News & EventsDepartment Events
Events
-
Mar10
EVENT DETAILS
lessUnderstanding and Measuring the Role of Buildings in Community Resilience to Natural Hazards
Abstract
Light-frame wood buildings have historically performed well in earthquakes but there are limitations to how tall they can be constructed. Mass timber provides a unique opportunity to utilize a truly sustainable material while building to more socially needed heights and achieving high levels of seismic performance. This presentation will be being in the context of earthquake engineering with whole building tests of two apartment buildings – one tested in Miki Japan and the other in San Diego; and then a resilient mass timber building. The presentation hypothesis: Can superior building performance alone provide community resilience to earthquakes? To answer this we’ll explore the role of water and power networks that those buildings depend on to function – and then the households who depend on the functionality of physical infrastructure and social institutions. Moving to tornadoes and floods to discuss where the scope of a new modeling environment – the Interdependent Networked COmmunity Resilience Modeling Environment (IN-CORE), and prove or disprove our hypothesis.
Bio
Dr. John W. van de Lindt is the Harold H. Short Endowed Chair Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Colorado State University. Over the last two decades Dr. van de Lindt’s research program has focused on performance-based engineering and test bed applications of building systems for earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, tornadoes and floods. Van de Lindt led both the NEESWood and NEES-Soft project teams between 2005-2013 which consisted of two-story, four-story, and six-story shake table tests on the world’s largest shake tables, and currently serves as Chair of ASCE’s Executive Committee for the Infrastructure Resilience Division and Secretary of the Executive Committee for the Structural Engineering Institute. Professor van de Lindt current serves as the Co-director for the National Institute of Standards and Technology-funded Center of Excellence (COE) for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning headquartered at Colorado State University and in its sixth year. He has published more than 400 technical articles and reports including more than 200 journal papers, and currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Structural Engineering.
TIME Wednesday, March 10, 2021 at 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
CONTACT Tierney Acott tierney.acott@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Civil and Environmental Engineering
-
Mar11
EVENT DETAILSmore info
lessTAM Seminar Series Presents:
Itai Cohen
Professor of Physics
Cornell UniversityElectronically Integrated Microscopic Robots
Thursday, March 11th • 10:00AM CST
Abstract
What would we be able to do if we could build electronically integrated machines at a scale of 100 microns? At this scale, semiconductor devices are small enough that we could put the computational power of the spaceship Voyager onto a machine that could be injected into the body. Such robots could have on board detectors, power sources, and processors that enable them to sense, interact, and control their local environment. In this talk I will describe several cutting edge technologies we are developing to achieve this vision.
Biography
Itai Cohen is a professor of Physics at Cornell University. He received his BS from UCLA (1995) and PhD from the University of Chicago (Physics 2001). In addition, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University (2001 - 2005). His research at Cornell focuses on building robots the size of cells, controlling the shear thickening behavior of microscopic and nanoscopic particles suspended in a fluid, exploring the mechanics of materials ranging from biological tissues to origami inspired metamaterials, discovering the aerodynamic and neuromuscular mechanisms used by insects during flapping flight, and determining how Tango dancers and audiences at heavy metal concerts coordinate their movement. Understanding how emergent behaviors arise from the microscopic rules governing these systems remains one of the biggest challenges in Physics.
TIME Thursday, March 11, 2021 at 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
CONTACT Alison Rodriguez alison.rodriguez@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Civil and Environmental Engineering
-
Mar12
EVENT DETAILS
lessExploring the Microbial Ecology of Our Homes
Microorganisms are ubiquitous in our homes. Although most of these microbes are innocuous, some of these household bacteria and fungi can impact human health. Unfortunately, we have a limited understanding of how and why these household microbial communities vary across geographic regions. I will highlight two projects that leverage the power of ‘citizen science’ to investigate the microbes found inside homes. In the first set of studies, we collected dust samples from ~1,500 households across the U.S. to understand the distributions of airborne bacteria and fungi inside homes. We assessed how airborne microbial communities are influenced by climate, home occupants, and home design. More recently, we have been focusing on those bacteria living inside showerheads. Showerheads can harbor large populations of mycobacteria, a diverse group of bacteria that includes opportunistic pathogens capable of causing nontuberculous mycobacterial (NTM) lung infections, an increasing threat to public health. To determine how the diversity and abundances of mycobacteria vary spatially and in response to changes in household water chemistry, we recruited >600 volunteer households from across the United States and Europe to sample their showerhead biofilms. We found that showerhead mycobacterial communities vary in composition depending on geographic location, water chemistry, and water source, with households receiving chlorine-treated water having particularly high abundances of certain mycobacteria. Regions where NTM lung infections are most common were the same regions where pathogenic mycobacteria were most prevalent in showerheads, highlighting the likely importance of showerheads in the transmission of NTM infections. Together these results demonstrate the power of a ‘citizen science’-based approach to improve our understanding of those microbes living with us in our homes and their effects on human health.
Noah Fierer is a Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and a Fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is a microbial ecologist and his research program focuses on microbes living in a range of environments, including those bacteria, fungi, and protists living inside our homes, in soil, on plants, and in the atmosphere. His group uses various approaches, including DNA sequencing and high-throughput cultivation, to explore the diversity and structure of microbial communities, identify the fundamental controls on microbial processes, and examine the mechanisms by which microorganisms influence the health of ecosystems, plants, and animals (including humans). For more information, see: http://fiererlab.org/
TIME Friday, March 12, 2021 at 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
CONTACT Tierney Acott tierney.acott@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Civil and Environmental Engineering
-
Mar13
EVENT DETAILS
lessWinter Classes End
TIME Saturday, March 13, 2021
CONTACT Office of the Registrar nu-registrar@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR University Academic Calendar
-
Mar15
EVENT DETAILS
lessWinter Examinations Begin
TIME Monday, March 15, 2021
CONTACT Office of the Registrar nu-registrar@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR University Academic Calendar
-
Mar20
EVENT DETAILS
lessSpring Break Begins
TIME Saturday, March 20, 2021
CONTACT Office of the Registrar nu-registrar@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR University Academic Calendar
-
Mar26
EVENT DETAILS
lessWinter Degrees Conferred
TIME Friday, March 26, 2021
CONTACT Office of the Registrar nu-registrar@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR University Academic Calendar
-
Mar29
EVENT DETAILS
lessSpring Break Ends
TIME Monday, March 29, 2021
CONTACT Office of the Registrar nu-registrar@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR University Academic Calendar
-
Mar30
EVENT DETAILS
lessSpring Classes Begin 8 a.m. Classes remote until Tuesday, April 6.
TIME Tuesday, March 30, 2021
CONTACT Office of the Registrar nu-registrar@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR University Academic Calendar
-
Mar31
EVENT DETAILS
lessModeling Programmable Drug Delivery in Bioelectronics With Electrochemical Actuation
Drug delivery systems featuring electrochemical actuation represent an emerging class of biomedical technology with programmable volume/flowrate capabilities for localized delivery. Recent work establishes applications in neuroscience experiments involving small animals in the context of pharmacological response. However, for programmable delivery, the available flowrate control and delivery time models fail to consider key variables of the drug delivery system – microfluidic resistance and membrane stiffness. Here we establish an analytical model accounts for the key parameters – initial environmental pressure, initial volume, microfluidic resistance, flexible membrane, electrical current and temperature – to control the delivery using only 3 non-dimensional parameters and does not require numerical simulations allowing faster system optimization for different in vivo experiments. These results have relevance to the many emerging applications of programmable delivery in clinical studies within the neuroscience and broader biomedical communities.
Raudel Avila is a Ph.D. candidate in mechanical engineering at Northwestern University. He received a B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas at El Paso. His current research focuses on modeling the mechanics and electromagnetics in bio integrated electronics for health monitoring applications. Raudel is currently a National Science Foundation GRFP Fellow and a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow.
TIME Wednesday, March 31, 2021 at 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
CONTACT Tierney Acott tierney.acott@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Civil and Environmental Engineering
-
Apr14
EVENT DETAILS
lessExperimental Micromechanics of 3D Granular Materials with Applications to Force Chains, Waves, Rearrangements, Length Scales
Abstract
Granular materials are the sands, soils, and powders that are ubiquitous in nature and technology. Traditional approaches to studying granular materials include discrete and continuum modeling, 2D experiments using model materials, and 3D experiments using X-ray computed tomography (XRCT). While modeling approaches provide crucial predictions of material behavior across length scales, their quantitative validation in terms of both kinematics and stresses remains a challenge. Furthermore, while experimental techniques such as XRCT provide in-situ data on particle kinematics, they do not provide stress fields needed to fully constrain constitutive laws and link microscopic energy dissipation mechanisms to macroscopic deformation.
In this talk, I will first discuss our experimental approach to studying the micromechanics of 3D granular materials that combines in-situ XRCT and 3D X-ray diffraction (3DXRD), an X-ray scattering technique that provides per-particle stress tensors in thousands of crystalline particles simultaneously. I will then discuss exciting applications of our experiments, including for studying: inter-particle force networks in granular materials, ultrasound wave behavior, the microscopic origins of macroscopic energy dissipation, the role of packing structure and particle stress in local rearrangements, and the length scales governing representative volume element sizes of various material properties.
Bio
Dr. Ryan Hurley is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and a Fellow of the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute at the Johns Hopkins University (JHU). He received his B.S. in Civil Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park (2011) and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Applied Mechanics from the California Institute of Technology (2012 and 2015). From 2015 – 2017, Ryan was a postdoctoral researcher in the Computational Geosciences Group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California and an Assistant Research Professor at JHU. He joined JHU full-time as an Assistant Professor in January 2018. He received the Department of Energy’s Secretary’s Appreciation Award in 2017 for his work on the Source Physics Experiment and a 2020 NSF CAREER award. Ryan’s interests include studying the deformation and failure mechanisms of granular materials, rocks, concrete, and ceramics using advanced experimental techniques and modeling approaches.
TIME Wednesday, April 14, 2021 at 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
CONTACT Tierney Acott tierney.acott@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Civil and Environmental Engineering