Illinois Innovators

Illinois Innovators is the podcast of the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and it stays focused on that one institution. The guests in these episodes include faculty, center directors and the president of a global philanthropy, and the hosts usually open by listing a guest's titles before getting to the work. Bill Bell introduces himself in two of these conversations, and Debra Levy-Larson in another. The subjects cover a lot of ground. Marco Panesi, director of the Center for Hypersonics and Entry System Studies and a professor of aerospace engineering, describes modeling chemical reactions and turbulence at the same time: both span so many scales that there is not enough computing power to calculate them directly. Working with applied mathematicians and experimentalists, his team is looking for reduced-order models drawn from data and high-fidelity computation, and the conversation also covers NASA funding through an initiative called ACCESS. Rohit Bhargava, who has led the Cancer Center at Illinois since it was formed, puts it plainly: 21st century science cannot be done in 20th century facilities. He mentions the old Everett Hall, rebuilt inside for the Department of Bioengineering, and an approved cancer center research building meant to put engineers, basic biologists and clinicians on the same problem. The boldest premise belongs to 'Can we create food from air, water and electricity?' A four-year, $10.4 million DARPA grant funds seven Illinois researchers, led by principal investigator Ting Liu, who aim to make ammonia from air, water and electricity and feed it, along with acetate, to microorganisms that grow biomass. One guest stops to explain why ammonia matters: it is the fertilizer behind the world's food supply, made industrially by the Haber-Bosch process at high pressure and high temperature. Not everything here is a lab report. 'Physics for the masses, one song at a time' opens on the sound of 'Condensed Matter Girl', a parody of Madonna's 'Material Girl' filmed in Fahad Mahmood's physics lab, with graduate students and professors lip-syncing in lab spaces. Maggie Mahmood, who wrote the lyrics, and Fahad Mahmood talk about students watching themselves succeed and realizing that what they made is actually physics, math or engineering. Vilas Dhar, president of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, takes the conversation beyond campus. He asks what a digitally enabled future would look like if technology started from social development, equity and human potential rather than products, profit and commercial potential. The data science episode has a different setup: two professors, one from computer science and one from statistics, present the college's data science program together. They describe a public website with videos, fill-in-the-blank notes and practice problems, plus more than two dozen micro projects that each take under an hour. One of them cites Edward Tufte as someone who showed that an informative data visualization can also be beautiful. Where to start depends on your interests: the hypersonics conversation for aerospace, the food episode for chemistry and biology, and the music parody for something lighter.