Promising projects receive Schmidt Transformative Technology Fund awards
By the Office of the Dean for Research
Eight innovative research projects, including three led by Andlinger Center faculty, recently received funding through Princeton’s Eric and Wendy Schmidt Transformative Technology Fund — the largest number of annual awards in the fund’s history. The projects have potential to enable new capabilities and fundamental understandings across broad areas of science and engineering and involve faculty, researchers and graduate students from more than 10 Princeton departments and institutes.
The goal of the fund is to enable researchers to make bold leaps rather than incremental advances in the natural sciences and engineering. It supports projects that lead to the invention of a disruptive new technology that can have a major impact on a field of research; the development of equipment or an enabling technology that will transform research in a field; or the innovative application of new technologies to solve complex research problems, open new avenues of inquiry, or significantly enhance the capabilities of existing research methodologies.
The fund was created in 2009 through a gift from Eric and Wendy Schmidt. Eric Schmidt is executive chairman and CEO of Relativity Space, co-founder of Schmidt Sciences, The Schmidt Family Foundation, and Schmidt Ocean Institute, the former chief executive officer of Google, and former executive chairman of Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company. Wendy Schmidt is co-founder of Schmidt Sciences, and president and co-founder of The Schmidt Family Foundation and Schmidt Ocean Institute. Eric Schmidt earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Princeton in 1976 and served as a Princeton trustee from 2004 to 2008.
“The research teams supported through the Schmidt fund this year are poised to create powerful new research tools and to use AI and machine learning to accelerate discovery,” said Princeton University Dean for Research Peter Schiffer. “The fund enables researchers across disciplines to take big swings, advance ambitious and exciting research, and even build new fields that benefit society.”
The eight projects were selected for funding with the input of an anonymous panel of faculty reviewers.
Three projects highlighted below involve Andlinger Center faculty and associated faculty.
Building a new platform to discover cyclic peptide drugs
A. James Link, professor of chemical and biological engineering
Peptides have emerged as a promising new modality in drug design, with applications in market-leading GLP-1 medications and in drugs under development to treat high cholesterol. This project builds on previous work with naturally occurring cyclic peptides with the aim of accelerating drug discovery. The research team will develop large libraries of peptide variants that can be screened against a variety of drug targets. They will test the properties of fuscimiditide (a cyclic peptide with a unique stem-loop structure that may be effective in targeting challenging protein-protein interactions) and use mass spectrometry techniques to search for other cyclic peptides that are amenable to engineering with this drug discovery platform. This approach could lay the groundwork for others in academia and in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries to discover new molecules that would serve as the starting point for new drugs.
Developing an ultrafast microscope
Aditya Sood, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the Princeton Materials Institute
Barry Rand, professor of electrical and computer engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment
Advances in nanoscience require a detailed understanding of the motion of charge, energy and matter with nanometer spatial and picosecond temporal resolution. The research team will develop a novel dynamic microscope that can capture short-lived processes in nano materials on ultrafast timescales. By integrating ideas from ultrafast science, bioimaging and non-linear optics, the team will build a multimodal imaging platform that can visualize the movement of electrons, heat and ions within operating devices. The proposed instrument has the potential to transform a broad range of technologies, including optoelectronics such as solar cells, computing and data storage devices, and batteries.
Folding flows: Connecting origami and fluidics
Glaucio Paulino, Margareta Engman Augustine Professor of Engineering, professor of civil and environmental engineering and the Princeton Materials Institute
Howard A. Stone, Neil A. Omenn ’68 University Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Working at the intersection of origami engineering and fluid mechanics, the research team has developed the “folding flows” approach, a novel solution to the challenge of controlling fluid transport through morphing structures. The researchers will show how reconfiguration of origami lattices governs capillary pressure, permeability and fluid flow behaviors, and they will construct origami structures that control fluid directionality and enhance absorption and evaporation. By merging these structures with fluidic platforms, they aim to automate control of fluids at the microscale. These systems will have applications across fields, including energy, robotics, medicine, chemistry and environmental engineering. The theoretical models and design principles will provide an open-source framework for the research community, enabling cross-disciplinary innovation in engineering, materials science and applied physics.
This article has been abridged from the full story available on the Office of the Dean for Research website.