WashU’s engineering experts have earned highly competitive grants from a Department of Defense program aimed at building research infrastructure in underutilized areas of the country.
Chongjie Zhang, an associate professor of computer science and engineering, and Sang-Hoon Bae, an assistant professor of mechanical and materials science, both at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, each received a $600,000 award, over three years, from the Defense Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research.
Bae will be continuing to refine his work into ultra-high energy capacitors. Capacitors are a form of energy storage that make use of an electric field that can discharge electricity quickly, as opposed to the slower-releasing chemical energy used in batteries. Bae and collaborators aim to create ultra-thin materials capable of dense energy storage, the type that could power future quantum-computing technologies.
Bae will use the grant to develop his research on single-crystal oxide sheets known as nanomembranes, which can generate extraordinarily strong internal electric fields and act as “electrical engines” capable of influencing other materials placed on top of them. This work could provide the foundation for these next-generation technologies to operate at unprecedented speed and minimal power consumption, Bae said.
Zhang’s grant focuses on “multimodal sensing” — a method of synthesizing diverse data inputs, such as images, audio, maps and text, and training a machine to understand and make predictions about the complex dynamics of the physical world. Zhang’s team will advance deep-learning models by incorporating object-centric model-based reinforcement learning.
This approach addresses a critical challenge in machine learning: detecting “out of domain” objects. Essentially, the system learns to filter essential signals from irrelevant noise. For example, while training autonomous vehicles, images of city streets often include billboards. Zhang’s object-centric models teach the machine to disregard the billboard (the “noise”) and focus on the physical dynamics, such as the movement of pedestrians and vehicles (the “signal”).
DARPA work ongoing
But those aren’t the only projects that have seen strong federal funding support.
It’s not unusual for the military to invest in high-risk/high-reward research that has the potential to become world-changing technology. The internet began as a proto-Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project, for example. DARPA has supported McKelvey Engineering research for decades, including earlier this year awarding a $5.2 million grant to Fuzhong Zhang, the Francis F. Ahmann Professor of energy, environmental and chemical engineering. Zhang and colleagues will develop a genetic “switch” to make microbes work at high efficiency over extended periods during bioproduction. The technology has the potential to upend manufacturing and help establish a circular economy, where bioplastics and waste chemicals can be fed back into the production cycle.
DARPA also has an ongoing project with Xudong Chen, an associate professor in the Preston M. Green Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering. With approximately $250,000 in funding, Chen and his team will use advanced mathematical frameworks to bring order to complex systems. Of particular interest are problem formulations that can exploit Chen’s random graph or “graphon”-based framework for control and estimation of extremely large, complex networks.
“Graphon model is a stochastic model governing the probability that a pair of agents, such as robots, can establish a link,” Chen said. “We want to characterize the chance of a large swarm of robots establishing rich enough communication links so that they can coordinate with each other to accomplish a given task in an uncertain and complex environment.”
DARPA has multiple projects funding the school’s electrical systems and engineering teams, including a four-year $2 million grant awarded in 2023 to enhance the computational efficiency of radio-frequency correlators. That project, co-led by Shantanu Chakrabartty, the Clifford W. Murphy Professor, will improve radar systems’ efficiency by setting up a system where two signals can do similar computation that works like multiplication without the high computation costs.
Another $1 million 2024 grant has funded the Quantum Nano-Photonics Group, the lab of Associate Professor Jung-Tsung Shen, who is working to prototype a quantum photonic-dimer laser. The project includes using carefully controlled pairs of light particles, or photonic dimers, to generate a powerful and concentrated laser beam. Quantum photonic-dimer lasers take advantage of quantum effects to bind two photons together, increasing their energy and efficiency.
Beth Miller contributed to this story.
