McKelvey School of Engineering

One locust is harmless, a swarm can be devastating. A new multi-institutional, multi-disciplinary project involving a researcher at Washington University in St. Louis aims to understand how swarms arise — and how to combat them.

Lithium ion batteries that shouldn’t short circuit often do. Now researchers at the McKelvey School of Engineering have figured out why, and they have devised a straightforward way to tell if and when that will happen for individual batteries.

A team of engineers from the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis conducted a feasibility study for electrochemical “refilling” of lithium-ion batteries into the spent electrodes to regenerate useful compounds.

With a grant from the USDA, a researcher at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis works toward a customizable kill switch — a genetic circuit that could tell bacteria to self-destruct.

Washington University in St. Louis remains committed to strengthening global ties and collaboration despite the COVID-19 crisis. On Aug. 25, the university adopted a new partnership with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru, India, one of that country’s premier research universities.

Natalie Sorenson, a first-year student at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, died May 5, 2020. She died as a result of emotional challenges during lockdown for COVID-19. Natalie Sorenson was 18.

Using properties of light from fluorescent probes is at the heart of a new imaging technique developed at Washington University’s McKelvey School of Engineering that allows for an unprecedented look inside cell membranes.

The McKelvey School of Engineering’s Shantanu Chakrabartty has recently been awarded a $380,000 NSF grant to address a persistent problem when it comes to recreating these neuronal networks in silicon: energy efficiency.

Research from the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis has determined that locusts can smell explosives and determine where the smells originated — an important step in engineering cyborg bomb-sniffing locusts.

The federal Office of Fossil Energy has granted researchers at the McKelvey School of Engineering nearly $7 million to refine a new power plant that’s suitable for fossil fuels and renewables — and will emit almost no carbon.