Abstract: The construction and operation of buildings contribute massively to global energy use and greenhouse gas emissions; therefore, buildings will play a central role in the path toward a sustainable, net zero, clean energy future. This presentation will give a high-level framing of buildings’ role in the 21^st century energy challenge, as well as associated opportunities and emerging research, development, demonstration, and deployment (RDD&D) that are developing in response. The talk will start out by quantifying buildings contributions to energy and emissions, and then highlight select ongoing programs and RDD&D efforts at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

Biographical Sketch: Dr. Wale Odukomaiya joined NREL’s Building Technologies and Science Center in 2018 as a Director’s Fellow. His research focuses on innovating heat transfer, energy storage, and functional materials in ways that improve building efficiencies and support low-carbon buildings. This research applies fundamental heat transfer, thermodynamics, and materials science to advanced energy technologies and building components, with an emphasis on thermal and electromechanical energy storage technologies; heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC); and advanced manufacturing of related components. Prior to joining NREL, Dr. Odukomaiya was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Building Technologies Research and Integration Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he worked on the development of energy storage and magnetocaloric refrigeration technologies. His research background includes developing advanced energy technologies and building components, energy policy and economics, and thermal and electro-mechanical energy storage.

Abstract: Metamodels, or models of models, map defined model inputs to defined model outputs. When metamodels are constructed to be computationally cheap, they are an invaluable tool for applications ranging from topology optimization, to uncertainty quantification, to real-time prediction, to multi-scale simulation. In particular, for heterogeneous materials, metamodels are useful for exploring the influence of the (potentially massive) heterogeneous material property parameter space. By nature, a given metamodel will be tailored to a specific dataset. However, the most pragmatic metamodel type and structure will often be general to larger classes of problems. At present, the most pragmatic metamodel selection for dealing with mechanical data — specifically simulations of heterogenous materials — has not been thoroughly explored. In this work, we draw inspiration from the benchmark datasets available to the computer vision research community. These benchmark datasets have both made it feasible to compare different methods for solving the same problem, and inspired new directions for method development. In response, we introduce benchmark datasets for engineering mechanics problems (for example, the Mechanical MNIST Collection https://open.bu.edu/handle/2144/39371 [1,2,3, 4]). Then, we show some example problems that we are exploring with these datasets such as our methodology for constructing metamodels for predicting full field quantities of interest (e.g., full field displacements, stress, strain, or damage variable), for leveraging information from multiple simulation fidelities, and for creating well calibrated models. Looking forward, we anticipate that disseminating both these benchmark datasets and our computational methods will enable the broader community of researchers to develop improved techniques for understanding the behavior of spatially heterogeneous materials. We also hope to inspire others to use our datasets for educational and research purposes, and to disseminate datasets and metamodels specific to their own areas of interest (https://elejeune11.github.io/).

Biographical Sketch: Emma Lejeune is an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Boston University. She received her PhD from Stanford University in September 2018, and was a Peter O’Donnell, Jr. postdoctoral research fellow at the Oden Institute at the University of Texas at Austin until 2020 when she joined the faculty at BU. At BU, Emma has received the David R. Dalton Career Development Professorship, a Computational Science and Engineering Junior Faculty Fellowship, the Haythornthwaite Research Initiation Grant from the ASME Applied Mechanics Division, and the American Heart Association Career Development Award. Current areas of research involve integrating data-driven and physics based computational models, and characterizing and predicting the mechanical behavior of heterogeneous materials and biological systems.

Abstract: Sickle cells are known for their significantly shortened lifespan (10-20 days), which is much shorter than the lifespan (~120 days) of the normal red blood cells (RBCs). Similar to normal RBCs, sickle cells are also challenged by repeated hypoxia cycles as well as mechanical fatigue. To examine the impact of these repeated challenges toward the progressive degradation process of RBCs, we have developed in vitro microfluidic assays for testing RBCs in health and disease under cyclic hypoxia loading or cyclic mechanical loading. Both types of fatigue loading are found to cause significant RBC degradation in a cumulative manner. More importantly, our results show that sickle cells on average degrade much faster than normal healthy RBCs. These results provide new insights into the possible mechanisms underlying the significantly shortened lifespan of sickle cells. The developed assays can be used for drug efficacy screening and potentially disease severity testing in a patient-specific manner.

Biographical Sketch: Ming Dao is the Principal Investigator and Director of MIT’s Nanomechanics Laboratory, and a Principal Research Scientist in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT. His research interests include nanomechanics of advanced materials, cell biomechanics/biophysics of human diseases, and machine learning for engineering and biomedical applications. He has published over 160 papers in peer-reviewed journals, including Science, Nature Materials, Science Advances, Nature Communications, PNAS, etc. He was ranked within the Top 2% Scientists list established by Ioannidis/Stanford University in all four updates published in June 2019 (single year), October 2020 (single year & career), October 2021 (single year & career), and November 2022 (single year & career). He is also ranked as a top 0.5% researcher in both citation and h-index by Exaly.com (March 2023).

He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and named the 2012 Singapore Research Chair / Professor in Bioengineering and Infectious Disease by MIT. He was a visiting professor with the National Institute of Blood Transfusion, Paris, France (INTS, 2016-2017) and an adjunct professor with Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China (2011-2020). Since 2018, he has been a visiting professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He has also chaired or co-chaired 18 international symposiums/workshops/webinar series.