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WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Three Purdue professors advancing quantum science and work-life and work-life family research policy have been chosen to receive the university's most prestigious research and scholarship awards. Each recognizes recent accomplishments of high significance and impact. 2021 Arden L. Bement Jr. Award: Michael J. Manfra Michael J. Manfra, the Bill and Dee O’Brien Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy in the College of Science, and professor of materials engineering and of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering, will receive the 2021 Arden L. Bement Jr. Award, the most prestigious award given by the university in pure and applied science and engineering. Manfra, a leading condensed matter experimentalist, is being honored for his field-defining work in quantum physics. Manfra and his research team reported in 2020 a landmark experiment that found evidence for fractional statistics of quasiparticles called anyons. This was the first time that anyone showed direct evidence of the fractional statistics of anyons since the quasiparticles were first proposed in the early 1980s, following the discovery of the fractional quantum Hall effect in 1982 (awarded a Nobel prize in 1998).

The U.S. Department of Defense is awarding $2.8 million to a collaborative group of Purdue University professors in order to develop a quantum education program at Purdue. This grant is supported by the National Defense Education Program (NDEP) for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education, Outreach, and Workforce Initiative Programs. Professors involved in this grant are Mahdi Hosseini, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Courtesy in Physics; Muhsin Menekse, Associate Professor of Engineering Education and Science Education; and Erica Carlson, 150th Anniversary Professor of Physics and Astronomy. Purdue University is the primary recipient of the grant and the work will be done in collaboration with Microsoft Azure Quantum and Guided Particle Systems Inc. Other industry collaborators include IonQ, Entanglement Institute and Quantum Computing Inc.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — What makes pancreatic cancer so deadly is its covert and quick spread. Now, a “time machine” built by Purdue University engineers has shown a way to reverse the course of cancer before it spreads throughout the pancreas. “These findings open up the possibility of designing a new gene therapy or drug because now we can convert cancerous cells back into their normal state,” said Bumsoo Han, a Purdue professor of mechanical engineering and program leader of the Purdue Center for Cancer Research. Han has a courtesy appointment in biomedical engineering. The time machine that Han’s lab built is a lifelike reproduction of a pancreatic structure called the acinus, which produces and secretes digestive enzymes into the small intestine. Pancreatic cancer tends to develop from chronic inflammation that happens when a mutation has caused these digestive enzymes to digest the pancreas itself.

A Purdue University engineer's patent-pending invention could improve the quality of life for millions of people suffering from diabetic foot ulcers. Rahim Rahimi, an assistant professor in the School of Materials Engineering, has developed a flexible polymer composite microneedle array that can overcome the physicochemical bacterial biofilm present in chronic, nonhealing wounds and deliver both oxygen and bactericidal agents simultaneously. The results have been published in ACS Applied Bio Materials.

As a child, Chi Hwan Lee always had Lego sets on his birthday list. Lee, who loves math and physics, would spend hours building the sets – following the instructions as well as his imagination.That imagination and those Lego pieces became the building blocks of Lee’s Purdue University research, which focuses on converting items like contact lenses and prosthetic hands into smart devices with specially designed electronic stickers to measure vision loss or simulate the sense of feeling. From solar cells to biomedical applications Lee, the Leslie A. Geddes associate professor of biomedical engineering in Purdue’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, says his passion for creating and assembling items continues to grow, thanks to the entrepreneurial and collaborative environment at Purdue. While his initial research involved developing additive manufacturing processes to convert solar cells and sensors to become flexible and even wearable, it was during his job interview at Purdue where faculty members asked if he had ever thought about using his solar cell work in a biomedical setting. That moment was pivotal for Lee, who now has a joint appointment in the School of Mechanical Engineering and a courtesy appointment in the School of Materials Engineering.

A paper from ECE professors Vladimir Shalaev and Alexandra Boltasseva’s research groups has been published in the journal Nature Communications. “High-harmonic generation in metallic titanium nitride” was published Aug. 17, 2021.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – When the COVID-19 pandemic began and the technologies necessary to combat it came into focus, testing was immediately identified as being top on the list. Mohit Verma, assistant professor of agricultural and biological engineering, had been working for years on developing a diagnostic tool to detect Bovine Respiratory Disease (BRD) in cattle using nasal swabs. Verma and his colleagues identified nucleic acids specific to different pathogens that cause the disease and developed a paper-based testing device that was cheap to manufacture, accessible and accurate. “When COVID-19 hit, that’s exactly the type of testing technologies we needed,” Verma said, and he quickly pivoted his research to developing a scalable testing technology for COVID-19.

WEST LAFAYETTE - The Discovery Park District at Purdue University has announced a partnership related to Internet of Things technology. The district is teaming up with the university's SMART Consortium in an effort to advance IoT technology and study how it will be used. The SMART Consortium is a multi-disciplinary research center in the Birck Nanotechnology Center on the West Lafayette campus. Ali Shakouri, director of the Birck center, says the consortium is a foundry for IoT development. “A foundry is a shared developmental manufacturing facility, and they were vital to the rapid growth of Silicon Valley," Shakouri said. "At the district, we envision a foundry dedicated to supporting the fast development of low-cost, high-volume IoT devices and use cases – generating faster product development pilot runs and lower cost per unit – making innovation much more accessible and affordable.”

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — It is commonly known that two types of fundamental particles make up the universe: bosons and fermions. Bosons and fermions behave very differently due to fundamentally different statistical properties. Forty years ago, theorists predicted that a new class of particle, anyons, that have distinct statistical properties may exist in nature as well. The problem is that there was no direct observation of an anyon’s unique statistical properties. That is until 2020 when a team from Purdue University led Dr. Michael Manfra published findings in Nature Physics which demonstrated concrete evidence of the existence of anyons.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Researchers have detected the rolling movement of a nano-acoustic wave predicted by the famous physicist and Nobel prize winner Lord Rayleigh in 1885. This phenomenon can find applications in acoustic quantum technologies or in so-called “phononic” components, which are used to control the propagation of acoustic waves. The study, published in the journal Science Advances, was conducted by researchers from Purdue University, the University of Augsburg, the University of Münster and the University of Alberta.