The AFOSR has awarded Profs. Taylor and LeDuc a DURIP to acquire a new specialized atomic force microscope with scanning ion conductance microscopy module

We are delighted to announce that the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) has selected our Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) proposal for funding. With this generous support, we will acquire a specialized instrument for atomic force microscopy (AFM) and scanning ion conductance microscopy (SICM). This instrument will support basic research into peptide nucleic acid-based nanostructures at biotic and abiotic interfaces.

The FY2022 awards announcement can be found here. Our many thanks to the AFOSR!

Vismaya and Prof. Taylor present virtually at BMES 2021

Honored to present our lab's work at BMES 2021 virtually this October!

Vismaya Walawalkar presented her poster on "Development of DNA-based Shear Nanosensor: Human Platelets Bind DNA Origami via Chol-ssDNA." This work is the result of an exciting collaboration with Dr. Marvin Slepian's group at the University of Arizona.

Many thanks to the University of Florida and Prof. Chelsey Simmons for the opportunity to speak at the Mid-career Mechanobiology Symposium prior to BMES at the University of Florida.

Additionally thanks for BMES Track Chairs for Cellular and Molecular Biomechanics, Prof. Chelsey Simmons and Prof. Wendy Liu, for inviting Prof. Taylor to serve as featured speaker!

Professors Travers and Taylor have been awarded an NSF National Robotics Institute grant to use graph neural networks to study the formation and development of DNA-based nanorobotic superstructures

We are excited to announce that Prof. Matt Travers (RI) and Prof. Taylor have been awarded National Robotics Institute (NRI) funding for their proposal Self-Assembly of Modular Robots Constructed using DNA: Modeling and Manufacturing Nanostructures with Graph Neural Networks and DNA Origami.

Congratulations to Emma Benjaminson, who led the team in the conceptualization and writing of this grant!

Many thanks to the NSF for supporting this research!

Profs Taylor, Jayan, Kowalewski, Bockstaller and Tristram-Nagle awarded Major Research Instrumentation Program award from the NSF!

The development of cutting-edge nanostructured materials for applications like smart surfaces, batteries, and synthetic tissues requires highly interdisciplinary teams as well as tools that can characterize materials across multiple length scales. Advanced functional materials in particular have the potential to drive advances in sensing, energy storage and robotics, and these materials by definition have nanostructural features from Angstroms to hundreds of nanometers in size. Further, behavior of these materials must be measured in situ for accurate characterization of their structural properties during use.

In this MRI application, our CMU team proposed the acquisition of the Xenocs Xeuss 3.0 x-ray scattering system to enable high-throughput studies at a variety of length scales. We are now pleased to announce that our Major Research Instrumentation proposal has been funded by the NSF.

Many thanks to the CMMI division of the NSF for this tremendous support! Details on the award available here .

Second NASA event in one week: Emma presents her machine learning research for lightning tracking from her NASA summer internship

Congratulations to Emma and her team from NASA's Frontier Development Lab summer program on their fantastic presentation on lightning detection using machine learning. Recordings of the live stream of all the project presentations are available here.

Great work demonstrating how machine learning can be used to update the capabilities of a satellite system for the purpose of better recognizing, tracking, and predicting lightning as well as fires.

GLM

Welcome, Manoj!

We are very excited that Manoj Gupta has joined the team as a postdoctoral researcher on our PNA nanotechnology project! Welcome, Manoj!