In the news

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.

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."

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Each cancer patient’s tumors have cells that look and act differently, making it difficult for scientists to determine treatments based on tumors grown from generic cell cultures in the lab. Now, thanks to a new 3D cell culture technique developed by Purdue University researchers, it may be possible to personalize treatment by understanding the contributions of different cell types in a tumor to the cancer’s behavior. “I see a future where a cancer patient gives a blood sample, we retrieve individual tumor cells from that blood sample, and from those cells create tumors in the lab and test drugs on them,” said Cagri Savran, a Purdue professor of mechanical engineering. “These cells are particularly dangerous since they were able to leave the tumor site and resist the immune system.”

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Many patients with pancreatic cancer have only about a 10% chance of survival within five years of their diagnosis because they tend to become resistant to chemotherapy, past studies have indicated. A “time machine” that Purdue University engineers designed to observe pancreatic cancer behavior over time suggests a new drug testing approach that could help scientists better catch resistance. The researchers found that testing potential drugs on multiple tumor cell subtypes – rather than on just one cell subtype – can reveal drug resistance that may occur due to how different cancer subtypes interact with each other. Purdue engineers built a “time machine,” or microfluidic pancreatic tumor device, that simulates tumor growth over time. (Purdue University photo/Jared Pike) The study was recently published in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Lab on a Chip.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Purdue University innovators are taking cues from nature to develop 3D photodetectors for biomedical imaging. The Purdue researchers used some architectural features from spider webs to develop the technology. Spider webs typically provide excellent mechanical adaptability and damage-tolerance against various mechanical loads such as storms. “We employed the unique fractal design of a spider web for the development of deformable and reliable electronics that can seamlessly interface with any 3D curvilinear surface,” said Chi Hwan Lee, a Purdue assistant professor of biomedical engineering and mechanical engineering. “For example, we demonstrated a hemispherical, or dome-shaped, photodetector array that can detect both direction and intensity of incident light at the same time, like the vision system of arthropods such as insects and crustaceans.”

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Purdue University will lead a national initiative sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense to address the urgent need for engineering graduates to develop defense technologies, especially in the area of microelectronics. The Scalable Asymmetric Lifecycle Engagement Microelectronics Workforce Development program (SCALE) is a $19.2 million multi-university public-private-academic partnership that will be used for workforce development across engineering universities across the nation. Michael Kratsios, acting undersecretary of defense for research and engineering and chief technology officer of the United States, said, "A skilled technical microelectronics workforce is required to ensure success of DoD [Department of Defense] modernization initiatives."

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — A rectangular robot as tiny as a few human hairs can travel throughout a colon by doing back flips, Purdue University engineers have demonstrated in live animal models. Why the back flips? Because the goal is to use these robots to transport drugs in humans, whose colons and other organs have rough terrain. Side flips work, too. Why a back-flipping robot to transport drugs? Getting a drug directly to its target site could remove side effects, such as hair loss or stomach bleeding, that the drug may otherwise cause by interacting with other organs along the way. The study, published in the journal Micromachines, is the first demonstration of a microrobot tumbling through a biological system in vivo. Since it is too small to carry a battery, the microrobot is powered and wirelessly controlled from the outside by a magnetic field.