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Faculty Research and Innovation at the Schaefer School

LEADING WHAT'S NEXT

At the Schaefer School, our innovative faculty are traversing new ground every day in the name of science and engineering.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are core strengths of our research enterprise that permeate nearly every department's scholarly efforts whether it's healthcare, robotics, chemical engineering or quantum science.

Meanwhile, our quantum researchers are at the forefront of the quantum revolution, boldly pushing technology where it's never gone before – including the exploration of quantum gravity.

We're attacking climate change from every angle by developing renewable energy and sustainability technologies. With our university being located at the convergence of the Hudson River and New York Harbor, coastal resilience research is in our DNA and our sustainability researchers work in a living laboratory.

No problem is too big or too small. At Stevens' Charles V. Schaefer Jr. School of engineering and science, we tackle them all.

Engineering the Future with Stevens-Made Technology

Here are just a few of the discoveries and technologies we're developing to take society to the next level and meet global challenges head-on.

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These Smart Underwater Robots Will Soon Help Us Inspect Where We Don't Want To

Anson Wood Burchard Endowed Professor Brendan Englot, a robotics expert, uses machine learning to teach remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs) to build better maps in real time as they navigate in murky, changing conditions inspecting bridges, piers, pipes and ships.

Graphical depiction of Twitter algorithm and fake news

New Stevens Research Uses Fake News-Spotting Artificial Intelligence to Identify False Information

To address the alarming rise in misinformation, Stevens Electrical and Computer Engineering researcher K.P. Subbalakshmi and computer scientist Yue Ning develop new strategies and AI to detect markers of fake news on the web, including emotional provocation, low-level vocabulary and bot generation. .

A photo of a syringe with a droplet coming out of the tip of the needle. The background is blue.

Improving Antibody Drug Development with AI

Through a groundbreaking new study, Pin-Kuang Lai, assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, and Ph.D. student Lateefat Kalejaye, in collaboration with AstraZeneca, have developed DeepViscosity—an AI-powered tool that predicts the viscosity of antibody solutions.

At Stevens, we leverage a century-long legacy of technology innovation and education to create new engineering grounds for quantum information technologies that will shape the future of our society.
Dr. Yuping HuangGallagher Associate Professor of Physics & Director of the Center for Quantum Science and Engineering
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New Research Suggests a Way to Capture Physicists’ Most Wanted Particle — the Graviton

Geoffrey S. Inman Junior Professor Igor Pikovski and his team have devised a way to do the impossible: detect gravitons with near-future quantum sensing technology, opening the door for the first experimental explorations of quantum gravity.

A robot hand touching a photon made of computer code

Invisible Touch: Giving AI the Ability to Feel and Measure Surfaces

Quantum-science advances using AI can measure very small surfaces and distances — opening a world of medical, manufacturing and other applications, thanks to quantum engineer Yuping Huang and the Center for Quantum Science and Engineering.

Tornado

Turbocharging Next-Gen Quantum Communication with "Twisty" Photons

In a cover story in the August 2022 issue of Optica, researchers led by Stefan Strauf, head of the NanoPhotonics Lab at Stevens, show that they can create and control individual flying qudits, or “twisty” photons, on demand — a breakthrough that could dramatically expand the capabilities of quantum communication tools.


A series of three pictures showing how flooding will impact the coastline of a body of water. The third picture in the series shows the biggest effect from flooding; the first shows the least effect.

Stevens Researchers Directly Link Destruction from Hurricane Sandy to Human-Caused Climate Change, Tallying Over $8 Billion in Damage

Novel modeling of sea level rise impacts by Stevens Institute of Technology researcher and collaborators creates a framework for assessing human-caused damage of past and future coastal storms.

Wave energy converter being tested at the Davidson Lab

Novel Wave-Energy Converters Generate Sustainable Energy From the Ocean

Stevens lab director Muhammad Hajj designs and tests oscillators that float in the sea and generate emission-free energy using novel design, electronics, and hardware.

Construction of concrete high-rise building

Stevens Civil Engineers Design New "Smart" Self-Healing Concrete that Cleans Air, Seals Cracks and Resists Fire

The Stevens-developed building material may help mitigate soil and groundwater pollution because it's produced using high-volume construction and demolition waste and industrial solid waste, which typically goes into landfills.

One of the things I find most compelling about Stevens is its interest in tackling large, complex societal challenges and their underlying systems.
Amro FaridProfessor, Department of Systems Engineering
Glass of water with drops going in

Stevens Designs Filter That Removes 'Forever Chemicals' from Drinking Water

Stevens Center for Sustainability director Dibs Sarkar develops natural green filters to portably remove dangerous PFAS and PFOS substances from drinking water supplies

A photo of a vaccine being drawn with a syringe

Stevens Professor Develops First Deep Learning Model to Predict High Concentration Antibody Viscosity

Chemical Engineering professor Pin-Kuang Lai's convolutional neural network surrogate model can accelerate early-stage antibody drug development by screening for elevated viscosity in a fraction of a second.

Close-up picture of cancer cells

New Nanotech Delivers Medicines Directly to Cancer Tumors

George Meade Bond Professor Hongjun Wang of the Department of Biomedical Engineering teamed with a major medical center on new research which reveals that gold-nanoparticle packages ferry cancer drugs precisely.


Featured Faculty Research Highlights

The Charles V. Schaefer, Jr. School of Engineering and Science Virtual Research Forum highlights our exciting research breakthroughs in five pillar areas. Each forum features highly accomplished faculty speakers from multiple departments within the Schaefer School. 

Artificial Intelligence and Computing

Artificial Intelligence to Improve Doctor–Patient Collaborations

Dr. Samantha Kleinberg, Department of Computer Science

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Transparency, Interpretability, and Fairness in AI for Decision Making, Social Science, and Healthcare

Dr. Yue Ning, Department of Computer Science

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Explainable AI and NLP For Healthcare and CyberSafety Applications

Dr. K.P. Subbalakshmi, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering

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Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Dr. Hui Wang, Department of Computer Science

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Radio Spectrum Awareness Using AI for Reliable, Efficient, and Secure Wireless Networks

Dr. Yu-Dong Yao, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering

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Stochastic Optimization and Risk Control: Theory, Methods, and Applications

Dr. Darinka Dentcheva, Department of Mathematical Sciences

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High Performance Spectral Methods for Truly Scalable Chip Design and Graph Learning Applications

Dr. Zhuo Feng, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering

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Safe, Concurrent Programming Languages to Reliably Exploit Multicore Architectures

Dr. Eric Koskinen, Department of Computer Science

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Green RF Sensing Communications on Shared Radio Spectrum

Dr. Hongbin Li, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering

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Optimization Under Uncertainty

Dr. Michael Zabarankin, Department of Mathematical Sciences

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Biomedical and Healthcare Science and Technologies

Tissue Engineering of Ovarian Cancer for Early Detection and New Treatment Discovery

Dr. Marcin Iwanicki, Department of Chemistry & Chemical Biology

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Novel Functionally Graded Nonwoven Meshes and Manufacturing Method for Air-Filtering Anti-Viral Membrane Layer of the Next-Generation Respirators

Dr. Dilhan Kalyon, Department of Chemical Engineering & Materials Science

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Repairing Damaged Lung Tissue via Site-Specific Cell Replacement

Dr. Jinho Kim, Department of Biomedical Engineering

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Self-Defensive Biomaterials to Combat Implant Infection

Dr. Matthew Libera, Department of Chemical Engineering & Materials Science

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Developing Novel Therapeutic Agents for Breast Cancer and Privileged Molecular Building Blocks

Dr. Abishek Sharma, Department of Chemistry & Chemical Biology

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Tissue Engineering and Nanomedicine for Replacement and Treatment of Diseased Tissues/Organs

Dr. Hongjun Wang, Department of Biomedical Engineering

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Developing Optical Imaging Techniques to Advance Biomedicine

Dr. Shang Wang, Department of Biomedical Engineering

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Musculoskeletal Control and Dynamics

Dr. Antonia Zaferiou, Department of Biomedical Engineering

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Computational Chemistry for High Accuracy Predictions of Biological and Catalytic Properties

Dr. Yong Zhang, Department of Chemistry & Chemical Biology

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Biomechatronics and Wearable Robotics for Rehabilitation Engineering and Human Motion Analysis

Dr. Damiano Zanotto, Department of Mechanical Engineering

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Cyber-Physical Systems

Intelligent Autonomous Navigation for Mobile Robots Operating in Complex Environments

Dr. Brendan Englot, Department of Mechanical Engineering

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Socially Assistive Mobile Robots for Seamless Human-Robot Interaction

Dr. Yi Guo, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering

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Improving Software Security and Reliability

Dr. Georgios Portokalidis, Department of Computer Science

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Resilient and Secure Control Design for Intelligent Autonomous Systems Under Cyber-Physical Attacks

Dr. Hamid Jafarnejad Sani, Department of Mechanical Engineering

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Cybersecurity in Complex Systems: Facilitating Secure and Efficient Applications

Dr. Susanne Wetzel, Department of Computer Science

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Cross-Layer Cybersecurity Research from Wireless PHY Layer to Machine Learning and Distributed Trust

Dr. Shucheng Yu, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering

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Quantum Science and Engineering

Innovative Quantum Engineering for Value-Creation Quantum Systems and Technology

Dr. Yuping Huang, Department of Physics

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Quantum-Enabled Detection and Imaging Using Modern Laser Technology for Homeland Security, Non-Destructive Evaluation, and Medical Diagnostics

Dr. Svetlana Malinovskaya, Department of Physics

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Quantum Technology Meets Gravity

Dr. Igor Pikovski , Department of Physics

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Quantum Information with Entangled Optics – Emerging New Links between Quantum and Classical

Dr. Xiaofeng Qian, Department of Physics

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Engineering Novel Quantum Materials for Quantum Computing and Quantum Devices

Dr. Chunlei Qu, Department of Physics

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Atomically Thin Magnetic Crystals: Toward Emerging Spintronics and Quantum Information Science

Dr. E.H. Yang, Department of Mechanical Engineering

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Entanglement and Quantum Decoherence​

Dr. Ting Yu, Department of Physics

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Energy and Sustainability

Field Pilot Ascale of Industrial Wastewater to Biofuel via Algae Growth, Harvesting, and Biogas Production; and Energetic-Laden Wastewater Treatment Technology via Chemical Reduction or Advanced Oxidation Transformers

Dr. Christos Christodoulatos, Department of Civil, Environmental, & Ocean Engineering

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Nature-Inspired Surface Engineering for Water, Food, Energy, Environment, and Health Applications

Dr. Chang-Hwan Choi, Department of Mechanical Engineering

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Energy Harvesting: Microwatt to Megawatt

Dr. Muhammad Hajj, Department of Civil, Environmental, & Ocean Engineering

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Solid-State Ionics of Energy Storage for Next-Generation, Lighter, Smaller, and Safer Batteries

Dr. Jae Chul Kim, Department of Chemical Engineering & Materials Science

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Enhancing Coastal Community Resilience to Hazards including Storm Surge, Coastal Erosion, and Climate Change

Dr. Jon Miller, Department of Civil, Environmental, & Ocean Engineering

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High-Speed and Reacting Flows for Applications in Defense and Sustainability

Dr. Nick Parziale, Department of Mechanical Engineering

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Developing Green Technologies for a Sustainable World 

Dr. Dibyendu Sarkar, Department of Civil, Environmental, & Ocean Engineering

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New Brain for Optimal Operation of Smart Grid: Comprehensive and Realistic Models and Fast, Scalable Algorithms

Dr. Lei Wu, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering

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Research News at the Schaefer School

Browse all research news, innovations, and happenings at the Charles V. Schaefer Jr. School of Engineering and Science.