August 18, 2025 Anaheim, CA
At IDETC-CIE 2025, Dr. Layton was awarded the 2025 Early Career Award by Design Theory and Methodology in the Design Engineering Division by ASME. The award was given “For exemplary early-career contributions to research, education, and service in Design Theory and Methodology, advancing knowledge of bio-inspired network-based approaches to sustainability, resilience, and complex systems in engineering design.”
This year at the ASME IDETC-CIE 2025 conference Dr. Layton served as an invited panelist in the CIE divisions “Women in CIE” panel Sunday night.
The CIE Division hosted a one-hour networking event at the 2025 IDETC-CIE on Sunday, August 17, from 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM, including a reception. This event was designed to recognize the contributions of those from nontraditional backgrounds in engineering, celebrate achievements within the ASME community, and foster professional networking and mentorship opportunities.
The event featured a group of panelists with expertise in emerging technologies—such as Modeling and Simulation, Digital Twins, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence-and how these innovations are helping to broaden access and opportunity across the field.
Ph.D. student Hadear Hassan presented research on a dynamic model that uses bio-inspired design principles to evaluate manufacturing systems for sustainability and resilience, especially under disturbances, while linking system qualities to performance metrics like capital cost and demand met at the 2025 Manufacturing Science and Engineering Conference (MSEC), hosted by Clemson University in Greenville, SC. The paper was a collaboration with Amira Bushagour, Dr. Abheek Chatterjee, and Dr. Astrid Layton.
The paper presented is titled “Quantitatively Supporting System-Level Sustainability and Resilience in Manufacturing.”
Abstract: “Manufacturing is a key driver of both economic health and environmental burdens, reporting over 12.7 million workers in the U.S. and emitting 30% of greenhouse emissions. Manufacturing systems thus must be both sustainable and resilient to mitigate environmental degradation and maintain job security and operations in case of disturbances. Doing both in manufacturing, however, is non-trivial and quantitatively ambiguous. This work investigates a bio-inspired approach to quantitatively design for both. Twenty manufacturing floor plan architectures are evaluated using a bio-inspired system design approach and traditional manufacturing metrics. Ecological Network Analysis has been shown in prior work to offer system design guidance inspired by nature’s resilient and sustainable food webs. Traditional metrics such as capital cost, throughput, and capacity utilization correlate these ecological characteristics with manufacturing-specific goals for the first time. The architectures, in both their traditional and bio-inspired architectures, are tested under disturbance scenarios to determine if the bio-inspired designs offer superior performance from a manufacturing perspective. The evaluation highlights interdependencies between metrics that capture circular economy supporting efficient pathways and resilience supporting manufacturing convertibility. The results also form the beginnings of an assessment framework for the use of low data metrics in the early-stages of manufacturing systems design.” Hassan, H., A. Bushagour, A. Chatterjee, A. Layton. (2025) “Quantitatively Supporting System-Level Sustainability and Resilience in Manufacturing.” ASME Manufacturing Science and Engineering Conference (MSEC). Greenville, SC, USA.
Dr. Astrid Layton hosted a free workshop at the 2025 ASEE Conference & Exposition in collaboration with Dr. Julie Linsey from Georgia Tech. The NSF sponsored workshop was titled “Is My Makerspace Meeting Students’ Needs? How to gain quantitative information about your space using a student-tool network model” and focused on the use of the BiSSL developed GUI for makerspace network analysis.
Dr. Layton also presented a paper “IUSE: Analyzing Nestedness Variability for Bipartite Makerspace Tool-Tool Projection Models” on this makerspace network analysis work, with lead author BiSSL PhD student Pepito Thelly.
Dr. Layton presented another paper “Work in Progress: Examining the Network Growth Strategies of Early-Stage Entrepreneurs” on research done in collaboration with Dr. M. Cynthia Hipwell at Texas A&M and the NSF I-Corps program, with first authors BiSSL grad student Ria Madan and PhD student Hadear Hassan.
A paper coauthored by Ph.D. student Hadear Hassan and Dr. Layton titled “Improving Cross-Disciplinary Knowledge Transfer for Bio-Inspired Engineering Design” has been published in the Integrative And Comparative Biology (ICB) journal. The work covers a 4 year study of the bio-inspired engineering design inspiration process, looking at how the technical level of biological information impacts the success of the resultant engineering designs. The work finds that a staggered approach may be the most beneficial, starting with basic references like those from National Geographic or zoos and following up the initial design generation round with highly technical and detailed journal articles to provide more functional details.
“Bio-inspired design has become a significant driver of innovation, enabling the development of effective solutions to some of the world’s toughest challenges. Bio-inspired design leverages evolutionary advancements to create products and processes that are often more efficient and sustainable. However, applying biological insights to engineering can be challenging due to the distinct ways the two disciplines define and interpret core concepts. This paper explores the cognitive and technical skills required to effectively translate biological inspiration into engineering solutions. Our hypothesis focuses on bridging the “language and representation gap” between biology and engineering. The goal of this paper is to identify key aspects of biological representation that enable its successful adaptation into engineering design, fostering the development of more impactful and efficient bio-inspired solutions. The analysis of student feedback and ideation outputs revealed that engineers preferred biology texts with a medium level of technical complexity, balancing ease of understanding with image quantity. Basic references were found to support diverse idea generation, while more technical texts proved useful and necessary for understanding in-depth biological insights and applying them to engineering problems. Future research could explore the impact of information presentation order, the role of biological experts in deepening insights, and the use of machine learning to refine how biological information is selected and categorized to enhance the bio-inspired design process.” – Hassan and Layton. (2025) “Improving Cross-Disciplinary Knowledge Transfer for Bio-Inspired Engineering Design.” Integrative & Comparative Biology. DOI: 10.1093/icb/icaf119
Emily Payne, a Ph.D. student in BiSSL, will be a Texas A&M Chevron Energy Graduate Fellow for Fall 2025 and Spring 2026. The award, a partnership with Chevron and the Texas A&M Energy Institute, funds 10 outstanding graduate student researchers from across the Texas A&M campus annually with fellowship awards of $10,000 each.
Funded by Chevron, the fellows program includes mentoring from faculty experts and opportunities to meet with subject matter experts at Chevron. Currently enrolled Texas A&M University graduate students from any school or college whose current and active research efforts focus on energy, including policy, technology, science, and societal impacts were eligible. The Texas A&M Chevron Energy Graduate Fellows program is part of Chevron’s University Partnership Program, which supports universities around the country by providing the necessary funding to better develop the future of the energy business.
“This exciting new collaboration between Texas A&M and Chevron represents a significant step forward in our shared commitment to advance energy solutions in support of a lower carbon energy future. Our newest Chevron Fellows are poised to make a real impact by creating scalable solutions that will transform the energy landscape. We eagerly anticipate the positive contributions they will make for the world,” said Jim Gable, the Vice President of Innovation at Chevron’s Technical Center and President of Chevron Technology Ventures.
Dr. Layton presented BiSSL’s work on sustainable design using bio-inspired techniques at Clemson’s mechanical engineering department graduate seminar on April 11. The research seminar was titled “The Best of Both Worlds: An Ecological Design Guide for Engineering Sustainability & Resilience” and had an audience of mechanical engineering and mathematics.
Abstract: The resilient and sustainable characteristics of Nature’s ecosystems are the result of millions of years of design iterations. These complex systems of systems are made up of interacting species that support their own needs while maintaining system-level functions. Dr. Layton will discuss ecosystems as a relatively untapped source of design inspiration for improving the resilience and sustainability of our human-engineered networks. Adapting quantitative descriptors and analysis techniques from ecology for human designers enables desirable ecosystem characteristics to be used as optimization and design guides for everything from industrial resource networks to power grids. Ecological characteristics such as high levels of materials/energy cycling and a unique balance between redundant and efficient pathways offer novel routes to achieving traditionally ‘at odds’ engineering goals like resilience, sustainability, and cost.
Drs. Astrid Layton, Jessica Menold, Kosa Goucher-Lambert, Mohsen Moghaddam, and Zhenghui Sha were invited by Drs. Carolyn Seepersad and Julie Linsey at Georgia Tech for an insightful series of talks on The Future of Design for the annual “Rigi” meeting of the Design Society. The talks will be compiled in an editorial journal paper in the Journal of Mechanical Design later this year.
BiSSL Ph.D. student Emily Payne awarded the Susan M. Arseven ’75 Make-a-Difference Memorial Award! The award was given by the Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) at their annual conference at Texas A&M University. The award encourages and provides financial assistance to A&M graduate students pursuing advanced degrees in science and engineering fields. Two awards of $1000 each are accompanied by a commemorative plaque and certificate.
Dr. Susan Arseven’s career in computer science began after earning a B.S. in Physics from the University of Michigan and an M.S. in Library Sciences from Columbia University. She initially worked at IBM, leading a project at the University of Pennsylvania to create the first major automated library system. Dr. Arseven furthered her education with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Texas A&M University, followed by a role at American Cyanamid, where she progressed from systems analyst to Chief Information Officer. In 1981, she completed an Executive MBA at Columbia University. Later, she served as the Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Union Camp Corporation until 1999. Throughout her career, Dr. Arseven was involved in advisory and community roles, including at Pace University’s School of Computer Science.
Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) is an organization of undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and staff at Texas A&M University that serves and represents women in all areas of science and engineering at Texas A&M University. Their mission is to promote the involvement of women in the fields of science, engineering, and technology. They aim to stimulate and encourage young women to pursue such careers as well as act as a support system for those that are currently pursuing professional degrees.
By an invitation from the INCOSE Natural Systems Working Group (NSWG), Dr. Layton presented on BiSSL work at the 2025 International Workshop. The talk titled “Biological Ecosystems as Quantitative System Design Inspiration for Resilient and Sustainable Human Networks” covered highlights from the BiSSL approach to using inspiration from ecological systems to improve sustainability and resilience in human networks.
BiSSL: Bio-inspired Systems Lab 