School of Engineering funds $1.2 million for tools and research equipment
In the fall of 2024, the School of Engineering Dean’s Office, with support from the Engineering Council, funded $1.2 million for a new Research Tool and Equipment Support Seed Grant. In the program’s pilot year, sixteen proposals were awarded up to $100K in support of physical research equipment. The funds covered (but were not limited to) physical equipment, hardware, installation of equipment, service contracts, or staff time associated with major equipment use.
The new equipment will benefit the research of multiple PIs. It will also expand and enable new collaborations among faculty.
“It was wonderful to see the excitement among the faculty through their responses and the ideas proposed,” said Hamsa Balakrishnan, associate dean of the School of Engineering and the William E. Leonhard (1940) Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro).
The broad scope of the program allowed faculty to propose anything related to physical equipment needed for their research. Some faculty asked for new hardware, while others opted to request service contracts needed to keep existing hardware functioning, which is usually an under-supported aspect of research.
All the proposals submitted were cross-cutting, across multiple faculty and multiple units within the school. The fund achieved its major objective in enabling more collaborative research at MIT.
“Many of the proposals highlight new capabilities at MIT that the proposed equipment would enable,” said Balakrishnan. “The overall objective was how we can provide financial support to encourage new research and collaborations. We hope to continue to have other similar opportunities in the future.”
The sixteen accepted proposals included the following:
Marc Baldo, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The LPKF Protolaser R4 high-precision laser micro-machining tool is designed to minimize thermal damage and debris, making it ideal for structuring heat-sensitive materials such as glass and quartz, polymeric and other sensitive piezoelectric materials, delicate flexible electronics and semiconductors. It will enhance existing research and enable new applications including implantable sensors, high-frequency quantum circuitry, bioelectronics, and more. Housed in MIT's T.J. Rodgers RLE Laboratory, the R4 will support interdisciplinary research across the entire MIT community, providing cutting-edge prototyping capabilities for diverse fields.
Michael Benjamin, Department of Mechanical Engineering
John Leonard, Department of Mechnical Engineering
The Charles River Tracking System will support research and education in
the domains of marine autonomy, multi-robot collaboration, underwater
sensor-based and model based-navigation. The tracking system will provide
real-time position estimates of deployed underwater vehicles which will
lower the barrier for underwater robot deployments in undergraduate
introductory classes. The tracking system will be comprised of an array of
passive hydrophones located below the water along the dock of the MIT
Sailing Pavilion, and data acquisition and processing equipment for the
hydophone data in real time over multiple channels.
Zachary Cordero, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
The Insstek MX-Lab 3D printer uses blown powder directed energy deposition (DED) to fabricate compositionally graded metallic structures using up to six different powder feedstocks. This will likely be the first DED printer in an academic institution in the greater Boston area, supporting a growing cohort of faculty and research programs working across emerging topics in materials, manufacturing, automation, and related next-generation technology domains. The equipment will enable cutting-edge research on emerging topics of interest to government and commercial sponsors, including high-throughput materials design and additive manufacturing of advanced multi-material structures, with applications in nuclear, mechanical, and aerospace engineering.
Masha Folk, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Carmen Guerra-Garcia, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Ahmed Ghoniem, Department of Mechnical Engineering
The existing Planar Laser Induced Fluorescence (PLIF) system will be upgraded from a low speed to a highspeed technique. The PLIF is an optical measuring technique which employs a laser to illuminate a thin plane of the combustion process and a camera to resolve the flow dynamics and concentration of a molecular species of interest. The understanding gained from these experiments will be used to identify and address key barriers and knowledge gaps of novel low-emission combustion solutions from ammonia fuel injectors to plasma assisted flame control. These developments will accelerate the technology readiness of critical industry solutions in power generation and aviation propulsion and will help meet industry climate goals.
Rafael Jaramillo, Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Advances in microelectronics are placing ever-more-stringent demands on the deposition of metal thin films, and leading-edge research presents needs that cannot be met by existing shared-use tools at MIT. The planned equipment will enable deposition of transition metals on semiconductor wafers in ultra-high vacuum conditions and with substrate temperature control. The equipment will be enabling for research by no fewer than twelve faculty in the School of Engineering to meet challenges in interconnects, dielectrics, spintronics, and metallization.
Ericmoore Jossou, Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering
The spark plasma sintering (SPS) setup is suitable for precise high temperature and applied force control during the sintering process to create high-density materials ranging from nuclear fuels to cladding and nuclear reactor structural materials. The SPS will facilitate the design and fabrication of accident-tolerant fuels for current and advanced reactors. Access to the SPS will also further enhance the teaching of advanced classes in nuclear materials manufacturing and characterization.
Tami Lieberman, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
The acquisition of the Flux instrument from Atrandi Biosciences will enable transformative high-throughput microbiology research across multiple MIT labs. This technology generates semi-permeable capsules (SPCs) that enable growth of bacteria in isolated compartments that, unlike water-in-oil droplets, enable exchange of reagents and waste products. This shared instrument is expected to drive innovation across several research areas, from single-cell bacterial genomics from microbiome samples to massively parallel screening of microbial libraries, opening new possibilities for microbial engineering and understanding microbial behavior in complex environments.
Stefanie Mueller, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The Stratasys J55 printer has advanced multi-material 3D printing capabilities allowing for the fabrication of objects with gradient stiffness (different Shore hardness), different surface textures (e.g., roughness or glossiness), and 3D printed optics with materials simulating glass and clear polymers. The printer has the ability to print onto existing materials, such as glass and carbon fiber, and is capable of embedding electronics, such as PCBs, into the printed object. The J55’s high printing resolution enables the fabrication of microstructure metamaterials and miniature mechanical components for small-scale actuated objects.
Farnaz Niroui, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
A system that enables in-situ electrical and optical characterization while precisely controlling the measurement environment is essential and will be built using the grant support. This system facilitates material and device discoveries and helps open up new device applications. The equipment will facilitate diverse research activities in computing, sensing, and energy micro/nanosystems across various MIT programs, including in EECS, DMSE, NSE, RLE and MTL.
Carlos Portela, Department of Mechanical Engineering
The proposed equipment will enable direct visualization of microscopic samples while being deformed at rates comparable to high-speed impact. This setup will fill a current gap at MIT in the characterization of materials under extreme conditions, enabling rates exceeding those typically possible through macroscale techniques. Furthermore, the small sample volumes required for these experiments—less than 1 mm3—will allow for testing of complex and advanced materials such as aerospace nanocomposites, mechanical metamaterials, and biological tissues.
Ritu Raman, Department of Mechanical Engineering
A 5-axis machining center at MIT will enable precise fabrication of complex 3D geometries using diverse materials including metals, polymers, and ceramics. This 5-axis machining center will enable the MechE, IMES, EECS, BioE, ChemE, and Biology departments to design and build precision instrumentation for interfacing with biological tissues, ranging from custom scaffolds for cells in petri dishes to next-generation medical devices.
Ellen Roche, Department of Mechanical Engineering
The Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) machine will open new research avenues in cardiovascular and interventional studies across the IMES, MechE, and AeroAstro departments. IVUS is an advanced imaging technology used in minimally invasive endovascular surgeries that provides real-time, high-resolution cross-sectional images of blood vessels by emitting high-frequency acoustic waves through biological tissues. Its use enhances surgical precision, allowing detailed assessments of vessel morphology, plaque burden, and lesion characteristics, which ultimately contribute to better patient outcomes and reduced procedural risks.
Yuriy Roman, Department of Chemical Engineering
The Rigaku MiniFlex 6G powder X-ray diffractometer (PXRD) is a benchtop system with autosampling capabilities, to be housed in the Román Lab. This instrument will also be accessible to trained users from Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Mechanical Engineering, and Materials Science and Engineering. PXRD is a cornerstone technique in our research, with over 70% of our publications featuring PXRD data. The ability to probe the local structure of materials is critical for understanding the relationship between structure and catalytic performance, making this instrument indispensable to our research and the work of others across MIT.
Michael Triantafyllou, Department of Mechanical Engineering
A high-speed Digital Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) system will extend the research capabilities of MIT’s fully automated, robotic ‘intelligent tow testing tank.’ Adding the PIV system to the force measurement equipment already in place will allow researchers to collect precise, detailed fluid velocity flow fields around their test bodies. Research will include turbulent wakes behind streamlined bodies such as ships and autonomous vehicles, and wakes behind bluff bodies such as risers and mooring lines used in the offshore industry. We plan to address problems with the combination of experiments in the robotic tank and the PIV flow visualization methods, in coordination with CFD (computational fluid dynamics) simulations, and AI methods.
Thomas Wallin, Department of Materials Science and Engineering
A suite of upgrades for the Instron Testing system in the DMSE Mechanics Lab will enable the characterization of soft, highly extensible and/or heterogeneous materials. Beyond testing of a single soft material, there’s a growing body of work across engineering disciplines where numerous soft-stiff components are integrated in a single architecture. Understanding these mechanical gradients is critical in flexible electronics, biomedicine, human-computer-interaction, and robotics. MIT engineers will now have insight into the complex behavior that occurs with soft-stiff integration.
Ashia Wilson and Marzyeh Ghassemi, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The grant, jointly funded by the School of Engineering, the Schwarzman College of Computing and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, will support four L40 GPUs as well as large storage server to enable large scale experiments on generative models. The resulting computing resources will help a group of highly-collaborative junior faculty who focus on AI for Society to collaborate and perform research on large web-scaled models.
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