News & Updates

July 7 – Today, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Clean Energy Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute (CESMII) announced selections totaling up to $1.7 million for four projects that will advance innovation in smart manufacturing. The selected projects will create educational programs that support smart-manufacturing technologies, processes, and workforce development.

It would take a human being years to read tens of thousands of scholarly articles, but an artificial intelligence system that can do it in a matter of minutes is about to go to work in the fight against COVID-19. Ilya Safro, an associate professor of computer science at Clemson University, said that his team will soon roll out a new artificial intelligence system aimed at helping researchers explore the scientific literature as they strive for new discoveries to combat the novel coronavirus.

Melinda Harman of Clemson University is volunteering her time to explore how hospitals could wash and sanitize medical masks without having to ship them elsewhere or buy an expensive piece of equipment. A device that Harman designed to hold multiple N95 masks is central to her idea. It would help ensure the masks maintain their shape while being washed so that they continue to fit securely around the mouth and nose, said Harman, an associate professor of bioengineering and director of Clemson University’s Medical Device Recycling and Reprocessing program, or GreenMD. The masks help prevent healthcare workers from inhaling the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 and have been in short supply since the pandemic began.

Dear Defense Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research community:

Scientists have linked historical political instability to a number of volcanic events, the latest involving an eruption in the Aleutian Islands.

In power plants fired by fossil fuels alone, 67 percent of the electricity generated is released unproductively into the environment in the form of heat, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. By rethinking the design of thermoelectric materials, which have the ability to convert heat to electricity, Xueyan Song, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at West Virginia University, is working to develop a method to recover the wasted heat energy from the air, resulting in improved sustainability and efficiency of the energy infrastructure in the U.S.

NASA has selected five teams led by university faculty and students to examine a range of technical areas in support of the agency’s aeronautics research goals.

The University of South Carolina Office of the Vice President for Research created an internal funding initiative to support research and scholarship related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Funds have been awarded to 42 projects involving 82 faculty members from five campuses, eight colleges/schools and 29 different departments across the University of South Carolina.

Dave Berkowitz, whose work at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln sits at the interface of synthetic organic chemistry and enzymatic chemistry, will take the helm of the chemistry division at the US National Science Foundation (NSF), which funds about one-quarter of all federally supported basic research conducted at American universities.