BiSSL Ph.D. students Hadear Hassan and Pepito Thelly represented the lab for our department’s MEEN Industry Day out at the A&M Rellis Campus. Companies attending included Airbus, Siemens, Halliburton, Baker Hughes, Oxy, NOV, and Nova.
The BiSSL group was at the 19th SIG Design Theory Workshop and the 10th SIG Tutorial on Design Theory at the Paris School of Mines. The workshop covered contributions in the areas of the Design Theory SIG:
BiSSL Ph.D. candidate Hadear Hassan led the publication of an IDETC-CIE conference paper titled “Potential for Digital Technologies & Additive Manufacturing to Support Lean Manufacturing + Circular Economy Synergies” in collaboration with Aarhus University Ph.D. student (and former BiSSL MS student) Amira Bushagour and Dr. Abheek Chatterjee, who is a post doc at NIST and is a former BiSSL PhD student. The paper was presented in the SEIKM track on “Advanced Manufacturing and Supply Chain Systems Design and Analysis” co-chaired by Dr. Chatterjee.
ABSTRACT: Lean manufacturing and circular economy are two production paradigms aimed at addressing the challenges faced by traditional production models, such as resource constraints, environmental impacts, and waste generation. Lean manufacturing focuses on improving production efficiency by eliminating non-value-adding activities. Circular economy aims to reduce waste and resource consumption and support production demands by retaining valuable materials in the economy as long as possible. Recent research has indicated that the convergence of these paradigms is a promising strategy to support sustainable production and consumption. However, challenges remain in fully integrating these approaches, as lean manufacturing emphasizes efficiency without directly considering environmental concerns, a key goal of the circular economy. This research investigates if additive manufacturing and digital technologies (such as digital twins and product passports) offer potential approaches to support the synergies between lean manufacturing and circular economy initiatives. To this end, this article surveys how additive manufacturing and digital technologies support the core aspects of circular economy and lean manufacturing. Thereafter, the synergies between the core aspects of the two paradigms are analyzed with a focus on the application of digital technologies and additive manufacturing in supporting these synergies. Specifically, it is found that the integration of digital technologies with additive manufacturing enables real-time monitoring and predictive analytics. This integrated approach addresses the scalability and flexibility challenges of additive manufacturing implemented alone while enhancing waste reduction, resource optimization, and material life cycle transparency in lean manufacturing and circular economy applications. These findings provide stakeholders with valuable insights regarding simultaneously implementing lean manufacturing and circular economy principles – supporting financial benefits, reduced environmental impacts, and sustainable production growth. -Hassan, Chatterjee, Bushagour, Layton. (2025) “Potential for Digital Technologies and Additive Manufacturing to Support Lean Manufacturing and Circular Economy Synergies.” ASME 2025 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers & Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC-CIE). Anaheim, CA, USA.
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.
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.
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.
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.
BiSSL: Bio-inspired Systems Lab 