Aerospace Engineering Seminar Series: Ryan Russell "Trajectory Design Challenges in Cislunar Space"

Thursday, April 16, 2026; 3:00pm-4:00pm
028 ECoRE
Speaker: Ryan Russell from The University of Texas at Austin

Abstract: Cislunar space, broadly defined as the Earth-Moon system and its surrounding dynamical environment, presents unique trajectory design challenges that fundamentally differ from near-Earth orbital regimes. This talk provides an overview of the governing dynamics across key cislunar regions, including: Escape, capture, and transfer corridors; L1 and L2 Lagrange points; and near-Moon regions. The dynamical characteristics in each region motivate distinct, custom trajectory design strategies. Several applications will be presented including: Low thrust spiral trajectories; Direct and resonant transfers; Periodic orbits as waypoints, destinations and general boundary conditions; Long-term stable orbits for observation and surveillance, and Emerging PNT (positioning, navigation, and timing) and SSA (space situational awareness) concepts. These challenges are increasingly relevant given recent initiatives by NASA, industry, the U.S. Space Force, and international partners to deploy and monitor spacecraft throughout cislunar space.

Speaker Bio: Ryan P. Russell is a Professor, Graduate Advisor, and holder of the Hayden Head Centennial Professorship in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at UT Austin. His research areas of interest include orbit mechanics, numerical optimization, trajectory design, and spacecraft GN&C. His projects are funded from a variety of sponsors, primarily NASA, DoD, and industry. He has prior experience as a mission designer and navigator for NASA’s JPL, and as a faculty member at Georgia Tech. He is a Fellow of the AAS, Associate Fellow of AIAA, and a former chair of the AIAA Astrodynamics TC. He is an associate editor for JGCD and Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy.

Hosted by: Jessica Chhan,  jmc7050@psu.edu

Glycerol-Derived Solvent Platforms for Lignin-First Biorefining toward Functional Aromatic Streams

Thursday, April 16, 2026; 10:35am
Capone Learning Auditorium (CBEB 001)
Speaker: James Sheehan from University of Alabama

Lignin, which constitutes 20–30 wt% of forestry and agricultural residues, represents the largest renewable source of aromatic carbon on the planet. Unlike conventional petrochemical aromatic streams dominated by benzene, toluene, and xylenes, lignin-derived aromatics intrinsically contain oxygenated functional groups that open pathways to higher-value applications in fine chemicals, flavorants, pharmaceuticals, and advanced materials. Harnessing this potential requires solvent systems that can both access and selectively deconstruct lignin’s complex polymeric architecture under practical processing conditions. This presentation highlights recent advances in glycerol-derived ethers (GDEs) as versatile solvent platforms for lignin-first biorefining. These solvents—prepared by etherifying the glycerol scaffold—offer a unique combination of high boiling points, dramatically reduced viscosities, and tunable polarity, enabling efficient lignin solvation and extraction under mild thermochemical conditions. Case studies will demonstrate how GDEs facilitate both organosolv delignification and, when used as hydrogen-donor media, enable transfer-hydrogenolysis pathways that convert lignin into streams of functionalized aromatic monomers without the need for high-pressure hydrogen. Together, these examples illustrate how rational solvent engineering can address long-standing challenges in lignin valorization. The talk will conclude by benchmarking glycerol-derived solvent systems within the broader landscape of lignin-first biorefining technologies using green chemistry metrics. This quantitative perspective will highlight key technical bottlenecks, opportunities for innovation, and future research directions critical for advancing lignin-derived aromatics as a foundation of sustainable chemical manufacturing.

Hosted by: Angela Dixon,  adc12@psu.edu

Boiled Frog or Adaptive Leader?

Wednesday, April 15, 2026; 121 Earth & Engineering Science Building
3:35-4:25 p.m.
Speaker: Susan O. Schall from Founder and Operations Leader of SOS Consulting LLC

Change continues to occur at an ever-increasing rate around us and our organizations. We can either remain in the boiling plan of change or become an adaptive leader that leads our organizations out. This presentation will define adaptive leadership and share a three-step process for leading your organization into the future.

Learning outcomes:

• Know the situations that require adaptive leadership.

• Know the characteristics of adaptive leaders.

• Know the three-step process for adaptively leading your organization.

• Understand adaptive leadership through a higher education case study.

• How to develop the leadership skills while at Penn State.

Over 30 years of experience delivering results using statistical process improvement and organizational health methods. Clients include manufacturing, higher education, and nonprofits.

PhD, Industrial Engineering, Penn State1988

MS, Industrial Engineering, Penn State, 1986

BS, Industrial Engineering, Penn State, 1982

Hosted by: Lana Fulton,  lub18@psu.edu

Aerospace Engineering Seminar Series: Carlos Cesnik

Thursday, April 23, 2026; 3:00pm-4:00pm
028 ECoRE
Speaker: Carlos Cesnik from University of Michigan

Hosted by: Jessica Chhan,  jmc7050@psu.edu

Accelerated Electrochemical Engineering Approaches for Sustainable Chemical Manufacturing

Thursday, April 23, 2026; 10:35am
Capone Learning Auditorium (CBEB 001)
Speaker: Miguel Modestino from TBD

The chemical industry produces more than 70,000 products (1.2 billion tons in total) via thermal processes powered by fossil fuel combustion, accounting for ~5% of the US energy utilization and >30% of the US energy-derived industrial CO2 emissions. Among these processes, the production of organic chemical commodities accounts for most of the energy consumption (>1200 TBTU/y), and the electrification of these processes via the implementation of electro-organic reactions could enable a deeper integration of renewable electricity sources with chemical plants and accelerate the decarbonization of the chemical industry. Currently, however, two major challenges prevent the deployment of electro-organic reactions at scale: their low selectivity and their low production rates. To circumvent these barriers, my group combines electrochemical reaction engineering principles, high throughput experimentation (HTE) and machine-learning methods to accelerate the development of high-performing electro-organic reaction processes.

In this presentation, I will start with a discussion of our studies on the electrochemical production of adiponitrile (ADN), a precursor to Nylon 6,6, via the electrohydrodimerization of acrylonitrile (AN). This is the largest and most successful electro-organic reaction deployed in industry and serves as a test case for the development of high-performing organic electrochemical processes. Our investigations on ADN are aimed at uncovering the relationship between the electrochemical environment at and near the electrical double layer (EDL) and reaction performance metrics (i.e., selectivity, efficiency, and productivity). I will discuss general guidelines for electrolyte formulation and provide molecular insights into the role of different species at electrode/electrolyte interfaces (e.g., buffer ions, chelating ions, selectivity-directing ions, and supporting ions) in enhancing conversions of AN to ADN. I will also present how carefully controlling pulsed electrosynthesis conditions guided by active machine learning can help mitigate mass transport limitations, control the concentration of AN near the EDL and enhance the production rate of ADN.

Leveraging our experience with ADN electrosynthesis and with the intention to accelerate the development of high-performing electrosynthetic processes, my group has recently developed HTE tools that allow us to explore 10-100 reaction environments per day, and apply machine-learning methods to accelerate and enhance chemical analysis, to maximize desired performance metrics, and to extract knowledge from complex reaction explorations in high-dimensional parameter spaces. These new tools are helping us elucidate key process-activity relationships for novel chemical transformations (e.g., production of high-value products from biomass waste and CO2) and are setting the foundations for the development of future smart reactors that effectively integrate artificial intelligence in their active control.

Hosted by: Angela Dixon,  adc12@psu.edu

Beyond Equilibrium: Modeling Structurally and Chemically Complex Materials via Energy Landscape Navigation

Wednesday, April 22, 2026; 121 Earth & Engineering Science Building
3:35-4:25 p.m.
Speaker: Yue Fan from Mechanical Engineering at University of Michigan

This seminar highlights the unique capability of energy landscape-based modeling to provide a fundamental, predictive understanding of the behavior of non-equilibrium materials with significant structural and chemical complexity. I will present two case studies illustrating how this modeling approach can reveal insights that are inaccessible to conventional methods.

First, I will discuss metallic glasses — a disordered and inherently non-equilibrium metastable material system. Due to the lack of long-range order, building a valid structure-property relationship in glasses has been a longstanding challenge. I will show that by scrutinizing atomic reconfiguration processes—in particular the competition between elementary activations (up-hill climbing) and relaxations (down-hill dropping) on the energy landscape—a self-consistent equation can be derived to describe the time evolution of these disordered materials under various conditions. This, in turn, allows for the explanation and prediction of many critical phenomena in glassy systems—such as the aging/rejuvenation crossover and thermo-mechanical hysteresis—without relying on too many empirical assumptions or fitting parameters adopted in classical models.

Second, I will show that even in structurally ordered crystalline materials, non-equilibrium processing can induce chemical complexity that modifies the energy landscape in ways that significantly deviate from the classical linear-tilting picture. Using Al-Si-Mg alloys as an example, we integrated realistic energy landscape sampling of various local chemical environments with machine learning and a kinetic Monte Carlo (kMC) framework. This combined approach uncovered new microstructural evolution pathways—specifically, the formation of non-conventional nanoscale precipitates—that are observed in advanced manufacturing experiments (e.g. selective laser melting, high-pressure die casting) but are missed by conventional kMC models.

Yue Fan is currently an Associate Professor at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He received his Ph.D. degree from MIT in 2013, and then worked at Oak Ridge National Lab as a Eugene P. Wigner Fellow from 2013 to 2016. His primary research interest is to provide a substantive knowledge on mechanics and microstructural evolution in complex systems via predictive modeling, and thus facilitate the development of new science-based high performance materials with novel functions and unprecedented strength, durability, and resistance to traditional degradation and failure. Some honors and recognitions he has received include “TMS-JIMM International Scholar”, “TMS MPMD Young Leaders Professional Development Award”, “NSF Career Award”, “Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award” (by ORAU), and “Haythornthwaite Young Investigator Award” (by ASME-Applied Mechanics Division).

Hosted by: Lana Fulton,  lub18@psu.edu

Aerospace Engineering Seminar Series: TBA

Thursday, April 30, 2026; 3:00pm-4:00pm
028 ECoRE
Speaker: TBA from

Hosted by: Jessica Chhan,  jmc7050@psu.edu

Achieving and Sustaining Liftoff: The Pathway for Commercialization of Hydrothermal Liquefaction in the Circular Economy

Thursday, April 30, 2026; 10:35am
Capone Learning Auditorium (CBEB 001)
Speaker: Michael Timko from Worcester Polytechnic Institute

The U.S. alone generates 240 million tons of municipal solid waste each year, the majority of which is organic waste including yard waste, food waste, and plastics. Hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) has the potential to convert this waste into a useful energy and chemical products. Since its discovery in the 1930s by Friedrich Bergius, who applied the process to coal, HTL has undergone two waves of innovation; one in the 1970s following the oil crises of that decade and a second that continues to this day following the oil shock and global financial crisis of 2007. My group has emphasized studies that improve the commercial prospects of HTL, and to that end we performed economic analysis that identified product yield, feedstock cost, and factory size as the three most important factors determining profitability. My talk is arranged on how my group has approached these three factors. In terms of product yield, we have developed data-driven approaches to predict product yields based strictly on feedstock composition. Further, we have developed catalytic HTL (C-HTL), mechanochemical HTL, and a new process termed radical initiated HTL (RI-HTL) to boost biofuel precursor yields at minimal incremental cost. Similarly, we have shown that selection of feedstocks can optimize product yields and even product quality in some cases. In terms of feedstock cost, we have focused our work on waste streams, and in particular have shown that HTL and especially RI-HTL can destroy >90% of the highly carcinogenic perfluoralkylated substances in sewage sludge and related waste. When it comes to factor size, we are breaking new ground on the use of HTL for bamboo conversion into renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel. As the fastest growing land plant, bamboo has tremendous potential for bioenergy production and we find that HTL conversion of bamboo can complete replace corn ethanol as a biofuel in the U.S. on just 15% of the total land area. Collectively, these advances point us to a sustainable future in which HTL plays a lead role, not just in laboratories but in factories near you.

Hosted by: Angela Dixon,  adc12@psu.edu

Biomedical Impedance Matching, Time-Varying Waveguides, Asymmetrical Transmission with Chiral Medium and Beyond: Research Experiences at a Primarily Undergraduate Institution

Wednesday, April 29, 2026; 121 Earth & Engineering Science Building
3:35-4:25 p.m.
Speaker: Atilla Ozgur Cakmak from Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Grand Valley State University

This seminar will highlight several research activities led by Dr. Cakmak at Grand Valley State University (GVSU), focusing on introducing undergraduate students to the research world of Electromagnetics. In this context, Dr. Cakmak will demonstrate how Electromagnetics serves as a powerful enabler for cultivating research habits at a Primarily Undergraduate Institution.

Three main research directions at microwave frequencies will be discussed:

1. Microwave coupling to the human torso,

2. Time-varying microstrip transmission lines, and

3. Asymmetric transmission using Frequency Selective Surfaces (FSS).

Microwave imaging plays an important role in detecting tumors in certain types of cancer. However, efficiently coupling electromagnetic waves into the human body remains challenging due to impedance mismatches at the skin–air interface. Furthermore, anatomical variability among patients and reactive near-field measurement limitations introduce additional complexities. To address these issues, a new type of actively modulated metasurface has been developed as an impedance-matching medium to enhance coupling efficiency and provide robustness against such variations. In a separate study, microwave strip waveguides are employed to explore signal modulation capabilities of microstrips without relying on active components. When loaded with PIN diodes, microstrips can effectively gate the transmission of microwaves, functioning as a time-varying electromagnetic system. A proof-of-principle demonstration shows amplitude modulation that operate at Wi-Fi and Bluetooth frequencies. Another research effort involves cascading chiral media with FSS layers to achieve pronounced asymmetric transmission. It is demonstrated more than 30 dB of one-way transmission, underscoring the potential of such composite systems for advanced microwave control and isolation applications.

Dr. Atilla Ozgur Cakmak is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Grand Valley State University (GVSU), Michigan. He joined GVSU in 2021, and his primary research interests lie in the areas of metasurfaces and antennas. Dr. Cakmak has authored or co-authored more than 25 peer-reviewed publications and actively contributes to the scholarly community as an associate editor, topical editor, and reviewer in his field.

Dr. Cakmak earned his Ph.D. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Bilkent University, Turkey, in 2012. In 2013, he joined The Pennsylvania State University’s Center for Nanotechnology Education and Utilization (CNEU) as a postdoctoral researcher, focusing on solar cell technologies. He later served as an Assistant Teaching Professor at Penn State, beginning in 2018, where he taught courses in nanolithography and nanophotonics within the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics. As a mentor and educator, Dr. Cakmak is deeply committed to undergraduate and master’s student supervision, fostering hands-on research experiences and professional development through his teaching and research activities.

Hosted by: Lana Fulton,  lub18@psu.edu