School Notes: School of Engineering & Applied Science
March/April 2017

Professor receives DARPA award

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded its Young Faculty Award to Amin Karbasi, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science. The $500,000 award is for a computer program designed to teach many people at once to better distinguish between types of woodpeckers. DARPA officials believe it could have wider-ranging benefits by training many people at a time on numerous other topics. While computer training programs often take a “one size fits all” approach, Karbasi aims to develop a program that constantly monitors users’ progress with an automated teaching method that adjusts to users’ intents, abilities, interests, motivations, and learning styles.

Making better use of microalgae

Researchers in the lab of Julie Zimmerman, professor of chemical and environmental engineering, have developed a method that not only extracts different compounds from microalgae—a microscopic form of algae—but separates those compounds by type for different uses. That could help make algae a cost-viable source for such products as biodiesel, pharmaceuticals, and infant formula. The results of their work, led by PhD student Thomas Kwan, were published in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering. The researchers targeted a compound found in microalgae known as triacylglycerides (TAGs). Similar in structure, TAGs have proved difficult to separate. The Yale researchers, though, developed a process that can essentially “tune” the extraction and target specific TAGs.

Gates foundation funds TB tech

Funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will help advance Yale-developed technology designed to detect tuberculosis quickly and inexpensively. The device, which separates TB cells from other cells in a sample within hours, was developed by graduate students Shari Yosinski and Monika Weber with advisor Mark Reed, Harold Hodgkinson Professor of Electrical Engineering, in collaboration with British biotech firm QuantuMdx Group. Early detection of TB is critical to minimizing transmission and other risks of the disease. Current diagnostic tests, however, take up to three days to produce results.