Aerospace Engineering Seminar Series: Jason Cornelius “From Whiteboard to Intercept: Building AI-Driven Aerospace Systems in the Real World”

Thursday, April 9, 2026; 3:00pm-4:00pm
028 ECoRE
Speaker: Jason Cornelius from Perseus Defense

Abstract: This talk traces my path from a small-town Pennsylvania student to leading a defense technology startup focused on countering emerging drone threats. I will discuss technical work spanning Bell Helicopter, NASA’s Dragonfly mission, and current efforts applying AI to aerospace design and optimization—including development of the lowest cost actively guided interceptor missile. Beyond the technical work, I will share lessons learned from rapidly building and testing real systems, and from operating at the intersection of engineering, national security, and entrepreneurship. This includes perspectives from engagements with the Pentagon and Congress, and what it takes to move ideas from whiteboard concepts to flight-tested hardware. The talk is intended to be both technically informative and candid, highlighting not just successes, but the failures and tradeoffs that shape real-world engineering.

Speaker Bio: Dr. Jason Cornelius completed his BS, MS, and PhD in Penn State’s aerospace engineering department. Over the course of his ten years at PSU, he co-founded the Wind Energy Club, learned Russian and Mandarin Chinese, obtained a graduate certificate in international affairs, taught SCUBA diving in the Natatorium, earned his Private Pilot’s license at the State College airport, and created an international drone competition. Dr. Cornelius joined the Titan Dragonfly team in late 2016 and worked on the program throughout his PhD and after as a Civil Servant at the NASA Ames Research Center. He left NASA last June to start his own company, Perseus Defense, to develop counter drone interceptor missiles for the Pentagon.

Hosted by: Jessica Chhan,  jmc7050@psu.edu

Sustainable Production of Therapeutic Monoclonal Antibodies

Thursday, April 9, 2026; 10:35am
Capone Learning Auditorium (CBEB 001)
Speaker: Todd Przybycien from Renseellaer Polytechnic Institute

The current platform process for monoclonal antibody (mAb) and related therapeutic production is complex and cannot sustainably meet the global need. The demand for mAbs in high-income countries and the unmet need in low and middle income countries (LMICs) is large and growing. New disease targets for mAbs, including pandemic infectious disease, Alzheimer’s and high cholesterol, have patient populations at least 10x of the current anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer therapeutic mAbs.  The shortage of tocilizumab for rheumatoid arthritis patients due to treatment of inflammation in Covid-19 patients during the pandemic highlighted current capacity limitations.  About 80% of global mAb production is consumed by the US, Canada and Europe; even if sold at current cost of goods, $50 to $200/gram, mAbs are out of reach for most patients in LMICs. 

     The economic sustainability bottleneck for mAb manufacture is the protein A (ProA) affinity chromatography-based platform downstream process (DSP).  Industrial process development thought leaders have suggested that upstream titer increases beyond 8 g/L may be pointless due to platform DSP limitations.  The platform DSP also has poor environmental sustainability with process mass intensities typically >10,000 with the ProA capture step alone using on the order of a liter of buffer per gram mAb produced.

     In a bid to sustainably meet the growing need for mAbs, including the economic, environmental and social dimensions of sustainability, we have developed a new, fully continuous, precipitation-based process for mAb downstream processing, drawing inspiration from the manufacturing process for blood plasma products.  This new process can be significantly cheaper, greater in capacity, and less raw material-intensive than current mAb manufacturing technology.  We’ll describe the genesis and evolution of the process, key process parameters, process performance in terms of mAb critical quality attributes and sustainability metrics, and the path forward.

Hosted by: Angela Dixon,  adc12@psu.edu

Repetition-Aware Indexing for Pangenomic Alignment

Monday, April 6, 2026; 10:00AM
W375 Westgate Building
Speaker: Dr. Christina Boucher from University of Florida

Dr. Christina Boucher is a Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the University of Florida. Her research focuses on the design of algorithms and compressed data structures for large-scale biological sequence analysis, enabling efficient search and analysis of massive genomic datasets. She has authored over 170 publications in bioinformatics, including many on succinct data structures, sequence alignment, and pangenomic analysis. Dr. Boucher has delivered keynote addresses at major international venues including WABI 2025, HiCOMB 2022, IGGSY 2022, SPIRE 2021, RECOMB-SEQ 2016, and the ECCB Workshop on Pan-Genomics. She is the recipient of the ESA 2016 Best Paper Award and has led the development of widely used bioinformatics tools such as MONI, MEGARes, AMRPlusPlus, METAMarc, Kohdista, Vari, and VariMerge.  Her research program is highly interdisciplinary, bringing together collaborators in microbiology, veterinary medicine, epidemiology, public health, and clinical sciences. Her work is supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Dr. Boucher has served as Program Committee Chair for several international conferences, including WABI 2022, SPIRE 2020, RECOMB-SEQ 2019, and ACM-BCB 2018. She has been a Standing Member of the NIH Biodata Management and Analysis (BDMA) Study Section since 2021 and is a member of AAAS and ACM and a Senior Member of IEEE.

Hosted by: Emmalia Lutz,  exr123@psu.edu

Structured and Scalable AI for Dynamic Biological Systems

Friday, April 10, 2026; 10:00am
W375 Westgate Building
Speaker: Dr. Yijie Wang from Indiana University-Bloomington

Yijie Wang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Indiana University Bloomington, where he has been on the faculty since 2019. His research develops foundational AI and machine learning methods for modeling complex, high-dimensional biological systems. He focuses on interpretable, structured learning through sparsity, advancing algorithmic approaches to uncover gene regulatory mechanisms. His work bridges AI, applied mathematics, and biomedical sciences, with translational applications in AI-driven drug discovery. He is the recipient of the NIH MIRA (R35) Award in 2022 and an NIA R01 grant in 2026.

Hosted by: Emmalia Lutz,  exr123@psu.edu

Designing Soft Materials to Study Impact Mitigation

Wednesday, April 8, 2026; 121 Earth & Engineering Science Building
3:35-4:25 p.m.
Speaker: Edwin P. Chan from Mechanics of Polymers & Interfaces at MSED, NIST

An impact, defined as a high-force or blast event experienced by a target over a short duration, should be avoided whenever possible. When unavoidable, its severity can be lessened using lightweight, protective systems made from soft materials. My research team aims to develop measurements to answer these questions: What material properties make soft materials impact-resistant and protective, and how can we design better materials?

In this talk, we introduce new microballistic measurement methods to address these questions. First, we demonstrate that combining microballistic testing with mechanochemistry enables the direct measurement of molecular-scale deformation within a maleimide-anthracene-functionalized polystyrene-polyisobutylene block copolymer, thereby capturing the material's response. The shear wave speed of the elastomer is measured directly from the mechanochemically activated subsurface volume, with results validated through simulations, theory, and acoustic measurements. Next, we gain further insights into extreme rate impacts by combining micro- and macro-ballistic experiments with molecular dynamics simulations, revealing similar mechanical behavior of a polystyrene-polyisobutylene star block copolymer across different energy and size scales. Similarly, the shear wave speed of the elastomer is directly measured in these studies. Importantly, both simulation and experimental results highlight the critical role of shear wave speed in determining the extent of impact energy dissipation in these soft materials.

Edwin Chan is the Project Leader of the Fundamentals of Polymer Mechanics Project in the NIST Materials Science and Engineering Division. He leads a research team that studies the elastodynamics of impact-mitigating materials and the interfacial mechanics of polymer interfaces.

Edwin earned a B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University in 2000, an M.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2003, and a Ph.D. in Polymer Science and Engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2007. His Ph.D. research was on the adhesion and mechanics of structured soft elastomers. Before joining the technical sta?, Edwin was a National Research Council Postdoctoral fellow in the Polymers Division at NIST (2008-2011).

Edwin is the recipient of the 2024 NIST Bronze Medal Award, the 2022 Arthur S. Flemming Award, the 2022 US National Academy of Science Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow, and the 2019 American Chemical Society Polymeric Materials: Science and Engineering Division Cooperative Research Award. He was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2016. He was selected to participate in the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) organized German American Frontiers of Engineering in Potsdam, Germany, in 2015. He is also a recipient of the 2013 Adhesion Society Young Scientist Award. He has over 60 publications, three book chapters, and seven patents.

Hosted by: Lana Fulton,  lub18@psu.edu

Aerospace Engineering Seminar Series: Ryan Russell

Thursday, April 16, 2026; 3:00pm-4:00pm
028 ECoRE
Speaker: Ryan Russell from The University of Texas at Austin

Hosted by: Jessica Chhan,  jmc7050@psu.edu

Glycerol-Derived Solvent Platforms for Lignin-First Biorefining toward Functional Aromatic Streams

Thursday, April 16, 2026; 10:35am
Capone Learning Auditorium (CBEB 001)
Speaker: James Sheehan from University of Alabama

Lignin, which constitutes 20–30 wt% of forestry and agricultural residues, represents the largest renewable source of aromatic carbon on the planet. Unlike conventional petrochemical aromatic streams dominated by benzene, toluene, and xylenes, lignin-derived aromatics intrinsically contain oxygenated functional groups that open pathways to higher-value applications in fine chemicals, flavorants, pharmaceuticals, and advanced materials. Harnessing this potential requires solvent systems that can both access and selectively deconstruct lignin’s complex polymeric architecture under practical processing conditions. This presentation highlights recent advances in glycerol-derived ethers (GDEs) as versatile solvent platforms for lignin-first biorefining. These solvents—prepared by etherifying the glycerol scaffold—offer a unique combination of high boiling points, dramatically reduced viscosities, and tunable polarity, enabling efficient lignin solvation and extraction under mild thermochemical conditions. Case studies will demonstrate how GDEs facilitate both organosolv delignification and, when used as hydrogen-donor media, enable transfer-hydrogenolysis pathways that convert lignin into streams of functionalized aromatic monomers without the need for high-pressure hydrogen. Together, these examples illustrate how rational solvent engineering can address long-standing challenges in lignin valorization. The talk will conclude by benchmarking glycerol-derived solvent systems within the broader landscape of lignin-first biorefining technologies using green chemistry metrics. This quantitative perspective will highlight key technical bottlenecks, opportunities for innovation, and future research directions critical for advancing lignin-derived aromatics as a foundation of sustainable chemical manufacturing.

Hosted by: Angela Dixon,  adc12@psu.edu

Boiled Frog or Adaptive Leader?

Wednesday, April 15, 2026; 121 Earth & Engineering Science Building
3:35-4:25 p.m.
Speaker: Susan O. Schall from Founder and Operations Leader of SOS Consulting LLC

Change continues to occur at an ever-increasing rate around us and our organizations. We can either remain in the boiling plan of change or become an adaptive leader that leads our organizations out. This presentation will define adaptive leadership and share a three-step process for leading your organization into the future.

Learning outcomes:

• Know the situations that require adaptive leadership.

• Know the characteristics of adaptive leaders.

• Know the three-step process for adaptively leading your organization.

• Understand adaptive leadership through a higher education case study.

• How to develop the leadership skills while at Penn State.

Over 30 years of experience delivering results using statistical process improvement and organizational health methods. Clients include manufacturing, higher education, and nonprofits.

PhD, Industrial Engineering, Penn State1988

MS, Industrial Engineering, Penn State, 1986

BS, Industrial Engineering, Penn State, 1982

Hosted by: Lana Fulton,  lub18@psu.edu

Aerospace Engineering Seminar Series: Carlos Cesnik

Thursday, April 23, 2026; 3:00pm-4:00pm
028 ECoRE
Speaker: Carlos Cesnik from University of Michigan

Hosted by: Jessica Chhan,  jmc7050@psu.edu

TBD

Thursday, April 23, 2026; 10:35am
Capone Learning Auditorium (CBEB 001)
Speaker: Miguel Modestino from TBD

TBD

Hosted by: Angela Dixon,  adc12@psu.edu

Beyond Equilibrium: Modeling Structurally and Chemically Complex Materials via Energy Landscape Navigation

Wednesday, April 22, 2026; 121 Earth & Engineering Science Building
3:35-4:25 p.m.
Speaker: Yue Fan from Mechanical Engineering at University of Michigan

This seminar highlights the unique capability of energy landscape-based modeling to provide a fundamental, predictive understanding of the behavior of non-equilibrium materials with significant structural and chemical complexity. I will present two case studies illustrating how this modeling approach can reveal insights that are inaccessible to conventional methods.

First, I will discuss metallic glasses — a disordered and inherently non-equilibrium metastable material system. Due to the lack of long-range order, building a valid structure-property relationship in glasses has been a longstanding challenge. I will show that by scrutinizing atomic reconfiguration processes—in particular the competition between elementary activations (up-hill climbing) and relaxations (down-hill dropping) on the energy landscape—a self-consistent equation can be derived to describe the time evolution of these disordered materials under various conditions. This, in turn, allows for the explanation and prediction of many critical phenomena in glassy systems—such as the aging/rejuvenation crossover and thermo-mechanical hysteresis—without relying on too many empirical assumptions or fitting parameters adopted in classical models.

Second, I will show that even in structurally ordered crystalline materials, non-equilibrium processing can induce chemical complexity that modifies the energy landscape in ways that significantly deviate from the classical linear-tilting picture. Using Al-Si-Mg alloys as an example, we integrated realistic energy landscape sampling of various local chemical environments with machine learning and a kinetic Monte Carlo (kMC) framework. This combined approach uncovered new microstructural evolution pathways—specifically, the formation of non-conventional nanoscale precipitates—that are observed in advanced manufacturing experiments (e.g. selective laser melting, high-pressure die casting) but are missed by conventional kMC models.

Yue Fan is currently an Associate Professor at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He received his Ph.D. degree from MIT in 2013, and then worked at Oak Ridge National Lab as a Eugene P. Wigner Fellow from 2013 to 2016. His primary research interest is to provide a substantive knowledge on mechanics and microstructural evolution in complex systems via predictive modeling, and thus facilitate the development of new science-based high performance materials with novel functions and unprecedented strength, durability, and resistance to traditional degradation and failure. Some honors and recognitions he has received include “TMS-JIMM International Scholar”, “TMS MPMD Young Leaders Professional Development Award”, “NSF Career Award”, “Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award” (by ORAU), and “Haythornthwaite Young Investigator Award” (by ASME-Applied Mechanics Division).

Hosted by: Lana Fulton,  lub18@psu.edu

Aerospace Engineering Seminar Series: TBA

Thursday, April 30, 2026; 3:00pm-4:00pm
028 ECoRE
Speaker: TBA from

Hosted by: Jessica Chhan,  jmc7050@psu.edu

Achieving and Sustaining Liftoff: The Pathway for Commercialization of Hydrothermal Liquefaction in the Circular Economy

Thursday, April 30, 2026; 10:35am
Capone Learning Auditorium (CBEB 001)
Speaker: Michael Timko from Worcester Polytechnic Institute

The U.S. alone generates 240 million tons of municipal solid waste each year, the majority of which is organic waste including yard waste, food waste, and plastics. Hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) has the potential to convert this waste into a useful energy and chemical products. Since its discovery in the 1930s by Friedrich Bergius, who applied the process to coal, HTL has undergone two waves of innovation; one in the 1970s following the oil crises of that decade and a second that continues to this day following the oil shock and global financial crisis of 2007. My group has emphasized studies that improve the commercial prospects of HTL, and to that end we performed economic analysis that identified product yield, feedstock cost, and factory size as the three most important factors determining profitability. My talk is arranged on how my group has approached these three factors. In terms of product yield, we have developed data-driven approaches to predict product yields based strictly on feedstock composition. Further, we have developed catalytic HTL (C-HTL), mechanochemical HTL, and a new process termed radical initiated HTL (RI-HTL) to boost biofuel precursor yields at minimal incremental cost. Similarly, we have shown that selection of feedstocks can optimize product yields and even product quality in some cases. In terms of feedstock cost, we have focused our work on waste streams, and in particular have shown that HTL and especially RI-HTL can destroy >90% of the highly carcinogenic perfluoralkylated substances in sewage sludge and related waste. When it comes to factor size, we are breaking new ground on the use of HTL for bamboo conversion into renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel. As the fastest growing land plant, bamboo has tremendous potential for bioenergy production and we find that HTL conversion of bamboo can complete replace corn ethanol as a biofuel in the U.S. on just 15% of the total land area. Collectively, these advances point us to a sustainable future in which HTL plays a lead role, not just in laboratories but in factories near you.

Hosted by: Angela Dixon,  adc12@psu.edu

Biomedical Impedance Matching, Time-Varying Waveguides, Asymmetrical Transmission with Chiral Medium and Beyond: Research Experiences at a Primarily Undergraduate Institution

Wednesday, April 29, 2026; 121 Earth & Engineering Science Building
3:35-4:25 p.m.
Speaker: Atilla Ozgur Cakmak from Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Grand Valley State University

This seminar will highlight several research activities led by Dr. Cakmak at Grand Valley State University (GVSU), focusing on introducing undergraduate students to the research world of Electromagnetics. In this context, Dr. Cakmak will demonstrate how Electromagnetics serves as a powerful enabler for cultivating research habits at a Primarily Undergraduate Institution.

Three main research directions at microwave frequencies will be discussed:

1. Microwave coupling to the human torso,

2. Time-varying microstrip transmission lines, and

3. Asymmetric transmission using Frequency Selective Surfaces (FSS).

Microwave imaging plays an important role in detecting tumors in certain types of cancer. However, efficiently coupling electromagnetic waves into the human body remains challenging due to impedance mismatches at the skin–air interface. Furthermore, anatomical variability among patients and reactive near-field measurement limitations introduce additional complexities. To address these issues, a new type of actively modulated metasurface has been developed as an impedance-matching medium to enhance coupling efficiency and provide robustness against such variations. In a separate study, microwave strip waveguides are employed to explore signal modulation capabilities of microstrips without relying on active components. When loaded with PIN diodes, microstrips can effectively gate the transmission of microwaves, functioning as a time-varying electromagnetic system. A proof-of-principle demonstration shows amplitude modulation that operate at Wi-Fi and Bluetooth frequencies. Another research effort involves cascading chiral media with FSS layers to achieve pronounced asymmetric transmission. It is demonstrated more than 30 dB of one-way transmission, underscoring the potential of such composite systems for advanced microwave control and isolation applications.

Dr. Atilla Ozgur Cakmak is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Grand Valley State University (GVSU), Michigan. He joined GVSU in 2021, and his primary research interests lie in the areas of metasurfaces and antennas. Dr. Cakmak has authored or co-authored more than 25 peer-reviewed publications and actively contributes to the scholarly community as an associate editor, topical editor, and reviewer in his field.

Dr. Cakmak earned his Ph.D. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Bilkent University, Turkey, in 2012. In 2013, he joined The Pennsylvania State University’s Center for Nanotechnology Education and Utilization (CNEU) as a postdoctoral researcher, focusing on solar cell technologies. He later served as an Assistant Teaching Professor at Penn State, beginning in 2018, where he taught courses in nanolithography and nanophotonics within the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics. As a mentor and educator, Dr. Cakmak is deeply committed to undergraduate and master’s student supervision, fostering hands-on research experiences and professional development through his teaching and research activities.

Hosted by: Lana Fulton,  lub18@psu.edu