Off

Off

Off

The 91������’s College of Engineering and Applied Science (CEAS) has announced the recipients of its inaugural class of Innovation & Entrepreneurship (I&E) Fellows, a new program designed to support faculty, postdoctoral researchers and graduate students in advancing cutting-edge research with commercial potential. The fellowships are supported by the CEAS I&E initiative and Venture Partners at 91������. 

Launched in 2025, the fellowships include two tracks: the Faculty & Postdoc/Graduate Student Team Fellowships and the ASCENT Deep Tech Accelerator Fellowships. Both are designed to foster a culture of entrepreneurship within the college by helping researchers translate academic discoveries into real-world impact.

“This inaugural cohort represents the remarkable breadth and depth of innovation within the College of Engineering and Applied Science,” said Wil Srubar, Deming associate dean for innovation and entrepreneurship. “By providing targeted support through these fellowship programs, we aim to empower researchers to transform their groundbreaking ideas into impactful solutions for society.” 

Faculty & Postdoc / 
Graduate Student Team Fellowships

The Faculty & Postdoc/Graduate Student Team Fellowships support collaborative teams of faculty members and graduate students or postdoctoral researchers. It provides funding, mentorship and access to entrepreneurial resources to help translate new technologies and innovations that have a strong commercialization potential.

The inaugural recipients are:

Max Saffer-Meng, graduate student, and Assistant Professor Anthony Straub (Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering - CEAE)

William Franz, graduate student, and Professor Mark Borden (Department of Biomedical Engineering - BMEN)

Grace McFassel, postdoctoral researcher, and Assistant Professor Kaushik Jayaram (Department of Mechanical Engineering - MCEN)

Yunxuan Zhu, postdoctoral researcher, and Assistant Professor Longji Cui (Department of Mechanical Engineering - MCEN)

Maxwell Conway, graduate student, and Professor Nikolaus Correll (Department of Computer Science - CS)

Tsung-Han Wu, postdoctoral researcher, and Professor Scott Diddams (Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering - ECEE)

These interdisciplinary teams are commercializing several new technologies in areas such as advanced materials, robotics, biomedical devices and carbon capture.

ASCENT Deep Tech Accelerator Fellowships

The ASCENT Deep Tech Accelerator Fellowships support individual researchers working on transformative technologies aimed at addressing complex societal challenges. Fellows receive funding and tailored entrepreneurial support through 91������’s ASCENT Deep Tech Accelerator to advance the development and commercialization of their innovations.

The first ASCENT Fellows are:

Sanghamitra Neogi, associate professor (Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences - AES)

Kian Lopez, graduate student (Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering - ChBE)

Aoife Henry, graduate student (Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering - ECEE)

Laila Fighera Marzall, research faculty (Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering - ECEE)

Jason Rivas, graduate student (Department of Materials Science and Engineering - MSE)

Dhiman Nandi, graduate student (Department of Chemistry)

Subrata Pal, graduate student (Department of Chemistry)

These fellows are advancing technologies in areas such as energy systems, advanced manufacturing and materials science.

Learn more about the CEAS Innovation & Entrepreneurship Fellowship programs.

Related Articles

Off

Off

Off

Off

In June, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams boarded the International Space Station (ISS), expecting a week-long stay in orbit. Now, they won’t return to Earth until February after a series of technical issues plagued the Boeing Starliner space capsule they rode into space on.

If spending eight months on the ISS, which measures just 5,000 square feet, sounds like a recipe for frayed nerves, it may very well be. That’s according to Arquilla, an engineer who has studied how long space journeys can affect the mental health of humans.  

“On long-duration space missions, there are many stressors that create the potential for negative mental health effects,” she said. “From data taken in research facilities in extreme environments on Earth, like Antarctica, we have seen symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress.”

A future mission to Mars, however, could be a lot more than eight months, potentially as much as three years. Which raises the question: Can humans handle that much time in space?

Arquilla thinks so, but there are caveats.

“It will be a big challenge,” she said. “There’s a lot we don’t know because we haven’t sent people to Mars before. They won’t be able to look down and see the Earth the way they can on the International Space Station.”

In previous research, Arquilla and her colleagues explored the mental health consequences of that kind of isolation through an unlikely event here on Earth—the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, millions of Americans were suddenly cooped up in their homes with the threat of a major disease hanging over their heads. The researchers conducted a survey and observed that people with military training or other experience in stressful environments tended to be more productive during the pandemic than others. But those experienced individuals didn’t appear to maintain their mental health better than less experienced people.

Arquilla noted that simply being aware of your own body, and knowing when stress sets in, can help. She has partnered with Laura Devendorf, a researcher at 91������’s ATLAS Institute, to assist people in doing that kind of monitoring. The team integrated sensors into comfortable textiles that track electrocardiogram (ECG) signals coming from wearers’ hearts.

“Maybe I'm an astronaut on a mission and I'm tracking my own signals, and I see that my heartrate starts to go up,” Arquilla said. “I could decide based on that that I should take a break for a couple of hours.”

This research won’t just help astronauts. Arquilla is also exploring how similar technologies could give people on the ground tools to detect and manage symptoms of mental health changes in high-stress environments. That might include wilderness expeditions, remote research facilities and military deployments.  

She’s glad to see people talking more about mental health, both on Earth and in space.

“We all, after the pandemic, understand the importance of mental health a lot more than we did maybe 10 years ago,” she said. “Being able to recognize that it's okay to not feel at 100% all the time, and being able to give people the tools they need to articulate what is wrong, is really important.”

Off

That ordinary smartphone in your pocket could be a powerful tool for investigating outer space.

In a new study, researchers at Google and 91������ have transformed millions of Android phones across the globe into a fleet of nimble scientific instruments—generating one of the most detailed maps to date of the uppermost layer of Earth’s atmosphere.

The group’s findings, , might help to improve the accuracy of GPS technology worldwide several-fold. The research was led by Brian Williams of Google Research and included Jade Morton, professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at 91������.

“These phones can literally fit in your palm,” Morton said. “But through crowdsourcing, we can use them to change the way we understand the space environment.”

She and her colleagues used the GPS sensors that come standard in every smartphone to collect data on how Earth’s atmosphere warped signals coming from satellites. In the process, they were able to view phenomena in the atmosphere, such as blobs high above the planet known as “plasma bubbles,” in never-before-seen detail.

The group released its data publicly so that anyone can watch how the atmosphere swirled and shifted over about eight months.“Collaboration is central to scientific progress and to our scientific research at Google,” said Lizzie Dorfman, product lead for Science AI in Google Research. “Dr. Morton’s expertise was essential to this research, and it has been an absolute pleasure working with her as a visiting researcher and collaborator.”

Eye on the ionosphere

The study puts new focus on the ionosphere, a wispy layer of the atmosphere that stretches more than 350 miles above Earth’s surface.

It’s a volatile arena: Here, rays from the sun constantly beat down on the atmosphere, splitting its molecules and atoms into a soupy mix of charged particles—what scientists call a plasma. It also never stays still.

“At 2 o'clock in afternoon, there are a lot more charged particles in the ionosphere because the sun is at its strongest,” Morton said. “But at night, the sun is on the other side of the planet, so we have very few charged particles.”

That fluctuation can play havoc with GPS technology.

Morton explained that the technology works through a sort of stopwatch in space: Satellites thousands of miles from Earth first beam radio waves to the planet. Your phone then pinpoints your location by measuring how long it takes those signals to reach the ground.

Scientists try to account for how the ionosphere might shift that timing by mapping this region of space using radar dishes on the ground. Currently, however, they can only observe about 14% of the ionosphere at any one time. As a result, GPS devices may miss your exact location by anywhere from a few to several dozen feet.

“There are a lot of applications that require a lot of accuracy—for example, landing aircraft,” Morton said.

Bubbling up

In the current study, the researchers landed on an unusual idea: Rather than rely on expensive radar dishes, they could map the ionosphere using a suite of sensors that already existed in every country on Earth: Android phones.

The ionosphere maps are created using aggregated measurements of the radio signals between satellites and the receivers in some Android devices. ensure these measurements do not identify any contributing individual devices.           

In particular, the group used the phones to track in real time how the ionosphere stretches out radio waves coming from satellites.

The team reported that, on its own, this worldwide fleet could observe roughly 21% of the ionosphere—potentially doubling the accuracy of GPS devices worldwide.

“Millions of phones together can do a much better job of monitoring the atmosphere than our ground network,” Morton said.

The group’s maps also capture the ionosphere in brilliant detail.

In May 2024, for example, a powerful solar storm struck Earth just as the group’s cell phones were looking up. In the hours that followed, huge regions of atmosphere, or “plasma bubbles,” containing low concentrations of charged particles formed above parts of South America. Those bubbles then rose through the ionosphere like wax in a lava lamp.

Morton, for her part, says the study shows the untapped potential of the everyday technologies that many people take for granted.

“I have spent my lifetime building dedicated instruments to do scientific research,” Morton said. “But as technology advances in our society, we see all these sensors at our disposal that have a lot more power than we ever imagined.”

Off