Month: January 2025

Invited Presentation in ASME’s Engineering 4 Change Seminar Series

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Zoom – January 15, 2025

What can engineers and designers learn about sustainability from nature?

Natural ecosystems are an untapped source of design inspiration for improving the sustainability of human networks. This month’s Engineering 4 Change (E4C) Seminar Series features Dr. Astrid Layton Ph.D., Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University and Donna Walker Faculty Fellow in Mechanical Engineering. Her work explores how ecological food webs inspire sustainable engineering solutions. Join us, with Dr. Layton, for a session moderated by: Dr. Jesse Austin-Breneman , Associate Professor at Olin College of Engineering.

🌱 Discover how natural ecosystems can guide sustainable design
♻️ Explore the principle of ‘waste equals food’ in circular economy models
🚀 See examples of material cycling and energy efficiency
💬 Engage online with researchers, students and technical professionals worldwide

E4C’s Seminar Series features academic laboratories researching solutions to meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The world’s cutting edge research deserves a platform with a global audience. Join us for presentations of new findings from investigative teams worldwide.

🗓️ January 15th, 16:00 UTC –  11 am  ET
🔗 Sign up here: https://bit.ly/3ZJGyvo

Highlights from the presentation have been posted on their website: https://www.engineeringforchange.org/webinars/engineering-design-for-sustainability-learning-from-natures-systems-to-actually-achieve-waste-equals-food/

Sustainability as a systems-level problem with systems-level solutions.
Benefits of bio-inspired systems, meaning industrial or other human-made systems modeled after systems found in the natural world.
The ecological ‘window of vitality,’ a metric for systems analysis that measures efficiency and redundancy. She then uses the metric to show the effects of modeling a water distribution network after a natural ecological system.

PhD Student Hadear Hassan Attends Global Young Scientists Summit in Singapore

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Singapore – January 6-10, 2025

The National Research Foundation of Singapore has been conducting the interdisciplinary Global Young Scientist Summit in Singapore (Global Young Scientists Summit (nrf.gov.sg)) since 2013. The goal of the summit is an open exchange between young scientists (in 2025 about 350 young scientists from across the globe) and some of the most prominent scientists in the world (in 2025 around 20 Nobel Laureates and Field’s prize winners are expected). Texas A&M was invited to send our brightest young scientists to participate. Hadear was selected as one of 5 top nominations from A&M by the National Research Foundation of Singapore to participate in the summit.

The event enables promising young scientists to exchange ideas and knowledge with the speakers and their peers over four days under this theme. At the Summit, participants will take part in lectures, plenary sessions and panel discussions. They will have the opportunity to interact with and be mentored by speakers in informal small group sessions.

Invited Biology Symposium Presentation

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Atlanta, GA – January 5, 2025

We started the year off with our lab’s work being presented at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB, https://sicb.org/) 2025 conference, thanks to an invitation from Drs. Cassandra Donatelli and Karly Cohen to participate in their special session “From evolution to innovation: bridging biology and engineering through bioinspired design.” The presentation, and upcoming paper with PhD student Hadear Hassan, focused on how to better support engineers seeking to do bio-inspired design: “The Role of Information Representation in Fostering Bio-Inspired Designs in Engineering.” The presentation will be published as a paper in the ICB journal later this year.

Abstract: Engineering designs inspired by the natural world encompass many innovative and novel solutions to human problems, often solving problems where engineers had initially only seen trade-offs. Most bio-inspired engineering designs however have been the result of either chance observation or dedicated study, hindering efforts to have biological inspiration become a mainstream tool. Efforts have been made to develop normative bio-inspired processes and identify approaches that can aid the non-experts in biology find and successfully implement a bioinspired strategy, however true accessibility is still lacking. This work uses classroom studies to understand the impact of information representation on engineering design creativity under a biologically inspired engineering umbrella. Small teams of students were provided with a common problem description, followed by different sets of biological information. This biological information was made up of various technical levels of figures, discipline-specific terminology, and reading levels. The students were tasked with generating bio-inspired design solutions using the provided biological information. Sketches and feedbacks from students provide insight into a possible connection between information representation (text vs. images, reading level, disciplinary overlap, ideation novelty and diversity scores) and bio-inspired engineering designs. Using images and different levels of technical complexity in the text are possible routes for improving successful interdisciplinary knowledge transfer in ways that broaden the accessibility of problem driven interdisciplinary design.