(Senior Hannah Fix wrote this excellent post for The Approach to tell us about her educational outreach work with Professor Patrick Underhill. Enjoy!)

My name is Hannah Fix, I am a  senior undergraduate studying aeronautical and mechanical Engineering. I work with Professor Patrick Underhill on the “Fluid Dynamics Demo Kit: Fluid Physics on the Road” project, which is funded through the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics.

The Fluid Dynamics Demo Kit is an educational outreach project designing kits that contain experiments to teach students basic fluid and flow concepts. The aim of the project is to use exciting experiments aimed at high school students to teach them practical applications of the concepts they learn in the classroom. These experiments include a water gun, a siphon, Heron’s fountain, and a viscous drag experiment. There is a list of topics covered for each experiment and the assumption is that the topics will have previously been covered in class.

Heron's Fountain

Along with materials for the experiment, each kit includes the information for the teachers and worksheets for the students. There is a PowerPoint presentation which goes along with the experiment, walking through the set-up for the experiment, as well as the procedure, and the calculations that give a basic explanation of all the topics covered. The worksheets are designed to help the high school students walk through the various calculations to get theoretical results, compare them to the experimental results, and explain why they differ. For each experiment a sample worksheet is done with all the calculations written out to provide the teachers with extra guidance.

The supplies needed for each experiment are listed on both the PowerPoint slides and the worksheets. Each kit contains the basic components needed to complete every one of the experiments—beakers, scales, water, and other common laboratory equipment and supplies are assumed to be available to the students and will not be included in the kits. The experiments in all four kits are use parts that are cheap and easy to find, so even if something is broken or lost it can easily be replaced.

In the  water gun experiment, the students choose a target, calculate the number of times they have to pump the water gun, fire the water gun, and then see how close they were to hitting the target. The idea behind the water gun is that by pumping it and adding air, the water in the tank becomes pressurized thus causing it to exit the gun at a faster rate of speed and to go a farther distance. The students have to take measurements of the gun’s performance and calculate in advance the number of times they should have to pump it, using principles including ballistics, conservation of energy, Bernoulli, ideal gas law, conservation of mass, and generation of entropy. Then, using the results from the first test shot, the students calculate the coefficient of friction, recalculate the number of pumps, and fire again hopefully getting closer to the target with friction taken into account.

A siphon is a tube that pumps water up and out of one bucket and down to a bucket at lower lever. Atmospheric pressure is used to pump the water up the tube and then the water flows down into the lower bucket because it has less potential energy. The lab covers principles including Bernoulli, conservation of mass, conservation of energy, and viscous drag. The students are asked to calculate the theoretical time it takes to fill the lower bucket a certain amount and then compare it to experimental results. This lab also then has the students use those results to calculate the frictional losses.

Heron’s fountain, in which water runs up from the bottom tank and out through a tube in the top tank with no pumps, seems impossible. But it is just a matter of pressures pushing the water up and out. To prime the fountain,  water is added to the bottom tank and then the fountain is flipped upside down and water from the bottom tank fills the middle tank pressurizing the middle tank. The high pressure of the middle tank causes the water to flow up and out of the top of the fountain. Over time all the water from the middle tank flows up and out of the top of the fountain and the fountain stops until it is re-primed. The students calculate the time it takes for the fountain to stop running and compare it to the actual time.

The viscous drag experiment involves dropping various size and weight glass spheres in corn syrup and measuring the amount of time it takes for them to fall a certain distance. The students also heat and cool the corn syrup, to see if its viscosity changes at different temperatures. The drag laboratory covers principles including force balance, gravity, viscous drag, and buoyancy.

Our hope is to soon have these four experiments complete, and for the kits ready to be sent out to a few teachers who will test them out and give us feedback. We also hope to add more experiments to the kits, including one that covers surface tension. The education outreach project will help high school students learn to apply fluid concepts to real-world examples, and to gain a deeper understanding and appreciation for theory they learn in lectures.

(Below is an opinion piece by our own Jonathan Dordick on the need for personalized medicine. Dordick is the Howard P. Isermann Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and Director of our Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies. This winter he spoke at World Economic Forum in Davos about pharmaceutical safety and development. He shares some of those thoughts and others here with us at The Approach.)

“Drowsiness.” “Hallucination.” “Thoughts of Suicide.”

Anyone who picks up a magazine or watches primetime TV is woefully aware of these and myriad other potential side effects from a new prescription drug. Drugs cause side effects for a variety of reasons, and most of them are based on our individual biology. A drug that barely touches one man’s rheumatoid arthritis gives another woman near-complete relief. An asthma medication might allow one child to play soccer without asthma attacks but dangerously worsens the asthma of another child. With medicine, it is the personal that matters – it is the personal that could spell the difference between a cure and potentially deadly side effects. Medicine must move away from the impersonal to the personal.

With the massive progress made in science and medicine, including great reductions in genetic testing costs, an era of personalized medicine could be at hand. As scientists, we already know a great deal about the genetic makeup of some patients. For example, we know that some people metabolize drugs much faster or slower, making the average dose of certain medications either far too potent or near ineffective for some patients. The first step toward personalized medicine is already used to great effect in the treatment of cancers. Today, tumor biopsies from individual patients are used to determine the optimal type of chemotherapy for their specific type of cancer. Over the next decade, our scientific knowledge base will likely be sufficient to transition to an era of medicine where the majority of our medical treatment is specifically tailored to us as individuals.

But, personalized medicine faces more than scientific barriers. To develop truly personalized medicine, the economic and regulatory issues may be more complex than the actual scientific drug discovery process. The process of drug discovery and the way new pharmaceuticals are regulated must be reinvented to allow for personalized medicine.

Differences between individual patients, at the most fundamental level of human biology, must be integrated into the drug discovery and development process. While this has been a goal of modern drug discovery, it does not fit the current blockbuster model of the pharmaceutical industry. It is really just simple math. The way the pharmaceutical industry is currently set up, the only way to recoup the exorbitant costs of drug development is to create a drug formulation that a large percentage of the population can take. If a drug supports only a small fraction of that population, the pharmaceutical companies cannot afford to bring the drug to market. To overcome this huge barrier to entry for smaller batch drugs, the cost of drug development needs to be significantly reduced.

Today’s complex drug approval and clinical trial process represents the largest portion of a drug’s cost to consumers. To reduce costs and better target drugs to the individual, preclinical studies for new drugs need to move away, at least in most cases, from using animals to test the safety and efficacy of new drugs. If two human beings differ significantly in a drug’s efficacy, than how can scientists legitimately discover drugs when preclinical data is obtained from something as biologically dissimilar from us as a rat or a dog? In my lab and others around the world, scientists and engineers are developing entirely new technologies that test the toxicity and effectiveness of new drug molecules using individual human cell cultures rather than live lab rats and other animals. In other words, it is possible that with such tools doctors could one day use your own cells to test the efficacy of a drug on your specific body. Such tools need to be integrated into the overall drug approval process, replacing the majority of the now-required preclinical animal testing procedures. While animal tests might still be required prior to clinical trials, such animal studies would be focused and small. This would ultimately save significant amounts of money in the development process and weed out unsafe drugs earlier in the approval process. Money would no longer be lost moving unsafe drugs through the approval pipeline only to scrap them at the start of human trials.

Regulatory hurdles also complicate the pathway toward personalized medicine. Today, a drug passes the approval process when the majority of patients in clinical trials taking the drug have relief of symptoms and limited side effects. The very notion of “personal” means that many of these current policies policing drug efficacy and safety would be outdated. We would no longer be concerned about the majority of patients, but the minority of patients. Regulatory hurdles must be tailored to realistic levels that weigh the risks and benefits of new drugs to the individual patient. This would require much more focused clinical trials instead of the traditional multiphase trial structure. Such trials would also be smaller and less costly than current ones.

Such a paradigm shift will be difficult, but would reshape drug discovery and transform human health care. Let us all make this fight personal.

Here’s an obvious statement: science and engineering research topics can be challenging to understand. When you drill down deep into a discipline, the concepts, lingo, and implications can get very esoteric very quickly.

Now here’s something you may not have previously thought about: as trying as it is to understand certain research topics, it’s even trickier to explain the stuff. And explaining it in a way that clicks with non-scientists and non-engineers? It can be a Herculean task. But our professors are always up to the challenge.

As I travel around campus to  meet with the Institute’s peerless engineering faculty and learn about their research, there are a few constants I can count on. First, our professors are undoubtedly the nicest people in the world. Second, they’re invariably happy to take the time to walk me through their work and answer all of my questions. Third, they will always, always, always craft a doodle or draw a sketch to further my understanding of their research. Not only are sketches fun, they can help to distill the essence of a research project into something familiar. Seeing it on paper can expedite the “A-ha!” moment when a new concept or idea clicks into place.

Up above is a doodle that was sketched by chemical engineering professor Patrick Underhill, in an interview that led to this news story. He was explaining that in the realm of microorganisms, there’s a stark difference between pushers and pullers. Pushers, like the ulcer-causing bacteria H. pylori, propel themselves forward with their long helical filaments that train behind them. On the other hand, pullers like green algae propel themselves by performing a microscopic breast stroke with their pair of forward-facing filaments. The key takeaway is not the difference between the two groups, but a similarity: both create flows and make waves when they swim.

Look at the sketch again, and you’ll see it all there in pencil and paper.

Congratulations are in order for chemical engineering professors Steven Cramer and Shekhar Garde, who recently had their research featured on the cover of the Journal of Physical Chemistry B. The paper, which features beautiful scientific imagery and renderings, combines Cramer’s prowess in chromatography with Garde’s mastery of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations.

In the paper, Cramer and Garde report on new ways to probe the fundamental nature of how multimodal ligands bind to proteins. It is still largely unknown how these ligands—which are having a major impact on the field of bioprocessing—actually interact with the surfaces of proteins. Using MD simulations, Cramer and Garde gleaned new insights about the little-understood binding process. The resulting MD data corroborated with data Cramer has captured in the past using different methods including nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and chromatography with protein libraries.

Down the road, this work could help inform new techniques and technologies for separating proteins from other proteins that are extremely similar but not identical—a hugely important concern for pharma companies because of its implications in the process of refining and purifying biopharmaceutical drugs. This work also holds the potential to impact other fields such as biosensors and drug design.

See the journal cover above, and see below for some of the paper’s many wonderful figures:

Rensselaer President Shirley Ann Jackson and three of our leading scientists and engineers have just completed their “IdeasLab” presentation at the World Economic Forum out in Davos, Switzerland. They were invited there to talk about taking concepts from the university setting into commercial arenas. We thought we’d share a few photos. They also had the pleasure of spending time with Ecovative CEO and co-founder Eben Bayer, a Rensselaer alumnus, as he signed a new contract with Sealed Air Corp. Ecovative was incubated at Rensselaer.

At the IdeasLab, above, from left to right, Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor of Computer Science Boleslaw Szymanski, President Jackson,  Robert W. Hunt Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Dick Siegel, National University of Singapore President and session moderator Chorh Chuan Tan, and Howard P. Isermann Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering Jonathan Dordick.

Siegel, Szymanski, Dordick, and President Jackson at the IdeasLab.

Bayer (left) and President Jackson after the new Ecovative contract was signed, with William V. Hickey, President and CEO of Sealed Air.

Patrick Underhill is a professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering. We ask Patrick about his work:

Q:  You study complex fluids—everything from paint and ketchup to saliva, cell interiors, and DNA. More specifically, you investigate how tiny, microscopic features in these things can wield influence over the behavior of the entire fluid. How did you become interested in this topic?

A: As an undergrad, I majored in both chemical engineering and physics. Along with classes, I did research in a range of fields from catalysts to nuclear physics, including work on polymers. I was fascinated by how we could try to connect things at the atomistic scale to how the whole system or fluid behaves. The area of complex fluids lets me use all of this background in chemical engineering, physics, and math to work on some really cool problems. It is also fun to see the principles I study in many everyday materials. However, my friends and family often get tired of my pointing out all the complex fluids around us!

What’s your favorite thing about being a researcher?

I enjoy figuring out how things work or why they behave the way they do. I can’t think of a better job than being able to work on cool, important problems and try to figure out how they work. The “Eureka!” moment, where after working so hard on a problem you figure it out (and may be the first person to do so) is amazing. I also enjoy collaborating with researchers from many different backgrounds and disciplines, and the ability to help students as they build their career paths.

When did you know or decide that you wanted to be an engineer?

I have liked science and math since I was a kid. Ultimately when I needed to decide on a career, it helped that I have family members that are engineers. My Aunt Linda was one of the first female chemical engineering graduates from Northwestern. My older brother Greg also chose engineering as a career, and is now a professor at the University of Illinois.

For undergrad, you attended Washington University in St. Louis. Did you ever go up in the St. Louis Arch?

I’ve been up the Arch many times. I grew up 3.5 hours from St. Louis, so we would take family trips to see the Arch, the great museums, as well as other things the city has to offer including many Cubs versus Cardinals baseball games.

I also use the Arch as an example in one of the classes I teach. If you hold a string between your hands and let it hang down under gravity, the shape the string takes is called a catenary curve. The shape of the Arch is the same, except flipped upside down.

Outside of the lab and the classroom, what do you like to do for fun?

My wife and I like a lot of outdoor activities, especially hiking and nature photography. We also do quite a bit of cooking. My mother was a professional chef when I was growing up, so I was exposed to cooking at a very early age. I guess following a recipe and all the complex fluids used in cooking connect to my scientific sensibilities.

Finally, I am a passionate Atlanta Braves baseball fan. Even this year, when their epic collapse was second only to the Red Sox, I can still look forward to their certain World Series title next year!

To read more about Underhill and his research, check out the stories here and here.

The human immune system is a marvelous machine. Bacteria enter the body (perhaps through those nasty, chalky mints at the local diner that you simply could not resist diving in to). Above is a gross image of the mints’ effects as you see salmonella bacteria attacking human tissue. To fight the invasion, our white blood cells immediately get to work to attack the bacteria. If you are lucky, the bacteria are neutralized by the immune system and you can peel yourself off the bathroom floor and move on with your life, hopefully avoiding future contact with publicly shared jars of candy.

Scientists are discovering that plants also have a type of immune system that attacks bacteria and fungi. Instead of white blood cells, plants produce an abundance of things called flavonoids. And some very ingenious scientists here at Rensselaer are starting to ask the question, “If it works for plants, might it also work for humans?”

Why bother checking if flavonoids stop the spread of bacteria in humans? The answer is simple: society is running out of ways to kill bacteria. New methods to stop bacteria are becoming essential as the old methods – antibiotics like Z-pak, penicillin, amoxicillin, and the like – become less and less effective.

Despite being very simple organisms, bacteria have developed some exceptionally smart survival systems. As they and their brethren have been bombarded by decades by pills and sticky medicines, they have slowly adapted to survive the barrage. One of these adaptations actually allows bacteria to pump toxic compounds like antibiotics out of their systems before the drugs can leave lasting damage. And so, the antibiotics go in and the bacteria spit them right back out. To combat this, doctors need entirely new molecules to throw at the bacteria. When faced with a new molecule, the bacteria simply will not have the systems in place to combat it and they will be killed.

Of course there are a lot of different chemicals and compounds out there besides antibiotics that will kill bacteria on contact. But, drinking pool chlorine or injecting battery acid is not something I look forward to. I am guessing you are with me on at least this point. So, new drugs to combat bacteria also need to be safe for the very sensitive human system.

Flavonoids have long been praised for their health benefits (eat your kale), but little is understood about their antimicrobial effects. Mattheos Koffas who works in the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies and a team of researchers at the State University of Buffalo and in the pharmaceutical industry are looking at how effective flavonoids might be in combating bacteria in the human system. The scientists recently published a paper in the journal PLoS One that shared some very promising results on the future uses of flavonoids in medicine.

What they found was that naturally occurring flavonoids in plants had strong antibacterial and antifungal properties. They were also safe to human cells. Koffas and the team then took the research an important step forward by designing non-natural flavonoids in the lab. These new molecules took all the best aspects of the natural flavonoids and essentially turned up the volume.

What they found was that these chemically-synthesized non-natural flavonoids were even more potent against bacteria and fungi. They also appeared safe for human use.

The research provides an important path forward for a new class of antimicrobial agents – flavonoids. Koffas plans to continue to study the potential of these new molecules.

Wayne Bequette is a professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering. We ask Wayne about his work:

Q: Tell me a little bit about your work on creating an artificial pancreas to help people with juvenile diabetes.

A: Developing a fully closed-loop artificial pancreas requires a continuous glucose sensor, a continuous insulin infusion pump and a control algorithm to connect the sensor and pump. We have been tackling this problem one step at a time: first by developing a hypoglycemic alarm to warn of low blood glucose; next by constructing a simple pump shut-off algorithm to prevent hypoglycemia at night; then finally developing a fully closed-loop system. It is absolutely critical for engineers to have good medical collaborators to have a true impact, and I am fortunate to have excellent colleagues at Stanford University who perform the clinical studies.

You started your chemical engineering career working in the oil refinery industry. How did you end up in leading-edge biomedical engineering?

When I arrived at Rensselaer, I took the time to meet with just about every faculty member who was doing systems and control research. This led to me being asked to be on the dissertation committee of a graduate student in Biomedical Engineering, who was working on a drug infusion system to control a patient’s blood pressure and cardiac output. I introduced him to model predictive control (MPC), which was (and remains) the most commonly used advanced control technique in the oil refining industry. In no time he had coded up an algorithm and applied it to his drug infusion problem. About 10 years ago I decided to move into diabetes technology. One motivation was that a sister of mine has type 1 (also known as juvenile) diabetes; it turns out that many researchers in the area have a similar personal connection to the disease.

You seem to have a bit of a green streak, as your research also brushes up against fuel cells, biodiesel, and coal gasification. Is sustainability and efficiency important to you?

In addition to performing research in “green technologies,” I try to live a reasonably energy-efficient lifestyle. Most days (well, nine months out of the year), I bike to campus from my home in Albany. The 25-mile round trip by bike saves a 32-mile roundtrip by car, reducing fuel consumption and carbon dioxide production. The main challenge with my bike ride is that, in both directions, it ends with an uphill climb.

Tell me a little about the books you’ve authored. It has to take a ton of work to write a textbook. Was it challenging?

You certainly learn a lot by writing a textbook. My first textbook, focused on process dynamics and emphasized nonlinear behavior; I wrote it at a time in my career when I was learning about chaos and related topics. My second textbook, focused on control system design, was the first in chemical engineering to emphasize a model-based approach.

When did you know or decide that you wanted to be a engineer?

In seventh grade I told a friend that I liked math and science and he convinced me that I should be an engineer.

What would you say to young students and high schoolers who are thinking about studying engineering or becoming an engineer?

I would say that some of the math that you learn in high school may seem abstract at the time, but the more math that you learn, the better prepared you will be for an engineering career.

Outside of the lab and the classroom, what do you like to do for fun?

Three years ago, motivated by the 2008 Olympics, I began strength training and pole vaulting again. At the age of 54, I am actually a better vaulter than I was in high school, which probably says more about how bad I was in the early 1970′s than how good I am now. In addition to hiking and biking much of the year, I ski in the winter—although not aggressively enough to keep up with my two kids (ages 12 and 15).

To read more about Bequette and his research, see a Rensselaer story here, an Approach post here, and a great Channel 13 story here.

Our friend Benita Zahn visited campus earlier this week, to meet chemical engineering professor Wayne Bequette and learn more about his fascinating work on creating control systems for an artificial pancreas. The resulting news story is above.

Bequette started his career in the oil refinery industry, where he was in the business of creating complex computer code. This code was the brain that modeled and controlled the advanced diagnostics equipment responsible for monitoring the chemical state of oil as it moved through the labyrinth of refinery machinery.

His pursuits led him to academia. Bequette openly admits that, as a chemical processing guy, he never imagined he would end up doing biomedical engineering research. But serendipity strolls a subtle path. Several years after joining the Rensselaer faculty, a conversation with a colleague (who was an anesthesiologist) set off the proverbial light bulb over Bequette’s head. He saw an opportunity to apply techniques he used in the oil industry toward a new application: modeling blood pressure.

One thing led to another, and he ventured into applying these same techniques toward the challenge of creating an artificial “closed-loop” pancreas. The device, still several years away from being commercialized, pairs a glucose monitor with an insulin pump. For those suffering from Type 1 diabetes, also called juvenile diabetes, the closed-loop system holds the potential to remove much of the guesswork and estimation from the constant care they must take to maintain and live with the disease.

As you can imagine, there’s no shortage of excitement surrounding Bequette’s work. It’s a great project, and it’s a crystal clear example of how basic research can yield new technologies that better our lives in fundamental, meaningful ways.

Read more about Bequette’s research in our recent story here.

Marc-Olivier Coppens is a professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Rensselaer. We ask him about his work:

Q: Your research group is called “Nature Inspired Chemical Engineering.” What does that mean, exactly?

A: We look for fundamental mechanisms underlying the efficiency of natural systems (like lungs, trees and cellular membranes) from the perspective of a chemical engineer – who is interested in molecular and energetic transformations, separations, scaling-up and robustness – and then use those principles to guide the design of solutions to similar problems in technology. These include new solutions to energy and chemical challenges, like new catalysts, membranes, reactors, fuel cells, adaptive materials, etc. Nature inspired chemical engineering is not biomimetics in the narrower sense of imitating nature, because solutions need to be adapted to the required context, and design is based on fundamental mechanisms rather than appearances.

Why do you draw your inspiration from nature?

Nature is a complex, evolved system that is both beautiful and awe-inspiring. We have so much to learn from it! More sustainable solutions to technological and other challenges can be (or should be?) discovered by working with, and learning from nature, rather than producing at the expense of nature. Nature provides amazing guidance to providing efficient solutions to some of our Grand Challenges, like those concerning energy and water.

You’re a proud Belgian. I passed through Belgium on the train from Paris to Rotterdam, but sadly didn’t have a chance to stop there. What’s Belgium like?

Belgium is a beautiful country, small but incredibly rich with history and art. It is flat near the coast and hilly further south, with a mild, but often-rainy climate. Low lands with low clouds. My town, Ghent, even has a mediaeval castle, right in its center. Belgium is also famous for what is arguably the best chocolate, the tastiest beer, delicious food, and is the home of “French fries” (that’s right!). The capital, Brussels, is also the center of the European Union and NATO, and Belgium has one of the largest ports in the world, Antwerp, which partly explains its importance for trade and industry. It also holds the record of the longest time without government! There are three national languages: Flemish (Dutch), French and German. The Flemish in the north and the Walloons from the south constantly argue politically, and cannot perceive, what is more obvious to an outsider, that the union is more than the parts and that there are so many more commonalities than differences. But isn’t that a universal problem with humans?

What do you love most about being a researcher and professor?

I love the intellectual opportunity to freely explore and discover, and the unique chance to pass that excitement on to the next generation, to work with and guide students – to equip them with not just tools, but help them to foster a fresh, critical state of mind that allows them to approach challenging problems in a responsible way.

What’s the most challenging part of being a researcher and professor?

Prioritizing, as well as raising money to do exciting research are practical challenges, but one of the greatest ones, which I actually enjoy, is to constantly innovate and be adaptive, whether it is in research or in education, in an ever-changing social and cultural context.

You’ve taught all over the world: from the United States to Norway, China, Taiwan, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. Which country has the best food?

Here is some food for thought: Local food is always the best. I am a food lover, so I have enjoyed great food everywhere I lived or traveled, even though some localities have more variation in their daily diet than other places. Food in my native Belgium is delicious. The diversity of flavors in China is simply amazing.

When you’re not in the lab or classroom, what do you like to do for fun?

My interests are boundless, but time is lacking to explore many of them as much as I’d like. In general, I love life and the diversity that our planet offers, in nature, its people, experiences, arts, … Daily, I read and listen to music. I also like to be physically active: I swim regularly, hike, and have engaged (on and off) in a variety of other sports. A great art lover, I also like to explore artistic activities myself, as much as I enjoy traveling – I have traveled widely, from Central Asia to the Okavango and Svalbard. Whenever I have a chance, I like to explore new places. Mostly, I enjoy spending time with good friends, nearby or in far corners of the world.

Read more about Coppens’ research here, and a recent news story on him here.