College of Engineering Faculty Members Receive Prestigious NSF CAREER Awards

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Emily Kumpel, Jinglei Ping, Govind Srimathveeravalli, Robert Niffenegger

This spring, four outstanding young College of Engineering (CoE) faculty members have received grants from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program. The four award-winning researchers are Emily Kumpel of the Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department, Robert Niffenegger of the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department, Jinglei Ping of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department, and Govind Srimathveeravalli of MIE.

Kumpel’s CAREER project is called “Turning Home Water Storage from Risk into Reliability” and is funded for $549,834 over five years. Kumpel’s NSF research will focus on improving the water quality and reliability for myriad people worldwide who possess home-storage tanks that hold water for use between intermittent and often interrupted water deliveries.

According to Kumpel, “While hundreds of millions of people around the world keep water stored in their home from piped water systems, we do not yet know how to best keep this water safe.” This problem is aggravated when home deliveries are disrupted by unforeseen events such as weather emergencies.

To address this vital national and international issue, Kumpel says that “My long-term goal is to design plumbing for home-water tanks to last through water-supply interruptions or to be able to hold rainwater or other sources while protecting public health. My central hypothesis is that local water storage can be designed to preserve or even improve water quality, even through contamination events, while achieving resiliency through interruptions.” 

Kumpel explains that her lab (Water, Sanitation, and Development Research Group @UMass) will achieve this overall goal through three research objectives. First, her team will quantify the effects of a contamination event on accumulation, persistence, and release of “indicator bacteria and opportunistic pathogens” in home water-storage tanks that are supplied with municipal tap water. 

Second, as Kumpel says, her lab will “investigate the efficacy of interventions to minimize microbial persistence and growth in home-water storage while minimizing water consumption, supply interruption, and cost.” 

Kumpel’s third objective is to develop a framework for optimizing water-storage volumes to meet water-quality and reliability goals. 

As Kumpel says, “This research will advance fundamental knowledge of water-quality dynamics while water is in storage and offer insight into whether biofilms and sediments act as a reservoir and source of pathogens. It will offer insight into the efficacy of interventions to improve stored-water quality, contributing to new knowledge of the mechanisms that affect microbial persistence and growth.” 

Finally, Kumpel concludes that “by modeling the tradeoffs between water quality and water-storage capacity, we can identify how to simultaneously provide safe and reliable water through water storage.”

Srimathveeravalli's CAREER research, supported by the NSF for $$558,436 for five years, is titled “Modulating endothelial cell function using targeted electrical stimulation.” 

The endothelial cells lining our blood vessels become dysfunctional during cancer and some non-malignant diseases, thus interfering with drug delivery, triggering inflammation, and slowing healing. To resolve this critical issue, Srimathveeravalli seeks to develop a novel approach for modulating endothelial-cell function by using pulsed electric fields, or ultrashort electrical waveforms in which each pulse is a few microseconds long. In the process, his method will also focus drug delivery to tumors and speed up the healing process for such maladies

One example of this problem is our aging population. As the number of elderly people   mushrooms, there has been a dramatic increase in patients diagnosed with non-metastatic but locally advanced tumors. These patients cannot be surgically treated due to their advanced age and/or co-morbidities, thus creating an urgent need for alternative treatments.

Srimathveeravalli’s new approach offers a solution to this challenge and many more chronic health issues, such as diabetic ulcers that affect this demographic, in which the endothelial cells lining the blood vessels play a major role.

As Srimathveeravalli explains, “The objective of this CAREER proposal is to tackle this important question by developing a technology for the targeted stimulation of endothelial cells using pulsed electric fields that can be delivered to the desired region of the body using minimally invasive medical devices [developed in the Srimathveeravalli lab].”

Srimathveeravalli believes that developing devices to deliver pulsed electric fields, which can directly restore the function of endothelial cells during disease, will produce powerful new tools for targeted drug delivery to tumors and overcome many limitations of existing technologies. This NSF-supported research will do just that. According to Srimathveeravalli, “The [CAREER] project will study pulsed-electric-field waveforms that enable controlled and specific alteration of the endothelial-cell barrier function, identify the biological pathways that mediate this response, and test this approach for enhancing drug delivery to tumors.” 

Srimathveeravalli adds that the novel devices, tools, and knowledge gained from his CAREER research can also support new investigations into the role of endothelial cells in various diseases and improve treatment outcomes for countless cancer patients as well as those with non-malignant tumors. 

Ping’s CAREER research, supported by the NSF for $550,000 for five years, is titled “Highly Rapid and Sensitive Nanomechanoelectrical Detection of Nucleic Acids.” 

The amplification-free electronic detection of genetic materials holds significant promise for advancing the point-of-care diagnostics of numerous diseases. The problem, however, is that current, state-of-the-art, all-electrical methods struggle to achieve high sensitivity and rapid detection simultaneously. Ping is seeking to address this vital problem by developing a trailblazing method for detecting genetic materials such as DNA and RNA by cleverly combining high sensitivity with speed to overcome the shortcomings of existing techniques. 

As Ping explains, “The project will lead to compact, quick, accurate, and user-friendly devices for genetic-material detection. These devices operate by measuring the electrical responses of multiple genetic materials when they vibrate in an external electric field.” One goal of Ping’s proposed research is to boost both the sensitivity and time efficiency of nucleic-acid detection by two orders of magnitude. According to Ping, such innovation “promises to enhance pandemic management and global healthcare.”

Ping’s research departs from the status quo of electrical, nucleic-acid sensors, which directly convert the occurrence of probe-target, nucleic-acid hybridization into electrical response. Instead, Ping aims to harness a new pathway he has already developed for nano-mechano-electrical “transduction,” or the conversion of mechanical vibration into electrochemical signals. 

Technically, the expected outcomes of this project are twofold. First, Ping and his team will achieve a comprehensive understanding of the nano-mechano-electrical transduction principle for maximizing the multiplexity, selectivity, and sensitivity in nucleic-acid detection. Secondly, the team will achieve rapid, high-sensitivity, nucleic-acid detection by integrating nano-mechano-electrical transduction with microscale transversal “electrophoresis,” the term used to describe the motion of particles in a gel or fluid within a relatively uniform electric field. 

Ping expects these outcomes “to generate significant positive impact on bioengineering advancement and rapid, accurate, point-of-care, nucleic-acid testing.”

Niffenegger’s CAREER research, supported by the NSF for $624,196 for five years, is aimed at developing revolutionary integrated technologies for trapped ion qubits. 

“Trapped ions are used in the most powerful quantum computers in the world and for the most precise optical clocks in the world,” says Niffenegger. “They have been a foundational platform for quantum science going back almost fifty years. Yet, their underlying hardware hasn’t changed much in that time. This project aims to change that.”

Trapped ions are charged atomic particles, which, due to this charge, can be trapped and controlled by electric fields. Then laser beams can be used to precisely control their atomic states, turning them into qubits or clocks/sensors. 

According to Niffenegger, “Developing trapped-ion quantum processors with integrated photonics and other integrated technologies like electronics and detectors may enable the next generation of quantum hardware towards large-scale quantum computers and practical applications.” Integrated photonics is a rapidly advancing field that combines optics and nanofabrication to create integrated circuits for optical light.

One key aspect of Niffenegger’s NSF research concerns the “qubit,” which (according to the IBM website) is “the basic unit of information used to encode data in quantum computing and can be best understood as the quantum equivalent of the traditional bit used by classical computers to encode information in binary.”

As Niffenegger explains, current quantum technologies have been saturated at a handful of qubits with hardware that isn’t scalable to thousands or millions of qubits. As he says, “To realize operational quantum advantage for computing, and to improve precision for sensing, timekeeping, and fundamental physics measurements, the number of trapped ions in these systems must be scaled up. Yet, this would require laboratories full of sensitive, complex equipment, limiting the portability, scalability, and accessibility of these systems.” 

In his NSF proposal, Niffenegger offers an alternative and transformational approach that combines trapped-ion quantum research with integrated-photonics research to solve these problems. “The ultimate goal is to create a full quantum system-on-a-chip that could be used for both quantum computing applications and quantum sensing applications,” says Niffenegger. 

(June 2024)