School Notes: School of Engineering & Applied Science
January/February 2024

Green fuel through water splitting

With a $1.25 million award from the US Department of Energy (DOE), Shu Hu, assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering, will build a water-splitting device designed for the large-scale production of green hydrogen. The project is among 22 in the US that will receive a total of $42 million in funding from the DOE. The projects aim to advance critical technologies for producing, storing, and deploying clean hydrogen. Aiming for record efficiency and stability, Hu said the solar-driven device will split water into its two components, oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygen is vented into the atmosphere and the hydrogen is collected and compressed to be delivered. 

Yale SWE chapter recognized

The Yale University chapter of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) was recognized with two major awards from the national SWE organization: the Silver Mission Award and a Best Practice Award in Communication. These awards represent top honors for collegiate chapters that excel in all components of SWE’s mission: empowering women to achieve their full potential in careers as engineers and leaders, expanding the image of the engineering and technology professions as a positive force in improving the quality of life, and demonstrating the value of diversity and inclusion.

Observing unpredictable cells

The term “active matter” includes any group of individual agents that collectively form a much larger structure—flocks of birds, for instance. But the smaller things get, the more unpredictable they become. Cells are a good example of this. The forces of their environments have a big influence on them, making their trajectories trickier to calculate. Yimin Luo, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science, has developed a method for getting a much clearer picture of cellular behavior. It’s an advance that could help researchers better understand many developmental processes, as well as how cancer cells invade tissue. The results are published in PRX Life.