Multi-Scale Modeling and Optimization for Electrification-based Decarbonization of the Chemical Industry

Thursday, September 17, 2026; 10:35am
Capone Learning Auditorium (CBEB 001)
Speaker: Dharik Mallapragada from New York University - NYU

The continued expansion of variable renewable electricity (VRE) deployment in the power grid is spurring interest in electrification-based decarbonization of chemical processes, which can take multiple forms including electrification of process heat and electrochemical systems that use electricity as the driving force for chemical reactions. These technology options must be evaluated alongside the operational dynamics of grids, which are simultaneously accommodating growing VRE supply and increasing demands from other end-uses (e.g., AI data centers). Here, we discuss the use of multi-scale modeling and optimization methods to inform the design of electrification technologies and their integration within industrial processes and the grid.

First, we discuss the design of internal electric resistance heated reactors for high-temperature, endothermic chemical reactions such as ethane steam cracking to produce ethylene, a key platform chemical. We show that the added design and operational degrees of freedom of such reactors can increase ethylene yields and reduce reactor size compared to conventional fossil-fuel fired reactors. However, these gains could also be accompanied by accelerated cooking, motivating the development of multi-scale, multi-objective optimization methods to evaluate reactor design and operation.

Second, we address a key barrier to industrial electrification-based decarbonization: accessing sufficient quantities of clean electricity in a cost-competitive manner. We will make the case for a new process design paradigm that departs from the conventional steady-state design basis by accounting for the value of operational flexibility in response to electricity supply dynamics. Through a water electrolysis case study, we will show how co-optimization of design and operation can identify flexible processes that are more economical than steady-state alternatives. However, achieving low carbon intensity via process electrification during the mid-transition, while the grid remains insufficiently decarbonized, may require additional clean energy procurement on behalf of the consumer. We evaluate different procurement strategies and find that their cost and emissions outcomes are sensitive to process flexibility as well as grid context and associated policies. This underscores the importance of integrated industrial-power system modeling to identify viable electrification pathways.

Dharik S. Mallapragada is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, with a joint appointment in the Center for Urban Science and Progress, at New York University's Tandon School of Engineering. He leads the Sustainable Energy Transitions Group, whose research focuses on the design and optimization of technologies for energy and industrial system decarbonization and on developing computational methods, including open-source energy system models, to analyze how technology, resource constraints, and policies shape the energy transition. Prior to NYU, Prof. Mallapragada was a researcher at the MIT Energy Initiative, where he began his academic research career after spending nearly five years in the energy and chemical industry working on a range of sustainability-focused research topics. Prof. Mallapragada holds an M.S. and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University and a B.Tech. in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India.

Hosted by: Angela Dixon,  adc12@psu.edu

Data Importance for Semantic Communication and Networking

Thursday, September 17, 2026; 1:30pm
W375 Westgate Building
Speaker: Yin Sun from Auburn University

BIOGRAPHY

Yin Sun is the Bryghte D. and Patricia M. Godbold Endowed Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Auburn University, Alabama. He received his B.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2006 and 2011, respectively. From 2011 to 2017, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar and Research Associate at The Ohio State University. He joined Auburn University as an Assistant Professor in 2017 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2023. His research interests include Age and Semantics of Information, wireless networks, AI for 6G wireless systems, agriculture, education, and robotics. Dr. Sun has served on the editorial boards of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking, and the Journal of Communications and Networks. He has also served on the organizing committees of numerous international conferences, including as Technical Program Committee Chair for ACM MobiHoc 2025 and General Chair for IEEE/IFIP WiOpt 2026. He founded the Age and Semantics of Information (ASoI) Workshop in 2018 and the Modeling and Optimization in Semantic Communications (MOSC) Workshop in 2023. His publications have received multiple recognitions, including the Best Student Paper Award at IEEE/IFIP WiOpt 2013, the Best Paper Award at IEEE/IFIP WiOpt 2019, runner-up for the Best Paper Award at ACM MobiHoc 2020, the Best Paper Award from the Journal of Communications and Networks in 2021, the IEEE Communications Society William R. Bennett Prize in 2025, and the IEEE INFOCOM 2026 Test-of-Time Paper Award. He received the Auburn Author Award in 2020 and the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award in 2023.

Hosted by: Emmalia Lutz,  exr123@psu.edu

Seeing the Invisible Order in Biological Materials using a Nonlinear Vibrational Spectroscopy Technique

Wednesday, September 16, 2026; 3:35-4:25 pm
254 Health and Human Development
Speaker: Seong Kim from

Sum Frequency Generation (SFG) vibrational spectroscopy is widely recognized as a premier surface-sensitive characterization tool providing molecular information of chemical species at interfaces of two bulk media (such as molecular species at gas/solid, vapor/liquid, and even liquid/liquid interfaces). While this interfacial sensitivity represents one important application, it reflects only one consequence of the deeper physical principle underlying SFG: the requirement of noncentrosymmetry for nonlinear optical process. Any noncentrosymmetric structure—whether located at a surface, within a crystalline domain, or dispersed throughout a macroscopically centrosymmetric or disordered environment—can generate a coherent SFG response. Based on this principle, SFG becomes a powerful spectroscopic method capable of selectively probing crystalline biopolymers embedded in complex biological materials. Polysaccharides such as cellulose, chitin, and starch, and fibrous proteins such as collagen and silk, all possess intrinsic molecular and supramolecular noncentrosymmetry across multiple length scales. In this talk, I will present how leveraging SFG’s fundamental symmetry-based selectivity enables multiscale structural analysis of hierarchical biopolymer assemblies in natural materials, and how these insights open new pathways for understanding and engineering bio-inspired materials.

Dr. Seong H. Kim is the Department Head and Walter L. Robb Family Endowed Chair in the Robert V. Waltemyer Department of Chemical Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University. A globally recognized expert in surface science and tribology, Dr. Kim’s research spans a wide range of materials including silicate glasses, natural biopolymers, and advanced carbon coatings. His work has significantly advanced the understanding of surface chemistry, mechanochemistry, and the durability of materials under environmental and mechanical stresses. His recent research focuses on characterizing invisible subsurface damage in glass, tribochemical reactions at sliding interfaces, and the structural analysis of natural materials using advanced spectroscopic techniques. Dr. Kim’s interdisciplinary approach continues to influence both fundamental science and industrial applications, particularly in the fields of nuclear waste management, display glass technology, and sustainable materials. Dr. Kim earned his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Northwestern University and completed postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley. Since joining Penn State in 2001, he has held numerous leadership roles and was named a Distinguished Professor in 2021. He has authored over 400 peer-reviewed publications (with h-index of 78), wrote textbook Surface and Interface Analysis: Principles and Applications, and is a Fellow of the Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers.

Hosted by: Lana Fulton,  lub18@psu.edu

How Safe Is Safe Enough? Ensuring Safety and Resilience in Critical Infrastructure Control Systems

Wednesday, September 23, 2026; 3:35-4:25 pm
254 Health and Human Development
Speaker: ROMULO MEIRA GOES from

Abstract: Critical infrastructure control systems (CIS), such as energy, transportation, and manufacturing, are expected to operate safely despite uncertain environments, unexpected failures, cyberattacks, and AI-enabled decision-making. Although modern control and verification techniques can provide safety guarantees, these guarantees are only as reliable as the assumptions on which they are built. In this talk, we focus on three questions: (1) How safe is a system when its environment deviates from the assumptions used during design? (2) Can a system recover safe operation after a disruption while continuing to function? (3) How can we leverage emerging AI technologies without sacrificing safety guarantees?

To address these questions, we use supervisory control theory of discrete-event systems to develop new methodologies for robustness analysis of controllers, recovery strategy synthesis, and AI-assisted decision verification. These methodologies enable engineers to characterize safe operating envelopes of controllers, identify realistic vulnerabilities, design controllers that restore safe operation, and formally validate AI-generated plans before deployment. We demonstrate how these methods enhance the safety and resilience of CIS through case studies in manufacturing systems.

Bio: Rômulo Meira-Góes is an Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Pennsylvania State University. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher working with Eunsuk Kang, Stavros Tripakis, and Stéphane Lafortune at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Michigan. In 2022, he received the CPS Rising Stars Award from the University of Virginia. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan in 2020, working with Stéphane Lafortune. Prior to the University of Michigan, he earned his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná - Curitiba in 2015.

Hosted by: Lana Fulton,  lub18@psu.edu

Scaling Photonic Computing Across Device, Architecture, and System Levels

Wednesday, September 30, 2026; 3:35-4:25 pm
254 Health and Human Development
Speaker: Nathan Youngblood from

Abstract: Photonics information processing strategies offer the unique ability to perform analog computation with ultra-low latency and high efficiency. However, designing compact and reconfigurable photonic architectures which scale well at the architecture and system level is a challenge. The combination of bistable optical materials (such as phase-change materials like Ge2Sb2Te5 and Sb2Se3) and integrated photonics is a promising approach which enables nonvolatile optical memory on-chip with low drift, compact footprint, and high-speed readout. This talk will first present our work developing robust and scalable photonic memories using phase-change and magneto-optic materials (Ce:YIG) for photonic “in-memory” computing techniques. I will then discuss our recent theoretical and experimental results using coherent photonic crossbar arrays to implement large-scale matrix-matrix multiplication. Finally, I will present a new approach to enable distributed photonic computing over fiber without costly electrical-to-optical or analog-to-digital conversions.

BIO: Dr. Nathan Youngblood, William Kepler Whiteford Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, joined the University of Pittsburgh in September 2019. As a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford from 2017 to 2019, he developed phase-change optical systems and photonic architectures for non-von Neumann computing. In 2016, he received a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota where his research focused on integrating 2D materials with silicon photonics for optoelectronic applications. Nathan is the recipient of the NSF CAREER and AFOSR Young Investigator Awards, as well as the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for his innovations in optical computing and photonic memory technologies. His work has been published in leading journals such as Nature, Nature Photonics, and Science Advances, and featured in popular news outlets such as The Times, London and the Daily Mail.

Hosted by: Lana Fulton,  lub18@psu.edu

Engineering Nanomembranes for Molecular and Ion Separations

Thursday, October 8, 2026; 10:35am
Capone Learning Auditorium (CBEB 001)
Speaker: Haiqing Lin from University of Buffalo

Polymeric membranes have emerged as an energy-efficient technology for carbon capture and ion separations, and they should have desirable sub-nm free volumes to achieve superior separation properties. Furthermore, these materials must be fabricated into nanofilm composite (NFC) membranes of < 100 nm using roll-to-roll processes, while the nanofilm properties can significantly deviate from their bulk properties. I will discuss two approaches to designing and fabricating such nanomembranes. First, polysiloxane-based membranes can be sequentially treated with oxygen plasma and atomic layer deposition (ALD), producing a few-nm amorphous zeolite layer and yielding superior H2/CO2 separation properties for precombustion carbon capture. Second, nanofiltration membranes can be surface-engineered to impart Mg2+-philic groups, thereby dramatically increasing the separation factor for Li+/Mg2+, a critical separation for lithium recovery from brines. The correlation between manufacturing, structure, and separation properties will be elucidated.

Dr. Haiqing Lin is a professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. His research elucidates structure-property relationships of polymeric membranes for gas, liquid, and ion separations, with the end goal of addressing key challenges in energy and sustainability. He earned his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2005 and then joined Membrane Technology and Research, Inc. (MTR) as a Senior Research Scientist. He led the successful development of PolarisTM membranes for CO2 removal from syngas. In 2013, he began his career at the University at Buffalo as an assistant professor and was promoted to professor in 2021.

Dr. Lin has published nearly 180 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, and he is a co-inventor of 10 US patents and patent applications. He was a recipient of the 2016 NSF CAREER Award and the 2025 AIChE Institute Award for Excellence in Industrial Gases Technology.

Hosted by: Angela Dixon,  adc12@psu.edu

Breaking the Memory Wall with Optical Interconnects and In-Memory Computing

Wednesday, October 7, 2026; 3:35-4:25 pm
254 Health and Human Development
Speaker: Ning Li from

Abstract: The explosive growth of emerging applications in data analytics and high-performance computing is placing unprecedented demands on today’s computing systems. Consequently, hyperscale computing systems now face critical bottlenecks in data transfer rather than computational power. I will talk about two projects we are working on to address this challenge. In the first project, we are developing glass panel-enabled 3D optical interconnects to significantly increase bandwidth density and energy efficiency for panel-scale computing. We employ volumetric waveguides and 3D routing in glass to enhance the density of waveguides and optical components and eliminate the shoreline density limitations in planar photonics. In the second project, we are developing non-volatile memory devices for in-memory computing to greatly reduce the data shuffling between processors and memory. With numerous memory devices developed in recent years, there is a need for benchmarking their performance in the deep neural network computing. We developed such a comprehensive methodology for such benchmarking and found that electrochemical memory has great potential for high-performance large-scale analog in-memory computing.

BIO: Ning Li is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Materials Research Institute at The Pennsylvania State University. He was a research staff member at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center from 2010 to 2022. His research experience includes photonic components and links for communications and interconnects, heterogeneous integration of materials and devices for new applications, nonvolatile memories for in-memory computing. He was awarded more than 250 U.S. patents, many High Value Patent Awards, and multiple Master Inventor Awards. He published in scientific journals and conferences including Nature Photonics, Nature Communications, Advanced Materials, Optical Fiber Communication (OFC), etc. His work has been featured on Nature Research Highlight, Semiconductor Today, etc. He received his BS degree from Tsinghua University and PhD degree from The University of Texas at Austin.

Hosted by: Lana Fulton,  lub18@psu.edu