We are facing the challenge of needing to produce more food on less land. We have the added challenge that every year there are increasingly more extreme environment conditions that threaten crop yields. Research in the Hirsch lab integrates big data including high throughput sequencing, high throughput phenotyping, and extensive environmental measurements with the end goal of produce more food on less land while mitigating risk to farmers associated with environmental conditions.

Childhood stroke impacts activity and participation in daily life. Current treatments, though costly and time-intensive, have only minimal effects on improving function. Integrating rehabilitation and neuroscience domains, Bernadette Gillick’s lab investigates new treatments combining non-surgical brain stimulation and advanced forms of rehabilitation to minimize the impact of the stroke injury while improving function. Translating these investigations, her goal is to improve the lives of children with stroke and resultant cerebral palsy, for a lifetime.

The Frontiera lab develops and applies novel spectroscopic techniques to probe chemical reaction dynamics on nanometer length scales. Most current microscopies are restricted by the optical diffraction limit to dimensions much larger than a molecule, which is problematic for imaging processes in biological cells and photovoltaic devices. By developing new techniques with nanometer spatial resolution, the Frontiera lab’s research is uncovering how local environments affect functions like pharmaceutical binding, cellular signaling, and solar cell performance.

Optical metamaterials are a new class of materials formed from the systematic and subwavelength arrangement of nanostructures to guide, confine, and bend light in nanoscale dimensions. Vivian Ferry uses techniques of synthesis, optical characterization, and modeling to understand how light interacts with these tailored metallic and oxide nanostructures, to control properties such as light absorption, luminescence, and polarization state, and to ultimately design optical metamaterials for application in solar energy conversion and optoelectronic devices.

Suspensions of tiny particulate matter, called aerosols, are ubiquitous in the atmosphere, and have key implications for our health, environment, and climate. However, there remains a great deal of uncertainty concerning aerosol particle formation processes and ambient properties, since each particle is a highly complex microenvironment. Cari Dutcher’s research aims at developing and integrating analytic advances in thermodynamic modeling with experimental advances in microscale transport phenomena, towards improved understanding of the formation and fate of aerosols in the atmosphere.

Sairaj Dhople develops technologies to systematically integrate renewable resources into the electric power system. At the systems level, this involves formulating algorithms to optimally integrate and operate renewable resources in the power system. At the circuit level, the focus is on designing circuit interfaces between the renewable resources and the electric grid. The unified circuits-to-systems viewpoint is critical to engineer energy technologies that emphasize increased renewable integration, sustainable capacity expansion, and improved electricity access.

That we observe a diverse collection of distinct types of plants (i.e. “species”) rather than a single plant type reflects historical speciation events repeated many times over. But how does speciation occur? And how are nascent species maintained? To answer these questions, Yaniv Brandvain combines theoretical and empirical approaches to characterize, predict, and interpret patterns of genomic variation, interspecific reproductive barriers, species range overlap, reproductive modes, and other key plant traits.

Resource scarcity and environmental pollution are significant challenges facing society. Developing new processes that utilize renewable chemical feedstocks and environmentally benign reagents is of paramount importance to overcoming them. The Tonks group is creating organometallic catalysts (molecules that promote or accelerate chemical reactions) based on earth-abundant, nontoxic metals like titanium. These are used in reactions with renewable feedstocks such as biomass (corn, switchgrass) and carbon dioxide to make complex molecules such as pharmaceuticals and plastics.

Byron Steinman investigates climate/environmental change through the development of sediment based paleoclimate records and the analysis of observational and model data. His research group is focused on producing a broad spatiotemporal perspective on terrestrial climate change and assessing the influence of internal processes (e.g. El Niño) that drive observed patterns of climate variability. He is principally focused on improving methods for identifying climate signals in observational data and refining interpretations of paleoclimate records.

The interaction of freshwater systems with biogeochemical cycling, climate, and vegetation has a profound effect on local to global water resources and security. Ng employs computational models that connect underground water-system dynamics with environmental factors and she develops novel statistical approaches to merge models with observations, generating societally-relevant predictions. Ng investigates sulfur cycling in wetlands, social-biophysical perspectives on wild rice aquatic habitats, sources and consequences of arsenic contamination, and eco-hydrological modeling.