To mitigate climate change, physicist David Specht, M.S. ’18, Ph.D. ’21, feeds electricity to microbes. In turn, the insatiable Vibrio natriegens bacteria – the fastest duplicating organism on Earth, able to double itself in about 10 minutes – gorge on a sparky feast, but then the microbe can help scientists and farmers free up arable land, nourish livestock and feed farmed fish. The V. natriegens endeavor is among the first “Moving Research to Impact” fast grants funded by the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability as part of the 2030 Project: A Cornell Climate Initiative, which is mobilizing faculty to develop and accelerate tangible solutions to a warming world.

Professor Héctor D. Abruña, the E. M. Chamot Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been awarded $8.3 million to further his group’s research related to fuel cells and advanced battery technologies.

Congratulations to Jan Lammerding, professor in the Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering, who has been elected a 2022 Fellow of both the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) and the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB)! BMES Fellow is a distinction reserved for only a few select members who demonstrate exceptional achievements and experience in the field of biomedical engineering, and a record of membership and participation in the Society.

A portable diagnostic device designed by researchers at Cornell Engineering and Weill Cornell Medicine has been deployed in clinical tests in Uganda to identify cases of Kaposi sarcoma, a common yet difficult-to-detect cancer that often signals the presence of HIV infection. Now, thanks to a $4 million grant from the National Cancer Institute Center for Global Health, the rollout is expanding to 11 sites throughout sub-Saharan Africa, including locations in Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Botswana and Malawi – where a shortage of diagnostic testing and pathology experts has led to long waits and sometimes erroneous results.

The President’s Council of Cornell Women has awarded a PCCW Affinito-Stewart Grant to ECE Assistant Professor Amal El-Ghazaly for her proposal titled “Highly Stretchable Pressure and Curvature Sensor for Soft Robots.” The proposed research aims to develop a stretchable material-based sensor array to provide soft robots with a high-resolution sense of “touch.” When soft robots (which are filled with air) touch an external object, air within the body is displaced and puts internal pressure on other surfaces of the robot in addition to the point of contact. These two simultaneous pressures on the surface of the robot are indistinguishable from each other and can be confused. “We are designing and building a sensor to differentiate these two,” El-Ghazaly said. “It measures the pressure but also curvature. Detecting the curvature tells the robot if it's an external object exerting the pressure, or just the internal air of the robot itself.”

Johannes Lehmann, Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor in the School of Integrative Plant Science’s Soil and Crop Sciences Section, was honored along with other recent winners of the Humboldt Research Award at a reception in Berlin June 23, 2022.  Sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the award recognizes career excellence and funds opportunities to forge innovative collaborations with colleagues in Germany. "Humboldt’s ideal of a free, globally networked world of science is one which we again need to defend today,” said German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, addressing the award recipients.

Solving societal problems such as climate change could require dismantling rigid academic boundaries, so that researchers from varying disciplines could work together collaboratively – through an “undisciplinary” approach, a new Cornell study suggests. Instead of rallying around a specific mission, it’s best to incorporate a human approach and fixate on the process to find solutions. The work published May 16 in Nature’s Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. “The research topic is remarkably unimportant as motivation to engage in collaboration, which flies in the face of relying on engagement merely around an important crisis such as climate change,” said co-author Johannes Lehmann, Cornell’s Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor, School of Integrative Plant Science Soil and Crop Sciences Section, in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

Cilia are the body’s diligent ushers. These microscopic hairs, which move fluid by rhythmic beating, are responsible for pushing cerebrospinal fluid in your brain, clearing the phlegm and dirt from your lungs, and keeping other organs and tissues clean. A technical marvel, cilia have proved difficult to reproduce in engineering applications, especially at the microscale. Cornell researchers have now designed a micro-sized artificial cilial system using platinum-based components that can control the movement of fluids at such a scale. The technology could someday enable low-cost, portable diagnostic devices for testing blood samples, manipulating cells or assisting in microfabrication processes.

In his dark basement lab in Wurzberg Germany in 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen produced the first-ever X-ray image using a cathode ray tube – a radiograph of his wife’s hand, wedding ring and all. Today, 60 feet below the Cornell University campus, at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS), researchers utilize X-rays that are 100 million times more intense than Röntgen's first beams of light. Researchers at CHESS examine proteins that reveal new ways to fight cancer, battery cells that enable a charge far beyond current capabilities, and structural materials that enable space travel to improve with lightweight, yet more structurally sound components. Today’s high energy X-rays provide scientific advances and innovation far beyond what Röntgen could have ever imagined.

How might we extract the tech-essential mineral lithium sustainably from seawater? Will doctors someday engineer super-immune T cells? How do dialects arise in language? Why do we forget? The College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) has awarded seven New Frontier Grants totaling $1.25 million to faculty members pursuing critical developments in areas ranging from quantum materials to sustainable technologies to a philosophical theory of widespread sentience. Now in its second year, the program’s goal is to encourage A&S faculty to engage in high-impact, boundary-pushing research with potential to secure external support. This year, 42 applications represented disciplines spanning the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities.