Discovery and Innovation
Health & Biotech
Associate professor and biomedical engineer Marsha Rolle and collaborators are using tissue engineering to build replacement tracheas. The work could someday allow surgeons the option of replacing a damaged or faulty trachea with a fully functional natural-tissue trachea in both adults and children.
Advanced Materials & Manufacturing
Lithium-ion batteries power electronics and electric vehicles, but very few of these devices are ever recycled due to challenges related to their chemistry. A new company, based on research by mechanical engineer Yan Wang, may be the first to bring a viable recycling technology to market.
Cyber, Data & Security
With the support of a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, computer science professor Craig Shue is looking to make home networks—and the Internet—safer by by developing cloud-based security providers.
Robotics & the Internet of Things
Robotics engineer Raghvendra Cowlagi and electrical and computer engineer Alex Wyglinski are focusing their interests in decision making and wireless communication on driverless cars.
Learning Sciences
Created by computer scientist Neil Heffernan, ASSISTments, a free web-based learning platform, has been shown to boost student scores on standardized math tests. The impact will be further studied through two multi-million dollar grants from a division of the U.S. Department of Education and the American Institutes for Research.
Career Paths
One of the best-known and most coveted young faculty honors is the five-year CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Eight of these career-establishing awards have recently been bestowed on WPI researchers, along with the university's first U.S. Air Force Young Investigator Award. These rising stars represent a depth of expertise in areas such as math, chemical engineering, biology, learning sciences, and cybersecurity.