News: MAE

Cornell faculty members Jefferson Tester and Lance Collins are among the new class elected to the academy, among the highest professional distinctions for an engineer. Read more

Associate Professor Guy Hoffman and his team have created a low-cost method for soft, deformable robots to detect a range of physical interactions without relying on touch at all. The technology originated as part of a collaboration with Hadas Kress-Gazit, associate professor in the Sibley School and Kirstin Petersen, assistant professor in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. {"preview_thumbnail":"/sites/default/files/styles/video_embed_wysiwyg_preview/public/video_thumbnails/Ipb6VxPqGqs.jpg?itok=l0fFYwNa","video_url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ipb6VxPqGqs","settings"... Read more

Organic Robotics Corporation (ORC), co-founded by Robert Shepherd, associate professor in the Cornell Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, won the top award at the NFL’s 1 st and Future Pitch Competition in the Innovations to Advance Athlete Health and Safety category. The annual competition is in partnership with Amazon Web Services, Inc. and is designed to spur novel advancements in athlete safety and performance. ORC was founded in 2018 by Shepherd and former Ph.D. student, Ilayda Samilgil ’19. The company won $50,000 for its product, Light Lace™, designed to use light to... Read more

Dimensional Energy, co-founded by David Erickson, director of the Sibley School, is one of two finalists in the $20 million Carbon X Prize competition. The company developed technology that captures industrial carbon dioxide and converts it to an environmentally friendly product like aviation fuel. Read more

Cornell wind energy scientists, Sara C. Pryor and Rebecca Barthelmie, have released a new global wind atlas – a digital compendium filled with documented extreme wind speeds for all parts of the world – to help engineers select the turbines in any given region and accelerate the development of sustainable energy. Read more

Organic Robotics Corporation, a Cornell startup founded by Associate Professor Rob Shepherd and his former Ph.D. student, Ilayda Samilgil '19, will compete in the sixth annual NFL 1st & Future competition, to be televised Feb. 2 at 8 p.m. EST on the NFL Network. The two-part competition is designed to spur new ideas for athlete safety and performance. Organic Robotics Corporation (ORC) will go head-to-head with three other startups in the “Innovations to Advance Player Health and Safety” category. Read more

Xiangkun Elvis Cao, a Ph.D. candidate in the Sibley School’s Erickson Lab, shares his experience of successfully navigating his way through hardship from rural China as a first-generation college student to landing on Forbes 30 Under 30 for North America. He discusses the shared challenges first-generation students and underrepresented minorities in academia face: economic and social burden, exclusion, discrimination, and lack of access to information and mentoring. Read more in his opinion piece “ Navigating My Way as a First-Generation Student,” published online in the journal Matter. Read more

A team led by Assistant Prof Mahdi Esmaily developed a transparent helmet that prevents 99.6% of virus-containing droplets exhaled by patients from reaching the environment during open-face procedures. Read more

Atieh Moridi, assistant professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, was selected for the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award. According to NSF, the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is its most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. Moridi’s research interests lie in the areas of advanced materials and manufacturing. She exploits the intrinsic properties as well as... Read more

K. Bingham Cady, professor emeritus of nuclear engineering in the Sibley School, died Dec 10. Cady helped improve the safety of nuclear fission reactors by developing computer modeling software that could simulate how reactors respond to operational fluctuations and accidents. Read more