Purdue President Mitch Daniels. The Order of the Griffin is one of Purdue’s highest honors. The award recognizes outstanding service to Purdue by men and women whose commitment to the University has gone beyond the call of duty and has greatly benefited Purdue.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — A hacker can reproduce a circuit on a chip by discovering what key transistors are doing in a circuit – but not if the transistor “type” is undetectable. Purdue University engineers have demonstrated a way to disguise which transistor is which by building them out of a sheet-like material called black phosphorus. This built-in security measure would prevent hackers from getting enough information about the circuit to reverse engineer it. The findings appear in a paper published Monday (Dec. 7) in Nature Electronics. Reverse engineering chips is a common practice – both for hackers and companies investigating intellectual property infringement. Researchers also are developing x-ray imaging techniques that wouldn’t require actually touching a chip to reverse engineer it.

The National Academy of Inventors (NAI) has elected three Purdue ECE professors to NAI Fellow status. Alexandra Boltasseva, Ron and Dotty Garvin Tonjes Professor of ECE, Mung Chiang, the Roscoe H. George Distinguished Professor of ECE and the John A. Edwardson Dean of Engineering, and Haiyan Wang, Basil S. Turner Professor of Engineering, join 175 prolific academic innovators from across the world in the 2020 class of Fellows. The NAI Fellows Program highlights academic inventors who have demonstrated a spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on the quality of life, economic development, and the welfare of society. Election to NAI Fellow is the highest professional distinction accorded solely to academic inventors. To date, NAI Fellows hold more than 42,700 issued U.S. patents, which have generated over 13,000 licensed technologies and companies, and created more than 36 million jobs. In addition, over $2.2 trillion in revenue has been generated based on NAI Fellow discoveries.

COVID-19 has not only impacted the way in which we look at infectious diseases but also how we look at water systems in building, how we communicate for school and work, and how we look at way air moves through planes, buildings and homes. As Dr. David Warsinger, assistant professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering, says, "The current paradigm in building air treatment is that it's good enough to recirculate most of the air, and send some portion outside. This has contributed to air pollution, but has largely been ignored in the past. COVID has shown us that this is not good enough - we need to actively make our air safer to protect ourselves, and the environment."