Urban form, the physical structure of cities that influences daily life and city dynamics, faces sustainability challenges in the 21st century. How will these complex built environments adapt? As an architect and urban designer, Dingliang Yang integrates spatial research and design practice to develop innovative solutions across three dimensions of sustainability: environmental, social, and cultural. He experiments with new urban forms by constructing urban spaces that address the sustainability needs of future cities. 

Environmental engineers work to create a future world without pollution by unraveling the complex interactions between man-made materials and engineered and natural systems. Focusing on the interface of polymer science, environmental chemistry, and membrane material science, the Xiong group elucidates the environmental fate and degradation of polymers/plastics for sustainable design and thoughtful management, and develops novel membrane and filtration technologies to combat pathogen contamination and fouling for more effective water and air treatment.

Natasha Wright’s research is focused on increasing access to decentralized water treatment systems, primarily in low and middle-income communities. By decentralizing treatment, she aims to eliminate the inefficiencies that can come with distribution, as well as increase the potential for and value of resource recovery. The Wright Lab’s current focus is on the on-demand production of medical-grade fluids necessary to increase dialysis access; and remediation of, and resource recovery from, decentralized waste streams.

Honghong Tinn’s book, Island Tinkerers, defies the stereotype of “the West innovates and the East imitates,” and tells the history of how Taiwanese hobbyists and enthusiasts, including engineers, scientists, pioneering computer users, and entrepreneurs, tinkered with black-boxed imported computing technology and experimented with manufacturing their own versions, leading to their own brand of successful innovation.

AI is touching every discipline and our daily lives. However, our current AI systems need to learn from massive amounts of data to be effective, and they can easily make surprisingly wrong, misleading decisions. Sun’s group builds the foundations and tools to enable AI systems to make reliable predictions, even if only limited data are available, and safeguard them against costly mistakes, leading to breakthroughs in AI's scientific, engineering, and medical applications.

Daniel Stanton studies the diversity and ecological significance of the often-overlooked little photosynthesizers – mosses, lichens, and microbial crusts. His research seeks to understand how the ecological function of these understudied species varies with factors like climate stress or microbial interactions, and how this will play out under global change. He is a rising star in ecology.

Jessica Lopez Lyman is an interdisciplinary community-engaged scholar and artist who studies Latino communities and social transformation in the urban Midwest. Her research contributes to social movement and urban studies scholarship by studying how Latina/x artists participate in and shape contemporary social movements through their aesthetics. She offers a new spatial paradigm, “place-keeping,” as a strategy to combat gentrification and research housing justice practices that mitigate Latino displacement and housing insecurity.

Synthetic polymers improve many aspects of our daily lives, but modern applications and sustainability concerns demand the development of new materials with on-demand properties. The Lamb group utilizes their knowledge of organic chemistry to design new synthetic routes to polymers with a wide range of properties. They systematically correlate structure with properties, which enables them to define design principles that will shape the future of polymer synthesis.

American slavery was a collective project organized through public authority. My research recovers how state power constituted slaveowners’ private authority and guided where, when and how enslaved life and labor unfolded. Slave states mobilized the institution to build infrastructure and pursued a “state interest” defined by its security and profitability. “The Public Institution” draws out this submerged history of American slavery, one that can foster consideration of responsibilities and legacies beyond a framework of private individuals.

Black Women Unhinged argues that at the meeting of Enlightenment theory and chattel slavery practices two figures co-constitute irremediable political and social exclusion: the idiot and the Black slave. While contemporary theory has focused attention on madness as the unreasonable figure positioned to critique modernity, this work turns to Black feminist theorists’ engagement with the structural similarities of “idiocy” and blackness— irrational because “incapable” of self-possession—to provide an account of what lies beyond Reason.