Research Quick Takes | Dartmouth Engineering

Aug 13, 2026

AFOSR Young Investigator Award

Professor Wesley Marrero received a Young Investigator Program Award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). The award provides $450,000 over three years to advance the scientific foundations of interpretable artificial intelligence for time-varying decision environments. Marrero will develop methods for learning optimal decision strategies with tree-like structures or under user-defined interpretability rules. The project is motivated by challenges that deployed medics face when making rapid triage and evacuation decisions in austere environments. "For AI tools to be effective and trusted by military leadership, they must adapt to fast-changing scenarios and deliver logical recommendations that can be easily understood," he said.

Jul 30, 2026

Reshaping Sea-Level Forecasts

Research Associate Justine Caillet and Professor Hélène Seroussi are co-authors of "Uncertain ground: impact of bed topography on Antarctic Ice Sheet projections" published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. The study is featured in a Sciencenews.dk article where Seroussi is quoted extensively about her research: "We have spent decades improving climate models, but if we do not know exactly what the ice is resting on, it is like trying to predict a car's route without knowing the road."

Paula Olson, Emily Monroe, and Solomon Diamond
pose with the 2026 Constellation Prize for Peace Engineering.

Jul 30, 2026

NSF FINDERS Foundry Award

Professor Sol Diamond (co-PI), Lecturer and CEDC Director Emily Monroe, and Design Research Project Manager Paula Olson are part of a team collaborating with Makerspace Central on a project that received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Fostering Interdisciplinary Network Driven Educationally Responsive Solutions (FINDERS) Foundry Award. The project, titled "Shaping Career Pathways with AI-Enabled Design and Making," aims to design an AI-coach-plus-educator tool for K–12 classrooms. The coach would empower students to design with AI tools while the human educator guides ethical, responsible use.

Jul 30, 2026

Mobility-Ductility Tradeoff

PhD student Sam Ong won runner-up for the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Flexible Printable Sensors and Systems in Atlanta. Ong's paper, co-authored with Professor Will Scheideler and former postdoc Minh Nhut Le, was titled "Breaking the Mobility-Ductility Tradeoff in Liquid-Metal-Printed ITO Flexible TFTs." Said Ong, "I was very excited to present my work at IEEE FLEPS and showcase our research to the flexible device community. I believe that there is a lot of potential collaboration within this space, and highlighting the compatibility of our high-performance materials in flexible electronics garnered a lot of interest and excitement."

Jul 16, 2026

Glaciological Collaboration

Research Scientist and Lecturer Aleah Sommers and PhD candidate Anna Valentine, along with Derek Pickell and Mathieu Morlighem from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, traveled to Ladakh, India, to study thickness and dynamics of Himalayan glaciers with researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee. They also participated in the Indian Glaciological Summer School, a two-week intensive course in Leh, Ladakh, with students from all over India. "Building any international collaboration takes time and trust. The friendships, the challenges, and the science that will come out of combining our areas of expertise are remarkably worthwhile," said Sommers.

Scientist Aleah Sommers with students at the Greenland Ice Sheet Ocean (GRISO) Science Summer School.

Jun 18, 2026

Strengthening Science and Connections in Greenland

Research Scientist and Lecturer Aleah Sommers co-organized and taught at the Greenland Ice Sheet Ocean (GRISO) Science Summer School, held in Nuuk, Greenland. The two-week intensive course brought together PhD students and postdocs from around the world to connect with and learn from Greenland-based scientists and local Greenlandic organizations. "After teaching at the GRISO Summer School, I feel inspired about connecting glacier hydrology to the downstream impacts on lakes, fjords, ecology, and communities, and exploring how to connect physical process modeling with community interests and local research priorities," said Sommers.

Jun 18, 2026

mRNA Flu Vaccine for Better Protection

Research Scientist Tae-Geun Yu is co-first author, and Professor Jiwon Lee is co-corresponding author of "mRNA-based influenza vaccine expands the B cell response breadth in humans" published in Nature Immunology. A collaboration with WashU Medicine, the study found that Moderna's mRNA flu vaccine—currently under review by FDA—triggers an immune response against a wide array of flu strains, potentially offering stronger and longer-lasting protection.

Jun 18, 2026

IEEE PES Best Paper Awards

PhD students Yitong Liu (pictured), and Shengqi Yuan each received best paper awards for the 2026 IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting in Montréal. Yuan's paper, co-authored with Professor Junbo Zhao and members of Sandia National Labs, is titled "Integrated Wildfire Impact Modeling on Urban-Suburban Distribution System Resilience"; and Liu's, also co-authored with Zhao as well as ISO New England, is "Truncated Copula-based Scenario Generation to Model Spatiotemporal Correlations of Wind and Solar Power Plants in Large-Scale Systems."

Jun 11, 2026

Waves Accelerate Melting of Antarctic Sea Ice

Professor Don Perovich is a co-author of "The influence of ocean waves on Antarctic sea-ice albedo and seasonal melting, and potential coupled physical and biological feedbacks" published in The Cryosphere. "We found that waves washing the snow-covered sea ice darkened the surface, leading to more sunlight being absorbed and enhancing the speed of summer melting," said Perovich.

PhD candidates Adelaide Cagle, Afton Limberg, Amritha Anup Th'23, and Aleyna La Croix.

Jun 04, 2026

More Ethical Research in Bone Tissue Engineering

PhD candidates Adelaide Cagle, Afton Limberg, Amritha Anup Th'23, and Aleyna La Croix, and Professor Katie Hixon co-authored "Advancing the 3Rs in bone tissue engineering: emerging in vitro, in silico, and refined in vivo strategies," an invited review published in Frontiers in Physiology. The article was for a special issue addressing the 3Rs approach—replace, reduce and refine animal models—to improve preclinical research. "This review summarizes recent progress in advanced in vitro platforms, including organoids, bioprinting, and organ-on-a-chip systems, as well as in silico modeling approaches designed to decrease reliance on animal experimentation," said Anup.

May 28, 2026

Environmental Impacts of NICUs and Their Alternatives

An undergraduate capstone project team—Will Clendenning Th'24, Chad Klaas '24 Th'25, Samantha Melgar '24, and Ismael Rosales-Albarran '24—along with co-author and CEDC Director Emily Monroe, published their project results titled, "Using Life Cycle Assessments to Measure the Environmental Impact of Alternative Care Models in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit" in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. The team compared traditional hospital NICUs against "Hope Grows at Home," a home-care model for premature infants. Although other evidence shows no difference in health outcomes, their assessment showed significant reductions in both carbon emissions and solid waste by shifting to the home-care model.

Jifeng Liu presenting at the MRS meeting.

May 28, 2026

Presenting on More Sustainable Microchip Technologies

The Liu Research Group presented at the 2026 Materials Research Society Spring Meeting in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, showcasing their latest research on next-generation semiconductor materials and processes for more sustainable microchip technologies. Presentations included: Professor Jifeng Liu on atomic ordering in semiconductor alloys as a new degree of freedom for performance-sustainability synergy; PhD student Shangda Li on defect mitigation in low-temperature Ge and GeSn heteroepitaxy on silicon using self-assembled nanoscale oxide templates; and PhD student Yicheng Wang on identifying atomic short-range order in SiGeSn alloys using atom probe tomography toward sustainable infrared semiconductors.