School Notes: School of Engineering & Applied Science
January/February 2014

A new network of expertise

Engineers may soon be addressing epidemics—of germs, of misinformation, of behaviors as diverse as smoking and violence. So says Dr. Nicholas Christakis, sociologist, physician, and codirector of the Yale Institute for Network Science (YINS). Established in July, YINS brings together researchers from diverse disciplines to further the study of complex networks. SEAS is providing the largest faculty population of YINS, including associate professor of electrical engineering Sekhar Tatikonda and two faculty scheduled to join the Department of Electrical Engineering next year: Wenjun Hu, arriving from Microsoft China, and Amin Karbasi, arriving from ETH-Zurich. 

These SEAS representatives bring expertise in areas such as robotic networks—where autonomous robots make local decisions to complete tasks—and the sensor networks that monitor everything from farm soil conditions to the structural soundness of buildings. Such robots could have been deployed, for example, to control the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and such sensors measure the integrity of the Fukushima reactors and the spread of the resultant nuclear contamination. The YINS/SEAS faculty expertise also extends to renewable wind and solar energy generation, cloud computing, and Internet peer-to-peer networks. YINS will provide a hub for the many Yale scholars on the network frontier, scholars who design and improve networks. Or as Christakis notes, “We can use network science to intervene in the world to make people’s lives better.”

Innovating safer chemical design

Over the next four years, Yale scientists led by Julie Zimmerman, Donna L. Dubinsky Associate Professor of Chemical & Environmental Engineering, and professors of chemistry Paul Anastas and William L. Jorgensen will develop computer software that helps molecule designers create safer, less toxic chemicals. Funded by a $4.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation and Environmental Protection Agency, the project builds on achievements in toxicology science and computational chemistry that make it possible to identify the mechanisms that cause toxicity. Regarding the software, Zimmerman remarks that “the idea is to train chemists and toxicologists early in their college careers about these approaches so that chemists actually learn what toxicology is and toxicologists learn how to use their knowledge to help chemists.”