School Notes: School of Engineering & Applied Science
May/June 2015

Bringing a literary train to life with a 3D printer

For assistant professor of French Morgane Cadieu, the description of a story “leaping off the page” took on new meaning when she turned descriptions from literature into a 3D-printed train. Assisted by the staff and cutting-edge technology at Yale’s Center for Engineering Innovation and Design, the project tested if the thick technical descriptions in Emile Zola’s 1890 novel La Bête humaine—a book often decried as too detailed—would be enough for an engineer to build a realistic train. Through this process, Cadieu and her student researchers Sienna Jun ’16, John Sununu ’15, and Alexandro Gonzalez-Calvillo ’16 discovered that despite copious minutiae about the trains, Zola had not communicated enough details to make even a functional train. For example, only the engine’s two front wheels are described, resulting in a model with no back wheels. On the other hand, Cadieu’s project also explored the importance of close reading for nuance and context, and so the train’s chimney, to which Zola gives exaggerated importance, was designed to be much more prominent than on modern trains; this detail unexpectedly turned out to be accurate for trains in Zola’s era. The 3D-printed train therefore sits at the nexus of what literature and science can teach us about knowledge. “This is the first project I know of,” said Sununu, “that’s taken the heart and soul of literature and brought it to life physically.”

Professor wins prestigious award

Kathryn Miller-Jensen, assistant professor of biomedical engineering and molecular, cellular, & developmental biology, has received a prestigious 2015 National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award. The award will enable her to investigate why some of a patient’s immune cells respond strongly to pathogens while others do not—even though both groups of immune cells are genetically identical. Using state-of-the-art experimental tools for single-cell analysis, she will identify the source of this heterogeneity by examining each step a cell takes to transcript and secrete the pro-inflammatory proteins used for intracellular communication. These experiments will then form the basis of a mathematical model of signaling, cytokine secretion, and diffusion fit to single-cell data to make predictions about emergent population behavior.