Award Data

Opportunity: Guayule, a US native plant, is the only alternate rubber crop with an established, mechanized, agronomic system. Problem: Low rubber yields and lack of effective resin and bagasse coproduct valorization, have prevented widespread adoption by American farmers and processors. Rubber is only made when the cytoplasmic monomer pool (isopentenyl-pyrophosphate; IPP) is larger than that requi ...

The goal of the research is to provide a solar-blind, deep-UV photo-detector array that can be used in instruments detecting chemical and biological agents, such as TAC-BIO II, using UV Raman and Fluorescence measurements. The overall approach is to develop a solid-state detector array that achieves the performance goals for QE (>70%), gain (>1E6), dark current (

StampPump is a postage-stamp-sized (27x27x6 mm), fully-self-contained, closed-loop insulin patch pump system that is filled at the factory with enough insulin to treat a person with T1- or trauma-induced hyperglycemia for a full week. The device is shelf stable for at least 90 days and so is compatible with critical-care or forward deployment use. We propose to augment this system with the ability ...

It is well established that hyperglycemia of critical illness, general glucose intolerance, and insulin resistance are common among critically ill patients, including those without a diagnosis of diabetes mellitus upon hospital admission. Such glycemic dysregulation has been linked to increased patient morbidity and mortality, and longer recovery times. Furthermore, tight glycemic control has been ...

Most standard-of-care tools and techniques for evaluating neck disorders are subjective, unreliable, and do not provide actionable information for providers, payers, and organizations to deliver efficient and effective care. This lack of objective neck he

SSCI and MIT propose to perform initial design and testing of an innovative tightly-coupled vison and GNC system for follower vehicles to achieve safe approach and station-keeping with the lead vehicle within some range tolerance and inside a 60 degree cone, under leader maneuvers and vehicle capability constraints. The resulting system is referred to as the SPRINT (Station-keeping using Perceptio ...

Natural rubber is an essential manufacturing material that possesses performance properties that are superior to synthetic rubber for many product applications. However, natural rubber production is limited to a single species (rubber tree) in a limited geographic area (Southeast Asia) and is predicted to be incapable of meeting future demand. Producing rubber from another commercial crop such as ...

Current cervical spine assessment methodologies are focused on subjective measures (i.e. pain reports) and range-of-motion (ROM) measures that only measure maximum head excursion and reach, but not dynamic motion. Due to report bias and existing incentive

Conventional methods for detecting pathogens, which are based on culturing the microorganism, are time-consuming and laborious. Machine learning provides an alternative path to identify pathogens using supervised learning algorithms. Most current computational tools utilize genomic or protein data to identify bacteria. These methods look for features in the whole genome that correlate to pathogeni ...

The objective of this project is to develop a compact and efficient avalanche photodiode (APD), operating between 200-250 nm, for implementation in the next generation bio-chem-detectors. The proposed detectors will be based on the AlGaN materials system and will be solar blind, highly sensitive, smaller, less expensive, and more robust than current UV detectors. Development of such APDs will enab ...