Bogdan Vernescu
September 9, 2019
WPI, UMass Lowell team to support $111K in research
Photo | Grant Welker
Worcester Polytechnic Institute's campus in Worcester
Collaborative research between Worcester Polytechnic Institute and UMass Lowell is getting a $111,000 funding boost from both schools.
The funding, announced for the start of the fall semester, is going to six teams working on early-stage research, with both schools working together on research and shared scientific resources for the past eight months. The collaborative work is a way for area colleges to help one another work to solve pressing problems, said Bogdan Vernescu, WPI's vice provost for research.
Research projects receiving funding:
— Erin Solovey, assistant professor of computer science at WPI, and Holly Yanco, a UMass Lowell computer science professor and director of the New England Robotics Validation and Experimentation Center, are receiving $20,000 for their project, which is focused on developing robot behaviors that change to best suit the individual humans they are working with, while also developing team awareness tools that enable humans to adjust their own behavior as needed to better work with robots.
— Eric Young, assistant professor of chemical engineering at WPI, and Dongming Xie, associate professor of chemical engineering at UMass Lowell, are receiving $20,000 to develop a continuous biomanufacturing platform for producing high-value lipids or lipid-related products that can be used in fields such as nutrition and health, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals.
— Yuxiang Liu, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at WPI, and Zhu Mao, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at UMass Lowell, also received $20,000 for their project that aims to better understand the biomechanics, or how living organisms move, of cancer so they can open a new path to early-stage cancer diagnosis.
— Michael Timko, associate professor of chemical engineering at WPI, and Noah Van Dam, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at UMass Lowell, received $19,800 for their project designing a biomass reactor that can continuously take in biomaterial and provide green energy, with a goal of making it easier and more cost-effective to switch from greenhouse gas–producing fossil fuels to green energy alternatives.
— Mark Claypool, professor of computer science at WPI, Emmanuel Agu, professor of computer science at WPI, and Lynne Gauthier, associate professor of physical therapy and kinesiology at UMass Lowell, are receiving $11,486 for a program that hopes to help stroke survivors recover, including through a video game Gauthier developed. WPI researchers’ role will be to use artificial intelligence to detect when players are about to stop using the therapeutic game and then intervene to get them back on track.
— Pratap Rao, associate professor of mechanical engineering at WPI, and Christopher Hansen, associate professor of mechanical engineering at UMass Lowell, are receiving $20,000 for their work focused on demonstrating a scalable manufacturing method for a flexible solar cell to enable energy harvesting for flexible electronics, and developing a composite material that will increase the performance of sensors used in a flexible wearable device.
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