Science and Enterprise

Tag: NSF

  • Grant Awarded for Mind-Machine Engineering Research Center

    National Science Foundation announced an $18.5 million grant to establish an Engineering Research Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering based at University of Washington in Seattle. The grant is for five years of funding, with an option for another five years. The new center is expected to research robotic devices that interact with, assist, and understand…

  • University Culture Impacts Research Commercialization

    A Baylor University management professor in Waco, Texas finds research universities with an organizational climate that supports commercialization and encourages interdisciplinary collaboration among researchers are more likely to produce invention disclosures and patent applications. The findings by Baylor’s Emily Hunter and colleagues from University of Houston and University of California at Davis appeared in the…

  • Researchers Find New Properties in an Old Material

    Researchers at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg have devised a way to measure and manipulate the internal structure of Nafion, a common polymer, to expand the material’s applications. The research chemists’ results are published in the 19 June issue of the journal Nature Materials (paid subscription required). Nafion was developed in the 1960s by DuPont, and…

  • University Lighting Research Center Gains Industry Backers

    The Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center (ERC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York has drawn 21 industrial partners to help guide the center’s research programs and move its findings from the lab bench to the marketplace. ERC began in 2008 with funding from National Science Foundation, and is led by Rensselaer. The center’s…

  • Grant to Fund Research on Ice-Resistant Coatings

    University of Illinois at Chicago engineering professor Constantine Megaridis recently received a $320,000 National Science Foundation grant to investigate coatings that can resist the build up of ice. Megaridis’s research is expected to continue his previous research on coatings that are both superhydrophobic — have the ability to repel water — and self-cleaning. At UIC,…

  • Cause of Headphone, Hearing Aid Fatigue Diagnosed

    Engineers at Asius Technologies in Longmont, Colorado have found what they believe is the cause of listener fatigue brought on by on-ear headphones and hearing aids. Their findings, along with suggested fixes, were presented this past weekend at a meeting of the Audio Engineering Society in London, U.K. The problem concerns the discomfort and pain…

  • New Pilots’ Forecast Computes In-Flight Icing Chances

    Researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado has developed a computer-generated forecast that provides pilots with information on the chance of encountering dangerous in-flight icing conditions. The Federal Aviation Administration provided funding for the project. Each year in the United States, 20-40 aircraft accidents are linked to in-flight icing encounters,…

  • NSF Grant Awarded for Nanotech Color-Enhanced MRI Scans

    An engineering faculty member at University of Houston received a grant from National Science Foundation (NSF) for research on a process that adds color to the standard black-and-while MRI image. The three-year, $300,000 grant supports the work of mechanical engineering professor Li Sun (pictured left), as well as colleagues at Houston and the University of…

  • Engineers Increase Computer Program Speed, Retain Safety

    Researchers at North Carolina State University in Raleigh have developed a software tool that helps computer applications run more efficiently without sacrificing safety features that previously slowed down their performance. The faculty/student team will discuss this process on 5 April at the International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization in Chamonix, France. Application software programs…

  • University Spinoff Company Commercializes Robotic Modules

    A University of California at Davis engineering professor and former student have developed robot modules for teaching and research, and formed a company to take their invention to market. Davis professor Harry Cheng and former grad student Graham Ryland developed the iMobot, as their invention is called, while Ryland worked in Cheng’s Integration Engineering Laboratory.…