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From Lab to Field: Recent University-Government Successes

Lourdes Salamanca-Riba, University of Maryland, College Park; and Dianne Chong, Boeing, moderated a session on university–government collaborations.

The session featured John Joannopoulos, the Francis Wright Davis Professor of Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Lori Graham-Brady, professor of civil and systems engineering, mechanical engineering, and material science and engineering, and associate director, Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute (HEMI) at Johns Hopkins University; and K.T. Ramesh, Alonzo G. Decker, Jr., professor of science and engineering at Johns Hopkins University and director of HEMI.

INSTITUTE FOR SOLDIER NANOTECHNOLOGIES

John Joannopoulos, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Joannopoulos detailed the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN), an Army University-Affiliated Research Center founded in 2002 that is operated as a partnership among the U.S. Army, MIT, and industry collaborators. ISN conducts fundamental nanotechnology research and translation with a goal of improving soldier survivability and the capabilities of soldiers and their platforms. The institute comprises a fully staffed campus facility at MIT that includes an Army liaison officer, industry partners, and Army science and technology (S&T) centers across the United States. Joannopoulos described how ISN and its nanotechnology

research innovations have had a significant impact on commercial and government military applications.

A Focus on Applications

ISN performs basic research in three strategic areas: soldier protection, battlefield care, and sensing; augmenting situational awareness; and transformational nano-optoelectronic soldier capabilities. The applications that emerge align with Army Futures Command Cross-Functional Teams. Joannopoulos highlighted several examples of these applications, including compact and low-power light detection and ranging; ultra-strong kinetic penetrators; nanomaterials for hypersonics; stronger, lighter-weight armor; quantum dot ultraviolet tagging and communications; quantum dot compact hyperspectral imaging; and nanoparticle display technology.

Scientific Breakthroughs

Joannopoulos highlighted significant scientific breakthroughs stemming from ISN work. For example, novel, thermodynamically stable, nanocrystalline metal alloys developed by institute researchers outperform previous alloys that were not stable, had less stopping power, and weighed more. Another example is a functional multimaterial fiber device architecture that could be used to turn shirts into covert communication devices or remote cardiac monitors. This acoustic fabric was recently sent to the International Space Station to test its ability to detect or collect space dust–particle impacts. Finally, ISN developed superelastic granular ceramic materials, which offer far more ductility than previous ceramics, to improve impact absorption capabilities.

Commercial Transitions

ISN has also generated many research ideas that successfully transitioned into commercial products. For example, nanostructured, amplifying fluorescent polymers for ultrasensitive explosives detection were transitioned by FLIR Systems, Inc., to a handheld explosives detector now used in airports across the Middle East. A second example is a hollow-core, cylindrical, photonic crystal fiber designed for guiding high-power carbon dioxide laser light through air, which transitioned to the OmniGuide fully endoscopic scalpel, which has been used in more than 250,000 procedures across 1,000 hospitals in the United States. Finally, ISN solutions for efficient, wireless, non-radiative power–transfer over distance transitioned to WiTricity, which develops wireless charging for cars, implants, and military gear.

Q&A Discussion

In response to a question, Joannopoulos shared that ISN graduates often join military research units but also start their own companies, join existing companies, or find academic jobs. When asked if students were reluctant to work on weapons-related research, he replied that he has not noted such hesitancy among students, although ISN does little direct work on weaponry. He also noted that any MIT faculty member may join ISN; it is not limited to U.S. citizens. In response to a question from Haydn Wadley, University of Virginia, he confirmed that regular exchange between U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and ISN scientists helps connect researchers, students, and postdoctoral researchers with military research jobs.

In response to a question from Salamanca-Riba, Joannopoulos noted that ISN research ideas can come from anywhere, although the institute has two oversight boards and meets frequently with senior Army leaders, including soliciting information from the Army for every 5-year program in order to whittle down research interests and ensure that proposals are viable.

Ned Thomas of Texas A&M University, former ISN director, said that the high number of startups coming out of ISN is not surprising given the entrepreneurial tradition among MIT students. Joannopoulos added that another unique aspect of ISN is its ability to fund and learn from researchers who have no obvious DoD connection. For example, the work of a colleague in the physics department on dark matter inspired ISN researchers to find new ways to detect fissile material.

LESSONS FROM A SUCCESSFUL LARGE DOD CENTER IN THE TIME OF COVID-19

Lori Graham-Brady and K.T. Ramesh, Johns Hopkins University

Graham-Brady and Ramesh gave a joint talk detailing the workforce in the Materials in Extreme Dynamic Environments (MEDE) Cooperative Research Alliance funded by the Army Research Laboratory and discussed how COVID-19 has affected MEDE and the S&T workforce more broadly.

MEDE’s Mission and Workforce

Graham-Brady introduced MEDE, DoD’s basic research program to develop and design advanced protection materials through modeling, experiments, and processing. Launched in 2012 and housed at Johns Hopkins University, MEDE’s research has culminated in two important transitions to the Army Research Laboratory—newly designed innovative protection materials and multiscale

material design codes. The overall goal for these materials is to provide significant weight reduction without a loss in protection.

MEDE has a large research portfolio and collaborates frequently with the Army Research Laboratory. It comprises several primary and secondary university partners and includes faculty, scientists, postdoctoral researchers, and students. MEDE-affiliated doctoral students go on to join industry, academia, or national laboratories in roughly equal numbers, but its postdoctoral researchers overwhelmingly choose to pursue academic careers.

Graham-Brady described how MEDE uses a canonical modeling approach to adhere to Army classification codes. MEDE researchers, working in an open domain, can see the fundamentals of a problem—such as temperature, pressure, stress level, and weight—but cannot access classified information about applications. Army researchers have the opposite view, and the canonical model ensures constant communication to connect each side’s knowledge.

To build a pipeline into MEDE, its researchers teach courses, encourage professional coaching through HEMI, and host or sponsor interns through the Extreme Science program with Morgan State University and the Extreme Arts Program with the Maryland Institute College of Art. MEDE also offers research apprenticeships to undergraduates and high school students, with a particular focus on underserved communities. With almost 100 internships completed, Graham-Brady said the program serves as a model for other national laboratories.

Workforce Ramifications of COVID-19

Ramesh discussed short- and long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on MEDE and the overall S&T workforce. Initially, laboratory operations and conferences shut down completely, although data modeling continued and even increased, he said. While laboratory operations have since restarted, the pace is very slow, with only a limited number of individuals allowed in laboratories, and with severe limits on in-person training because of the potential for infection. He said that the loss of in-person collaboration particularly hampers the ability to make, characterize, and evaluate new materials. In addition, critical facilities that were shut down may have degraded, requiring specialized maintenance that universities may not be willing or able to fund.

This slowdown of science is also slowing the career paths of the future workforce, Ramesh said. Students and postdoctoral researchers are effectively losing a whole year of learning, cross-training, and output. Doctoral students can no longer expect to finish after 5 years and risk losing financial support. In-person training on sophisticated laboratory equipment is limited and risky.

Ramesh stressed that the long-term effects on the workforce are just as serious. At a minimum, he posited that there will be a year-long gap in the critical national

defense and technology infrastructure workforce. In the United States, which does not match other countries in terms of the sheer number of workers, quality of work is emphasized over quantity, and so the reduction in workforce leaving the universities for national laboratories and industry will have a large impact. The restart of the commercial research sector can also siphon talent away from national laboratories,¹ especially if it outpaces the restart of government research.

Furthermore, faculty are now more conservative about funding in order to protect existing students, who, unlikely to find a job, will need to be supported for longer. That makes it difficult to bring on new students, reducing opportunities for the next generation of students to move forward and creating downward pressure for the S&T workforce on the whole, Ramesh said.

Ramesh emphasized that the United States is no longer the infrastructure leader in some of DoD’s critical research areas. Asian countries are investing heavily in cutting-edge technology and facilities, outpacing U.S. demand and becoming attractive places for students seeking top-tier higher education or jobs. Their infrastructure investments bring onboard state-of-the-art technology, while some U.S. infrastructure remains legacy rather than cutting-edge. Since the companies making these technologies are attracted to the large Asian market, Asian countries are beginning to control the directions of technology development in these areas. The United States is also beginning to lose the international competition for high-quality junior faculty to Europe and Asia. As a consequence, Ramesh warned that even the United States’ long-standing edge in basic research may also be at risk. He stressed the need to ensure that U.S. research infrastructure at universities remains competitive with that of Asian and European competitors.

Closing, Ramesh urged major investments to facilitate short- and long-term recovery in S&T after COVID-19. These efforts should be focused on restarting facilities that were shut down, allowing current students to complete their training, and funding long-term, future-looking, collaborative research centers. In particular, he suggested that DoD postdoctoral fellowships are needed to reboot economic mobility and workforce training.

Q&A Discussion

Thomas asked if the panelists were optimistic or pessimistic about the future. Graham-Brady replied that she is an optimist but worries that the United States will suffer if it waits too long to increase its competitiveness. Ramesh said he is worried because he sees other nations investing more heavily and deliberately in national defense areas. Angus Rockett, Colorado School of Mines, likened the

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¹ P. Fiske, 1999, “Jobs in Industry vs. Jobs in National Labs,” Science, July 23, https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/1999/07/jobs-industry-vs-jobs-national-labs.

current situation to China’s investment in solar cells, an opportunity the United States ignored, which quickly made China the world leader in the field.

PANEL DISCUSSION ON UNIVERSITY-GOVERNMENT SUCCESSES

Salamanca-Riba introduced a panel discussion to further explore university–government collaborations. The panelists were Dan Marren, independent contractor for Scientific Research Corporation; Krista Walton, Associate Dean for Research and Innovation in the College of Engineering and the Professor and Robert “Bud” Moeller Faculty Fellow in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology; and Lei Zhu, Associate Director for Research at the Center for Layered Polymeric Systems (CLiPS) and Professor of Macromolecular Science and Engineering at Case Western Reserve University. Following their remarks, Salamanca-Riba and Chong moderated questions from participants.

Building the Hypersonics Workforce to Support DoD Programs

Dan Marren, Scientific Research Corporation

Marren detailed the work of the DoD-funded University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics (UCAH), which conducts applied hypersonic research and development to mature advanced technologies.

Established in 2020 with a $20 million annual research budget, UCAH includes more than 100 educational institutions, at least 40 industry members, and a diverse governance board of national experts. The initiative does not just transition new technologies but also transitions the workforce needed to use them in the field, Marren said.

Hypersonic work is critical to national security, and UCAH must balance International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) with classified work. To ensure the United States retains superiority in hypersonics and create field-ready technologies, UCAH works with universities to find both tapped and untapped S&T talent, partnering with established hypersonic university laboratories while remaining open to working with any laboratory whose technology could have hypersonic applications.

UCAH research covers six priority areas; especially relevant to this workshop is high-temperature materials and manufacturing, where current projects include additively manufactured components and seeker-sensor development for hypersonic vehicles. In addition, Marren noted that the initiative encourages Next Generation Projects to capture revolutionary ideas, even if they do not fit neatly into one of the priority categories. Multidisciplinary Challenge Projects are used to grow and train the workforce.

Because UCAH is so new, there is much work ahead, including project selection, workforce development, communication, and integration with collaborators, including internationally. The initiative has already launched 17 projects, with calls under way for additional proposals.

Energy Frontier Research Centers

Krista Walton, Georgia Institute of Technology

Walton is director and principal investigator for the Center for Understanding and Control of Acid Gas Induced Evolution of Materials for Energy (UNCAGE-ME), an Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC). Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), EFRCs are fully integrated, fundamental, multi-investigator efforts to accelerate materials discovery, combine workforce talent, and provide new tools for manipulating matter on atomic and molecular scales.

UNCAGE-ME was established in 2014, renewed in 2018, and includes senior investigators from seven institutions, students of all levels, and several affiliate organizations. Its mission is to accelerate new materials discovery through the development of a deep knowledge base in characterizing, predicting, and controlling acid gas interactions with a broad class of materials.

Acid gases are very important to the chemical industry, Walton said, but classical abatement methods are expensive and environmentally hazardous. UNCAGE-ME seeks to uncover how variations in surface and bulk properties influence adsorption and reaction with acid gasses, learn ways to predict synergistic effects, and enhance these investigations with advanced analytics and machine learning.

This work is directly relevant to two DOE Science Grand Challenges and also has multiple applications in the realm of materials development. UNCAGE-ME researchers primarily look at chemical separations and catalysis, where materials must have high selectivity, high throughput, high durability in complex environments, and high scalability. Barriers to developing such materials include the complexities in processing materials at scale, the degradation of materials by trace contaminants, and the naïve application of performance metrics.² Prior research has shown that materials that are stable in ideal situations can fail in more realistic environments.³ Also, Walton said there is no single technique that can uncover how acid gases degrade materials;

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² K.S. Walton and D.S. Sholl, 2017, Research challenges in avoiding “showstoppers” in developing materials for large-scale energy applications, Joule (1:2): 208-211, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2017.06.005.

³ K.S. Walton, 2019, 110th Anniversary: Commentary: Perspectives on adsorption of complex mixtures, Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research (58:37): 17100-17105, https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.iecr.9b04243.

instead, a myriad of tools and skills are needed, such as spectronomy, computational modeling, and adsorption measurements.⁴

Multifaceted collaboration is essential to advancing this work, Walton said, noting that the center hosts social events to promote interaction between groups. After working at UNCAGE-ME, students have moved to government agencies and started companies. In addition, the high-tech capabilities at UNCAGE-ME have encouraged companies to help initiate pilot-level testing of various research applications.

At UNCAGE-ME as at many other organizations, COVID-19 has brought a shift to online meetings and collaboration; a large drop in experiments and research exchanges; an increase in publications; and challenges related to training new hires, Walton said. Laboratories are slowly coming back to life but only at 50 percent occupancy, making it difficult to return to the pre-pandemic level of productivity.

High Energy–Density and High-Temperature, Multilayer Polymer Films for Pulsed Power and Power-Conditioning Applications

Lei Zhu, Center for Layered Polymeric Systems

CLiPS, launched by the National Science Foundation in 2006, is now a standalone S&T center with two main areas of focus. For DoD, the center’s researchers advance power, rail guns, and weapons-related technology. For the commercial sector, they work on electric vehicles, specifically on passive component polymer capacitors to enable higher speed and power.

The challenge of creating next-generation dielectric film capacitors is that it requires a polymer that is suitable for high-temperature operation with high energy densities, can be miniaturized, and has a long lifespan.⁵ Current capacitor technology, 2.5 micron biaxially oriented polypropylene films, has a low energy density and falls far short of temperature requirements of modern power electronics. Zhu and his team investigated several polymer candidates, but none had the right characteristics. Through iteration and experimentation, CLiPS researchers found that

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⁴ National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2019, A Research Agenda for Transforming Separation Science, Washington, DC, The National Academies Press, https://doi.org/10.17226/25421.

⁵ M. Mackey, A. Hiltner, E. Baer, L. Flandin, M. Wolak, and J. Shirk, 2009, Enhanced breakdown strength of multilayered films fabricated by forced assembly microlayer coextrusion, Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics 42: 175304, https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0022-3727/42/17/175304/pdf.

layering thousands of ultrathin nanolayers will give the desired characteristics.⁶ The center is now collaborating with three companies to transition and scale the resulting multilayered films.

Panel Q&A

Salamanca-Riba and Chong moderated a discussion of pandemic recovery challenges and collaboration strategies in the context of university–government initiatives.

Pandemic Recovery Challenges

Chong asked panelists what is needed to facilitate post-COVID-19 recovery. Marren answered that recovery will take two forms: sharing overall best practices and advancing strategies for in-person workforce development. He also stated that COVID-19 has posed special challenges to facilitating secure communication, especially in light of ITAR requirements, but UCAH is working on a solution.

Ramesh answered that long-term recovery will require significant investments in materials science and engineering research infrastructure. Noting that other countries are spending more, Ramesh warned the United States is at risk of falling behind. To facilitate medium-term recovery, he suggested DoD should expand full-time fellowships, especially for postdoctoral researchers, many of whom also need support to bridge into U.S. citizenship. In the short term, funding is required to support students whose work and career paths have stalled.

Wadley asked if the fact that nearly half of graduate students in the United States are not citizens has limited the defense workforce pipeline. Marren acknowledged that citizenship issues pose challenges for UCAH in the context of ITAR restrictions. One solution has been to invite U.S. researchers from other disciplines to participate in applied research, which he said has been a successful approach so far.

Collaboration Strategies

Thomas asked how UCAH could have international collaborations, given its defense work, and Marren replied that the only countries invited to participate are the “Five Eyes”⁷ nations with which DoD has established partnerships. UCAH

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⁶ J.-K. Tseng, K. Yin, Z. Zhang, M. Mackey, E. Baer, and L. Zhu, 2019, Morphological effects on dielectric properties of poly(vinylidene fluoride-co-hexafluoropropylene) blends and multilayer films, Polymer 172: 221-230, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polymer.2019.03.076.

⁷ “Five Eyes” is a handling restriction or handling code to represent Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and the United States. “Five Eyes,” Thesaurus Index, last updated September 17, 2008, https://web.archive.org/web/20140202105224/http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/call/thesaurus/toc.asp?id=37622.

is also inviting U.S. researchers to advise DoD on the state of the science for the specific applications to encourage collaboration.

Chong asked Walton what strategies she has used for cross-institution collaboration, especially in light of the challenges of remote interaction such as “Zoom fatigue.” Walton replied that the online event platform Gatherly and virtual reality approaches have worked well, and her team is actively seeking more engaging, game-like systems to facilitate relationships and support collaboration. Marren added that UCAH is also testing virtual reality tools to replace some in-person training. Ramesh noted that despite Zoom fatigue, online meetings do have upsides, such as reducing the need for travel. Successful collaborations require trust and comfort, which can be fostered online, and it is important to continue using tools that have worked well.

Industry–Academic Collaborations

Teresa Clement, Raytheon Technologies, asked if there was a pipeline for industry workers to return to school. Ramesh replied that several universities are now offering more online education, even creating specific certifications tailored to a company’s needs, although using physical laboratories will be challenging. Marren added that UHAC is hoping to create industry–academic exchange programs to improve both sides’ understanding of how basic research is translated.

Zhu noted that in addition to this bottom-up approach, there could be a top-down version where DoD initiates more industry–academic consortia. While funding for such efforts has dropped, he expressed his view that encouraging university–industry collaboration is just as important as reshoring U.S. manufacturing. Salamanca-Riba noted an uptick in university–industry collaboration; for example, electron microscope manufacturers are tweaking designs to suit researcher needs.