News: CBE

The heat of the earth is a vast untapped resource that could be used to heat not just homes but entire communities. Heating exceeds 20% of fossil fuel consumption across northern tiers of North America, Europe, Asia, and we need a low-carbon alternative. Shifting to electrical sources is not an efficient solution. Cornell University plans to do this through a project known as Earth Source Heat. Engineers at Cornell University are planning to utilize geothermal heat from intermediate temperature rocks (60-100°C) as a source of direct-use energy. This is a significant part of Cornell’s overall... Read more

Fengqi You, the Roxanne E. and Michael J. Zak Professor in Energy Systems Engineering and a Croll Sesquicentennial Fellow in the Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Ning Zhao, a doctoral student in the Process-Energy-Environmental Systems Engineering (PEESE) lab, examined a variety of carbon-neutral energy systems and decarbonization methods after the state passed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) in July 2019. Read more

Cornell Professor David Putnam has been named a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), the organization announced on December 8, 2020. Read more

Sarah Hormozi’s talk at the Physics of Dense Suspension Symposium appeared on the cover of Journal of Rheology in November (Vol. 64, No. 6). The Hormozi research team has designed a frictionless model suspension and characterized its rheology across multiple lengths for the first time by performing atomic force microscopy and conventional rheometry experiments. The results indicate the presence of inertial effects in an overdamped system of suspension close to jamming. These experimental findings do not entirely follow the current theoretical paradigms and add to open-ended questions in... Read more

AAAS Announces Leading Scientists Elected as 2020 Fellows Susan Daniel, Cornell University: For pioneering work that has yielded new approaches to the study of the biophysical interactions at cellular membranes, particularly involving microvesicles and viruses. Read more

The Engstrom Research Group’s most recent publication, published online on November 9, and entitled “Area-selective atomic layer deposition enabled by competitive adsorption,” was selected as an Editor’s Pick for the Journal of Vacuum Science & Technology A. This manuscript appeared as part of a Special Topic Collection on Area Selective Deposition, and the authors were Taewon Suh, Yan Yang, Hae Won Sohn, Robert A. DiStasio Jr., and James R. Engstrom. This work was a collaboration between the Engstrom and DiStasio Groups and involved the use of both experiments and calculations to demonstrate... Read more

Five Cornell faculty members have been elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society. Read more

A Cornell project funded by two separate three-year grants will develop worm-like, soil-swimming robots to sense and record soil properties, water, the soil microbiome and how roots grow. Read more

The company, co-founded by Robert S. Langer, CHEME ’70 in 2010, is a drug development biotechnology company most noted for its work on novel mRNA technology. Langer currently sits on the company’s board of directors. Read more

Years before the novel coronavirus turned into a global pandemic, Susan Daniel was already looking for ways to defeat it. Daniel, a professor in Cornell’s Robert Frederick Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, had created models of the host membrane to gain new insights into the virus SARS-CoV. Now referred to informally as SARS-CoV-1, the virus is a precursor and close relative of the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 or SARS 2. Read more