Category: Research & Innovation

Researchers from the Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering (MAE) in the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering, led by Saeed Moghaddam, Knox T. Millsaps Professor in MAE, have developed a new hemodialysis membrane made of graphene oxide (GO), a single-atomic layered material, which has the promise of revolutionizing treatments for kidney dialysis patients.

Dr. Walden “Wally” Rhines, son of the founding chair of the UF Department of Materials Science & Engineering (MSE) Dr. Frederick N. Rhines, is providing an endowment for a professorship in fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), a field in which Cornami, Inc., the AI company of which he is President and CEO, holds a leading edge position.

A team of University of Florida mechanical and aerospace engineering students, professors and researchers has been awarded a $12.5 million NASA contract to test and build a space exploration device over the next four years. UF’s team is led by experts John W. Conklin, Ph.D. and Peter Wass, Ph.D., a UF MAE associate professor and research scientist, respectively.

Three leading researchers at the Warren B. Nelms institute for the Connected World are using artificial intelligence (AI) to make the Internet of Things (IoT) more secure and more efficient. They have invited us into their laboratories to take a peek at the leading edge of AI applications.

Edward Phelps, Ph.D., assistant professor & J. Crayton Pruitt Family Term Fellow at the J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering, has received a $1.8M R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to further his studies of the role of gamma Aminobutyric Acid (GABA) in the islet cells of the pancreas.

Josephine Allen, Ph.D., MSE, and her team comprised of MSE Ph.D. candidate and NIH Predoctoral Fellow Bryan James and J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering undergrad Paxton Guerrin observed that biomedical and biomaterials researchers and the journals publishing their papers rarely mentioned the sex of the cells involved in the studies. They knew how that data could potentially affect research results, and so they conducted their own analysis by surveying the literature of several top biomedical journals and found that cell sex was reported in only a small fraction (roughly 3%) of papers. That information and several other notable results prompted their own paper highlighting the findings entitled “Let’s Talk About Sex – Biological Sex is Underreported in Biomaterials Studies.”

Amanda Krause, Ph.D., MSE, is employing artificial intelligence methods to track and catalogue data for her abnormal grain growth research, and thanks to new a $1.2 million research award from the NSF, she will bring a cutting-edge, 3D X-ray microscope system to campus to generate even better data for her algorithms.

Ruogu Fang, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering and director of the Smart Medical Informatics Learning and Evaluation Lab, was quoted in a Forbes article about an AI-assisted method for diagnosing Parkinson’s disease with, essentially, an eye exam.

UF engineers reach semi-finals in XPRIZE Contest for new COVID-19 test methods; their CRISPR-ENHANCE methodology published in Nature Communications journal

Faculty and students at the Warren B. Nelms Institute for the Connected World went to work to invent wearable, smart, connected devices to fight COVID-19 and future viruses.