NEWS RELEASES

CLEVELAND—On Tuesday, Jan. 14, President Biden awarded nearly 400 scientists and engineers the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers early in their careers. Four of the awardees are Case Western Reserve University engineering faculty: A. Bolu Ajiboye, Christine Duval, Burcu Gurkan and Steve Majerus.

The University of Texas at Arlington has been awarded a $1.3 million grant to develop a more efficient process for sourcing rare earth elements needed to produce high-performance magnets. Led by physicist J. Ping Liu, the project aims to make the mining of these critical materials more cost-efficient and environmentally sustainable by using cheaper, more abundant materials.

A new analysis of data from the PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) reveals fresh evidence that collisions of even very small nuclei with large ones might create tiny specks of a quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Scientists believe such a substance of free quarks and gluons, the building blocks of protons and neutrons, permeated the universe a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. 

Arizona State University and a team of its collaborators have received $11.2 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy to begin developing a regional Direct Air Capture (DAC) Hub for removing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. The team will prepare to build a multi-site Direct Air Capture Hub located in the Four Corners area of the Southwestern United States. Additionally, the project will receive $11.2 million in matching funds from the project partners. 

Currently, the most efficient way to create photon pairs requires sending lightwaves through a crystal large enough to see without a microscope. In a paper published today in Nature Photonics, a team led by Columbia Engineering researchers and collaborators, describe a new method for creating these photon pairs that achieves higher performance on a much smaller device using less energy.

The year 2025 has been proclaimed the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology by the United Nations, recognizing 100 years since the initial development of quantum mechanics. Now, Jefferson Lab, MIT and Sputnik Animation unveil “Visualizing the Nucleus,” a new animation of the particles and forces that dominate the quantum world and an accompanying website exhibit featuring the visualization of the structure of matter throughout history.

Catalysts do several surprising things to assist with daily life – from bread making to turning raw materials into fuels more efficiently. Now, SLAC researchers have developed a way to speed up the discovery process for a promising new class of these helpful substances called single atom catalysts.

Funded by the Department of Energy, these centers are part of an effort that brings together national laboratories, universities and industry to invent and accelerate novel microelectronics technologies to operate efficiently or in extreme environments.