School Notes: School of Engineering & Applied Science
November/December 2012

Center for Engineering Innovation & Design opens

The school’s new Center for Engineering Innovation & Design opened its doors for the start of the 2012–2013 school year. The CEID is the latest addition in the school’s ongoing efforts to encourage collaborative work not just among engineers, but also with students from all of the schools and programs on Yale’s campus. Offering students the ability to realize their ideas with tools and training from its affiliated faculty and staff, the CEID’s resources reach beyond the traditional wood and machine shops found in design spaces to include equipment for rapid prototyping and, in a unique and progressive move for a design space, a wet lab to support design efforts in medical devices or research in microfluidics. The CEID’s largest area, an open studio space on the ground floor, offers passersby a full view of current center activities and serves as a reminder that the space is open to the Yale community.

Grants support interdisciplinary research

Through a generous gift from Donna Dubinsky ’77, the School of Engineering has created the Dubinsky New Initiative Grants to foster new research efforts aligned with the school’s interdisciplinary research priorities. These priorities leverage talent across the school and all of Yale. Through the new initiative grants, the school has offered funding to two projects in the program’s first year. The first, a collaboration between professors from biomedical and chemical engineering as well as immunobiology, dermatology, anesthesiology, and medicine, proposes to develop a “microvessel-on-a-chip.” Their research has widespread applications in the study of cystic fibrosis, lung damage that leads to multiple organ failure in septic patients, and breast cancer metastasis into the lung. The second, a group representing chemical engineering, materials science, and applied physics, will study clean energy generation by pyro-electric conversion of solar radiation. Specifically, the group hopes to overcome a current limitation that requires time-varying heat fluxes as energy inputs.