August 26, 2026 Houston, Texas

BiSSL had a fantastic time attending ASME’s (The American Society of Mechanical Engineers) IDETC-CIE 2026 Conference in Houston. Our lab had one paper presented in the SEIKM conference track in CIE, titled: “Integrating Bio-Inspired Design for Robust System Recovery.”

The paper was lead by BiSSL alum Dr. Emily Payne-Broucek, former Ph.D. student who has since transitioned to the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. With support from a National Science Foundation CAREER grant, she was able to use our bio-inspired design for resilience research to redefine how we think about system recovery.

Key takeaways include:

• 🌱 Nature-Inspired Restoration: We introduced an ecologically guided recovery algorithm that uses graph-based ecological network analysis to direct the recovery sequence of power grids post-blackout.
• ⚡ Better Reach with Limited Power: When coupled with physics simulations, our ecological algorithm restored larger portions of network during early recovery stages compared to traditional hierarchy-based restoration procedures.
• 💪 Enhanced Resilience: Combining bio-inspired grid designs with the ecologically-guided recovery seems to yield equal or higher long-term robustness against cascading failures during severe outages.

A huge congratulations to Emily on this outstanding contribution to bio-inspired systems design! Looking forward to seeing all the amazing impact she continues to make in her new role. The paper is published as open access for anyone interested.

E. Payne and A. Layton. (2026) “Integrating Bio-Inspired Design for Robust System Recovery.” ASME 2026 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers & Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC-CIE). Houston, TX, USA.