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Columbia Engineering researchers have developed a way to manufacture microscale-sized machines from biomaterials that can safely be implanted in the body. Working with hydrogels, they have invented a new technique that stacks the soft material in layers to make devices that have three-dimensional, freely moving parts. The study demonstrates a fast manufacturing method they call “implantable microelectromechanical systems” (iMEMS). (Science Robotics 1/4/17)

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Current biomedical imaging and sensing technologies include computerized tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, optical coherence tomography, spectroscopy, and ultrasound. These technologies are at the intersection of the physical sciences, mathematics, computer science, and engineering. Columbia Engineering is home to many imaging and sensing labs, some of which collaborate with labs at Columbia University Medical Center. Our researchers are using biomedical imaging and sensing to study everything from the development of artificial vision systems to bone biomechanics.

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Columbia Engineering Prof Steve WaiChing Sun has won the Air Force’s Young Investigator Program Award to model load response of granular materials; he is leading a combined experiential-modeling effort to help understand the high-strain-rate responses of wetted granular materials to impact loadings released into the soil, such as blasts, explosion, munitions, subsurface exploration, ground improvement, and ballistic vulnerability of military structures.

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In a new study, Columbia Engineering researchers looked at increasing trends in the severity of tornado outbreaks where they measured severity by the number of tornadoes per outbreak. They found that these trends are increasing fastest for the most extreme outbreaks.

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Columbia Engineering Professor Yuan Yang has developed a new method to increase the energy density of lithium batteries. He has built a trilayer structure that is stable even in ambient air, which makes the battery both longer lasting and cheaper to manufacture. The work, which may improve the energy density of lithium batteries by 10-30%, is published online today in Nano Letters.

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Researchers have directly observed—for the first time—negative refraction for electrons passing across a boundary between two regions in a conducting material. They observed the effect in graphene, demonstrating that electrons in the material behave like light rays, which can be manipulated by such optical devices as lenses and prisms. The findings could lead to the development of new types of electron switches, based on the principles of optics rather than electronics. (Science 9/30)

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Balance is an essential component of daily life, something many of us take for granted. But not everyone can. Studies have shown, however, that activity-based interventions offer a promising approach, and Columbia Engineering Professor Sunil Agrawal is at the forefront of research efforts to improve recovery through the development of robotic devices that help patients retrain their movements. He recently won a five-year $5 million grant from the New York State Spinal Cord Injury Board.

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A team led by Nanfang Yu, assistant professor of applied physics at Columbia Engineering, has discovered a new phase-transition optical material—samarium nickelate—and demonstrated novel devices that dynamically control light over a much broader wavelength range and with larger modulation amplitude than what has currently been possible. SmNiO3 could potentially transform optoelectronic technologies, including smart windows and infrared camouflage. The team included researchers from Purdue, Harvard, Drexel, and Brookhaven National Laboratory (Advanced Materials, 8/30).

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Columbia Engineering Professor Hod Lipson and his students have invented a 3D food printer that could revolutionize the way we think about food and prepare it – it can fabricate edible items through computer-guided software and the actual cooking of edible pastes, gels, powders, and liquid ingredients—all in a prototype that looks like an elegant coffee machine.

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Columbia Engineering, Disney Research, and MIT researchers have developed a method to control sound waves, using a computational approach to inversely design acoustic filters that fit within an arbitrary 3D shape while achieving target sound filtering properties. They designed acoustic voxels, small, hollow, cube-shaped chambers through which sound enters and exits, as a modular system. Like LEGOs, the voxels can be connected to form a complex structure and can modify the structure’s acoustic filtering property.

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Columbia Engineering, Disney Research, and MIT researchers have developed a method to control sound waves, using a computational approach to inversely design acoustic filters that fit within an arbitrary 3D shape while achieving target sound filtering properties. They designed acoustic voxels, small, hollow, cube-shaped chambers through which sound enters and exits, as a modular system. Like LEGOs, the voxels can be connected to form a complex structure and can modify the structure’s acoustic filtering property.

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Xi Chen, associate professor of earth + environmental engineering at Columbia Engineering, and Klaus Lackner at Arizona State University, reports an unconventional reversible chemical reaction in a confined nanoenvironment. The discovery, a milestone in clarifying the scientific underpinnings of moisture-swing chemical reaction, is critical to understanding how to scrub CO2 from the Earth's atmosphere; the researchers have already used it to capture CO2 more efficiently and at a much lower cost than other methods.

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A new technique developed at Columbia Engineering by Biomedical Engineering Professor Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic repairs large bone defects in the head and face by using lab-grown living bone, tailored to the patient and the defect being treated. This is the first time researchers have grown living bone grown to precisely replicate the original anatomical structure, using autologous stem cells derived from a small sample of the recipient’s fat. (Science Translational Medicine 6/15)

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Columbia Engineering Professor Steven K. Feiner has developed a way to combat virtual reality sickness that can be applied to consumer head-worn VR displays, such as the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Sony PlayStation VR, and Google Cardboard. Their approach dynamically, yet subtly, changes the user’s field of view (FOV) in response to visually perceived motion, as the user virtually traverses an environment while remaining physically stationary, and significantly reduces VR sickness.

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Columbia Engineering-led team reports achieving real-time single molecule electronic DNA sequencing at single-base resolution using a protein nanopore array. The team includes researchers from Columbia University, Genia Technologies (Roche), Harvard University, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The work sets the stage for revolutionary, cost-effective genetic diagnostic platforms with unprecedented potential for precision medicine. (PNAS, 4/18/2016)

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Columbia Engineering Professor Harish Krishnaswamy has integrated a non-reciprocal circulator and a full-duplex radio on a nanoscale silicon chip for the first time. This breakthrough technology needs only one antenna, thus enabling an even smaller overall system than one he developed last year: “This technology could revolutionize the field of telecommunications,” he says. (Nature Communications 4/15/16)

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Columbia Engineering researchers have developed a novel sheet camera that can be wrapped around everyday objects to capture images that cannot be taken with one or more conventional cameras. They designed and fabricated a flexible lens array that adapts its optical properties when the sheet camera is bent. This optical adaptation enables the sheet camera to produce high quality images over a wide range of sheet deformations. (To be presented at ICCP 5/13-15)

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In a new study recently published in Nature Nanotechnology, researchers from Columbia Engineering, Cornell, and Stanford have demonstrated heat transfer can be made 100 times stronger than has been predicted, simply by bringing two objects extremely close—at nanoscale distances—without touching. The team used custom-made ultra-high precision micro-mechanical displacement controllers to achieve heat transfer using light at the largest magnitude reported to date between two parallel objects.

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Columbia Engineering Professor Shree Nayar and colleagues have developed Cambits, a modular imaging system that enables the user to create a wide range of computational cameras. The colorful plastic blocks of five different types—sensors, light sources, actuators, lenses, and optical attachments—can easily be assembled to make a variety of cameras with different functionalities including high dynamic range imaging, panoramic imaging, refocusing, light field imaging, depth imaging using stereo, kaleidoscopic imaging and even microscopy.

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Columbia Engineering Professor Elisa Konofagou won a $3.33 million DARPA grant to develop a new way to use focused ultrasound for stimulation of peripheral nerves that will ultimately be able to control organ function. The grant is part of DARPA’s new Electrical Prescriptions program aimed at developing novel technologies to improve physical and mental health using targeted stimulation of the peripheral nervous system to exploit the body’s natural ability to quickly and effectively heal itself.

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Columbia Engineering researchers have shown, for the first time, that electrical stimulation of human heart muscle cells engineered from human stem cells aids their development and function. Led by Biomedical Engineering Professor Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic, they used electrical signals, designed to mimic those in a developing heart, to regulate and synchronize the beating properties of nascent cardiomyocytes, the cells that support the beating function of the heart. (Jan 19, Nature Communications)

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Biomedical Engineering Professor Helen H. Lu has won a 3-year $1.125 million grant from the Department of Defense for her research on tendon-to-bone integration for rotator cuff repair. Lu is collaborating with William Levine, chairman and Frank E. Stinchfield Professor of Orthopedic Surgery at Columbia University Medical Center. The funding will support preclinical trials to test the potential of a nanofiber-based device to enable biological healing between tendon and bone post rotator cuff surgery.

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In the first study to run a genome-wide analysis of Short Tandem Repeats (STRs) in gene expression, a large team of computational geneticists led by investigators from Columbia Engineering and the New York Genome Center have shown that STRs, thought to be just neutral, or "junk," actually play an important role in regulating gene expression. The work uncovers a new class of genetic variants that modulate gene expression. (Nature Genetics 12/7)

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Led by Columbia Engineering professor Ken Shepard, researchers have, for the first time, harnessed the molecular machinery of living systems to power an integrated circuit from ATP, the energy currency of life. They achieved this by integrating a conventional solid-state complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) integrated circuit with an artificial lipid bilayer membrane containing ATP-powered ion pumps, opening the door to creating entirely new artificial systems that contain both biological and solid-state components. (Nature Communications 12/7)

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Biomedical Engineering Professor Elizabeth Hillman has won an NIH BRAIN Initiative grant, the first awarded to Columbia Engineering, for her work on SCAPE, a high-speed 3D microscope she has developed for imaging the living brain. Whereas most modern microscopes can only image a single plane at up to 20 frames per second, Hillman’s technique can over 100 planes within a 3D volume in the same amount of time, enabling scientists to make exciting new discoveries.

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In creating what looks to be a simple children’s musical instrument—a xylophone with keys in the shape of zoo animals—computer scientists at Columbia Engineering, Harvard, and MIT have demonstrated that sound can be controlled by 3D-printing shapes. They designed an optimization algorithm and used computational methods and digital fabrication to control acoustic properties—both sound and vibration—by altering the shape of 2D and 3D objects. (To be presented at SIGGRAPH Asia 11/4)

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Columbia Engineering Applied Physics Professor Nanfang Yu has won the prestigious DARPA Young Faculty Award, which will support his work on metasurface-based flat optical modulators, using strong interactions between light and 2D-structured materials to control light at will. Yu hopes to demonstrate spatial light modulators—high-speed and light-weight optoelectronic devices—that are crucial for light detection and ranging, technology useful for a wide range of applications, including remote sensing, navigation, and surveillance.

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Columbia Engineering researchers have developed technology, now commercially available through Red Balloon Security, that significantly reduces the threat of embedded device malware attacks on end users and organizations. HP has announced it is deploying the host-based defense technology on 4 new HP LaserJet Enterprise printers and multi-function printers coming out this fall. HP will also deliver a firmware update on all Future Smart-enabled HP LaserJet Enterprise printers already in operation going back to 2011.

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A team led by Sunil Agrawal, professor of mechanical engineering and of rehabilitation and regenerative medicine at Columbia Engineering, has won a $1 million grant from the NSF’s National Robotics Initiative to develop a dynamic spine brace that is more flexible than the rigid braces now in use for treatment of scoliosis.

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Researchers from Columbia Engineering and Columbia University Medical Center have developed a new method that can target delivery of very small volumes of drugs into the lung. Their approach, in which micro-liters of liquid containing a drug are instilled into the lung, distributed as a thin film in the predetermined region of the lung airway, and absorbed locally, may provide much more effective treatment of lung disease. (August 31 online Early Edition PNAS)

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Columbia engineers have developed a new approach, opposite to climate models, to correct inaccuracies using a high-resolution atmospheric model that more precisely resolves clouds and convection and parameterizes the feedback between convection and atmospheric circulation. The new simulation strategy paves the way for better understanding of the water and carbon cycles in the Amazon, enabling researchers to learn more about the role of deforestation and climate change on the forest.” (PNAS Online Early Edition 8/31)

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Researchers have discovered two strategies that enable Saharan silver ants to stay cool in one of the world’s hottest environments. They are the first to demonstrate that the ants use a coat of uniquely shaped hairs to control electromagnetic waves over an extremely broad range from the solar spectrum to the thermal radiation spectrum and that different physical mechanisms are used in different spectral bands to realize the same biological function of reducing body temperature.

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Led by James Hone’s group at Columbia Engineering, a team of scientists from Columbia, SNU, and KRISS demonstrated—for the first time—an on-chip visible light source using graphene, an atomically thin and perfectly crystalline form of carbon, as a filament. They attached small strips of graphene to metal electrodes, suspended the strips above the substrate, and passed a current through the filaments to cause them to heat up. (Nature Nanotechnology AOP June 15)

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The increasing inequality in income and wealth in recent years, together with excessive pay packages of CEOs in the U.S. and abroad, is of growing concern.. Columbia Engineering Professor Venkat Venkatasubramanian has led a study that examines income inequality through a new approach: he proposes that the fairest inequality of income is a lognormal distribution (a method of characterizing data patterns in probability and statistics) under ideal conditions, and that an ideal free market can “discover” this in practice.

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Columbia Engineering professor Latha Venkataraman has designed a new technique to create a single-molecule diode, and, in doing so, she has developed molecular diodes that perform 50 times better than all prior designs. Venkataraman’s group is the first to develop a single-molecule diode that may have real-world technological applications for nanoscale devices.

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Columbia Engineering professor Changxi Zheng has developed a technique that enables hydrographic printing, a widely used industrial method for transferring color inks on a thin film to the surface of 3D objects, to color these surfaces with the most precise alignment ever attained. His new computational method, which simulates the printing process and predicts color film distortion during hydrographic immersion, generates a colored film that guarantees exact alignment of the surface textures to the object.

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Matei Ciocarlie, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, has been awarded a three-year $637,000 Young Investigator Program (YIP) grant from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) for his work on human-in-the-loop systems in which humans and robotic manipulators work together, side by side, on the same task.

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Columbia Engineering Professor James Hone led a team in 2013 that dramatically improved the performance of graphene by encapsulating it in boron nitride. They’ve now shown they can similarly improve the performance of another 2D material, molybdenum disulfide (MoS2. Their findings provide a demonstration of how to study all 2D materials and hold great promise for a broad range of applications including high-performance electronics, detection and emission of light, and chemical/bio-sensing. Nature Nanotechnology , week of April 27, 2015

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A team led by Shree K. Nayar, Computer Science Professor at Columbia Engineering, has invented a prototype video camera that is the first to be fully self-powered—it can produce an image each second, indefinitely, of a well-lit indoor scene. They designed a pixel that can not only measure incident light but also convert the incident light into electric power. The work will be presented at the International Conference on Computational Photography in Houston, 4/24-26

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Columbia engineers have invented a technology—full-duplex radio integrated circuits—that can be implemented in nanoscale CMOS to enable simultaneous transmission and reception at the same frequency in a wireless radio. Up to now, this has been thought to be impossible: transmitters and receivers either work at different times or at the same time but at different frequencies. Electrical Engineering Professor Harish Krishnaswamy’s team is the first to demonstrate an IC that can accomplish this.

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Columbia Engineering Professor Barclay Morrison has led the first study to determine underlying biological mechanisms that promote functional recovery of the blood-brain barrier after blast injury, demonstrating that treatment with the glucocorticoid, dexamethasone, after primary blast injury promotes rapid recovery of an in vitro model of the BBB. His findings may also help improve outcomes in brain-injured soldiers and civilians, reducing the length of their mandatory rest periods before returning to duty.

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Columbia Engineering Professor Andreas Hielscher is developing a novel technology that could improve diagnosis of peripheral arterial disease and make it easier to monitor patients. He’s won a $2.5 million 5-year grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to build and test a dynamic optical tomographic imaging system, which uses near-infrared light to map the concentration of hemoglobin in the body’s tissue and reveal how well blood is perfusing patients’ hands and feet.

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Columbia Engineering Professor Samuel Sia has developed a low-cost smartphone accessory that can perform a point-of-care test that simultaneously detects three infectious disease markers—HIV and syphilis—from a finger prick of blood in just 15 minutes. The device replicates, for the first time, all mechanical, optical, and electronic functions of a lab-based blood test without requiring any stored energy: all necessary power is drawn from the smartphone. February 4, Science Translational Medicine.

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As nanomachine design advances, researchers are moving from wondering if the nanomachine works to how long it will work—an important question as there are so many potential applications, e.g., for medical uses including drug delivery and early diagnosis. Columbia Engineering Professor Henry Hess observed a molecular shuttle powered by kinesin motor proteins and found it to degrade when operating, marking the first time degradation has been studied in detail in an active, autonomous nanomachine.

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Columbia Engineering professor Elizabeth Hillman has developed SCAPE, a new microscope that images living things in 3D at very high speeds. Her approach uses a simple, single-objective imaging geometry that requires no sample mounting or translation, making it possible to image freely moving living samples. SCAPE’s ability to perform real-time 3D imaging at cellular resolution in behaving organisms could be transformative for biomedical and neuroscience research. (Study published on Nature Photonics's website 1/19/2015.)

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Innovative technology developed in Electrical Engineering Professor Peter Kinget’s lab is at the core of Seamless Devices, a startup co-founded by Kinget and his former student Jayanth Kuppambatti PhD’14. Seamless Devices aims to address critical limitations faced by semiconductor technologies striving to meet the demands of performance and power efficiency required by the next-generation of electronic devices and sensors.

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Researchers from Columbia Engineering and the Georgia Institute of Technology report today that they have made the first experimental observation of piezoelectricity and the piezotronic effect in an atomically thin material, molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), resulting in a unique electric generator and mechanosensation devices that are optically transparent, extremely light, and very bendable and stretchable.

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Columbia Engineering and MIT researchers have combined computer simulations designed for Hollywood with precision model experiments to examine the mechanics of coiling. Their study, which bridges engineering mechanics and computer graphics, impacts a variety of engineering applications, from the fabrication of nanotube serpentines to the laying of submarine cables and pipelines (published 9/29 PNAS Early Online edition).

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Researchers have created a data resource that will improve genomic research in the Ashkenazi Jewish population and lead to more effective personalized medicine. The team of experts from Columbia Engineering and 10 other labs in the NYC area and Israel focused on the Ashkenazi Jewish population because of its demographic history of genetic isolation and the resulting abundance of population-specific mutations and prevalence of rare genetic disorders. The study was published on Nature Communications.

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Roxana Geambasu and Augustin Chaintreau, assistant professors of computer science at Columbia Engineering, have developed XRay, a new tool that reveals which data in a web account, such as emails, searches, or viewed products, are being used to target which outputs, such as ads, recommended products, or prices. They are presenting the prototype, an open source system designed to make the online use of personal data more transparent, at USENIX Security on August 20.