Household robots that can cook. New materials for sodium-ion batteries. Technologies that capture carbon and break down forever chemicals. These were among the projects graduate students presented during the University of Miami College of Engineering's Research Symposium.
The event gave master's and Ph.D. students an opportunity to present their research, explain the challenges they are working to solve and share their findings with the University community.
"The College of Engineering Research Symposium is an excellent showcase of the high-quality, impactful research taking place across engineering disciplines at the University of Miami," said Noel Ziebarth, associate dean for graduate studies at the College of Engineering. "I look forward to this event each year, as it is a great opportunity to engage with our talented students."
For Mariana Viso, a Ph.D. student in biomedical engineering in Ashutosh Agarwal's lab and winner of the oral presentation, the engineering challenge takes place at a microscopic scale.
Viso presented recently published research using a microfluidic platform to study a lethal form of pancreatic cancer. Her work examines how two types of cells surrounding pancreatic tumors interact and contribute to an environment that can limit the effectiveness of chemotherapy.
The team found evidence that these cellular barriers do not just operate independently but communicate in ways that promote inflammation around the tumor.
"Our goal is not to create a new therapy but rather sensitize the tumor to the therapies we already have," Viso said. "If we learn how they're communicating, then we learn how to target them."
In mechanical and aerospace engineering, Dudhatra, a Ph.D. student working with Giacomo Po, focused on one of the major challenges facing fusion energy: developing materials capable of surviving the extreme environment inside a fusion reactor.
Tungsten is a leading material for components facing a reactor's plasma because of properties including its high melting point and ability to conduct heat. But exposure to high-energy neutrons can change its microscopic structure, eventually making the material harder and more brittle. Dudhatra uses computational modeling to study those changes and predict how materials could behave under fusion reactor conditions.
"There is no engineering code that has many materials that you could use to build a fusion reactor," Dudhatra said, describing the need for models that can help qualify materials for future reactors.
For Abdullah Aldhafeeri, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering working with Mingzhe Chen, that challenge lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence and wireless communication.
Aldhafeeri presented a framework for split learning, an approach that divides the work of training an AI model between individual devices and a central server. His research examines how devices with different computing capabilities and wireless conditions can participate efficiently while keeping their raw training data on the device.
The oral presentations were part of a broader showcase of graduate research. During two poster sessions, students had the opportunity to discuss their work with faculty and peers, offering a closer look at research underway across the college.
