In 2016, The New York Academy of Sciences and Takeda Pharmaceuticals announced the establishment of the Innovators in Science Award. The Award recognizes a promising Early-Career Scientist’s and an outstanding Senior Scientist’s contributions to biomedical science and is intended to support their commitment to innovative research. Two prizes of US$200,000 are awarded each Award cycle, in a specific therapeutic area, one to an Early-Career Scientist and the other to a well-established Senior Scientist from around the world. The winning scientists have distinguished themselves for the creativity and impact of their research. See https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1111/(ISSN)1749-6632.innovators-science-award.
The Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists seek to identify and honor exceptional young scientists and engineers 42 years of age and younger. Honorees are selected based on the quality, novelty, and impact of their research and their potential for further significant contributions to science. For previous issues of awardee papers, see Ann NY Acad Sci (2012) 1260 and Ann NY Acad Sci (2013) 1293. Or click https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1111/(ISSN)1749-6632.blavatnik-awards.
The Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists in Israel is one of the largest prizes ever created for early-career researchers in Israel. Given annually to three outstanding, early-career faculty from Israeli universities in three categories—Life Sciences, Physical Sciences & Engineering, and Chemistry—the awards recognize extraordinary scientific achievements and promote excellence, originality, and innovation.
On August 2, 2021, the New York Academy of Sciences celebrated the 2020 and 2021 Laureates at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Jerusalem, Israel. The multidisciplinary symposium, chaired by Israel Prize winners Adi Kimchi and Mordechai (Moti) Segev, featured a series of lectures on everything from a new class of RNA to self-assembling nanomaterials.
In this eBriefing, you’ll learn:
The secret life of bats, and how the brain shapes animal behavior
How genetic information in unchartered areas of the human genome—known as long noncoding RNA—could be used to develop treatments for cancer, brain injury, and epilepsy
Creative ways of generating light, X-rays, and other types of radiation for practical applications such as medical imaging and security scanners
The intricate choreography of protein assembly within cells, and how this dance may go awry in disease
Speakers
Yossi Yovel, PhD Tel Aviv University
Igor Ulitsky, PhD Weizmann Institute of Science
Emmanuel Levy, PhD Weizmann Institute of Science
Ido Kaminer, PhD Israel Institute of Technology
Life Sciences of Tomorrow
Speakers
Yossi Yovel, PhD Tel Aviv University
Igor Ulitsky, PhD Weizmann Institute of Science
From Bat Brains to Navigating Robots
Yossi Yovel, PhD, Tel Aviv University
In this presentation, Yossi Yovel describes his studies on bats and their use of echolocation to perceive and navigate through the world. To monitor bats behaving in their natural environment, he has developed miniaturized trackers—the smallest in the world—capable of simultaneously detecting location, ultrasonic sounds, movement, heart rate, brain activity, and body temperature changes.
By attaching these small sensors to many individual bats, Yovel is able to monitor large groups of free-flying bats—a task which would be almost impossible in other mammals. His current and future studies include applying bat echolocation theory to engineering acoustic control of autonomous vehicles.
Further Readings
Yovel
Moreno, K. R., Weinberg, M., Harten, L., Salinas Ramos, V. B., Herrera M, L. G., Czirják, G. Á., & Yovel, Y.
Igor Ulitsky outlines his investigation of the biology of a subtype of genetic material—long non-coding RNA (lncRNA)—an enigmatic class of RNA molecules. Similar to other classes of RNA molecules, lncRNAs are transcribed from DNA and have a single-strand structure; however, lncRNAs do not encode proteins. Even though non-coding regions of the genome comprise over 99% of our genetic material, little is actually known about how these regions function.
Ulitsky’s work has shown dynamic expression patterns across tissues and developmental stages, which appear to utilize diverse mechanisms of action that depend on their sub-cellular positions. These discoveries have unlocked the potential of using lncRNAs as both therapeutic agents and targets with promising leads for the treatment of diseases such as cancer, brain injury, and epilepsy.
Further Readings
Ulitsky
H. Hezroni, D. Koppstein, M.G. Schwartz, A. Avrutin, D.P. Bartel, I. Ulitsky.
Chemistry and Physical Sciences & Engineering of Tomorrow
Speakers
Emmanuel Levy, PhD Weizmann Institute of Science
Ido Kaminer, PhD Israel Institute of Technology
Playing LEGO with Proteins: Principles of Protein Assembly in Cells
Emmanuel Levy, PhD, Weizmann Institute of Science
In this presentation, Emmanuel Levy describes how defects in protein self-organization can lead to disease, and how protein self-organization can be exploited to create novel biomaterials. Levy has amassed a database of protein structural information that helps him to predict, browse, and curate the structural features—charged portions, hydrophobic and hydrophilic pockets, and point mutations—within a protein that govern the formation of quaternary structures. By combining this computational approach with experimental data Levy is able to uncover new mechanisms by which proteins operate within cells.
Further Readings
Levy
H. Garcia-Seisdedos, C. Empereur-Mot, N. Elad, E.D. Levy.
M. Meurer, Y. Duan, E. Sass, I. Kats, K. Herbst, B.C. Buchmuller, V. Dederer, F. Huber, D. Kirrmaier, M. Stefl, K. Van Laer, T.P. Dick, M.K. Lemberg, A. Khmelinskii, E.D. Levy, M. Knop.
Shining Light on the Quantum World with Ultrafast Electron Microscopy
Ido Kaminer, PhD, Israel Institute of Technology
Ido Kaminer discusses his research on light-matter interaction that spans a wide spectrum from fundamental physics to particle applications. Part of his presentation addressed the long-standing question in quantum theory over the predictability of motions quantum particles. He also demonstrated the first example of using free electrons to probe the motion of photons inside materials. Finally, he talked about the potential applications of tunable X-rays generated from the compact equipment in his lab, for biomedical imaging and other applications.
Further Readings
Kaminer
R. Dahan, S. Nehemia, M. Shentcis, et al., I. Kaminer.
This Year’s Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists Laureate in the Life Sciences is connecting the activity of cells and synapses to emotions and social behavior
Published October 21, 2021
By Roger Torda
Neuroscientist Kay Tye has challenged orthodoxy in her field by studying the connection between the brain and the mind. The work has led to breakthroughs in basic science. It also points to new approaches to mental illness, with significant potential impact.
Tye is a professor in the Systems Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. She and her research team work to identify the neural mechanism of emotional and social processing, in health and disease. Tye explained to the New York Academy of Sciences why this work is so important.
Impacts on Mental Health
“Mental health disorders have a prevalence of one in two. This is half the population. If we could understand how the brain gives rise to the mind, we could de-stigmatize mental health, and everyone would go and get the treatment that they need,” she says.
Current therapies for mental disorders are developed by trial-and-error, with drugs that have broad ranges of effects. Tye envisions a much different approach, with treatments that target specific mechanisms in the brain.
“Our insights could revolutionize our approach to mental health treatments, supporting individualized therapies that would be effective for everyone and have the precision to be free of side effects,” she says.
Tye is the daughter of two scientists—a biologist and a physicist—who met while travelling to the U.S. from Hong Kong to pursue their educations. From a young age, Tye says she was fascinated by subjective experiences, foreshadowing her studies on the connection between brain and mind.
“How do I feel the way I feel?” Tye recalls wondering as a child. “How can two people listen to the same song and one person loves it and one person hates it? What are emotions?”
Tye with her children
Tye went to MIT for her undergraduate degree and received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Francisco. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford, she opened her lab as an assistant professor at MIT in 2012. In 2019, she moved across the country again, to the Salk Institute.
As Tye gained confidence as a young scientist, she took on a difficult professional challenge as she sought to examine questions that had not traditionally been the purview of her field.
“As a neuroscientist, I’m often told I am not allowed to study how internal states like anxiety, or craving, or loneliness are represented by the brain,” she recalled in a TED Talk. “And so, I decided to set out and do exactly that.”
Research in Optogenetics
In her research, Tye uses technology called “optogenetics,” which transfers the light sensitivity of certain proteins found in some algae to specific neurons in the brains of lab animals. Researchers can then use light to control signaling by the neuron, and they can establish links between the neuron and specific behavior. Tye developed an approach using this tool called “projection-specific optogenetic manipulation.”
“This permits scientists to dissect the tangled mess of wires that is our brains to understand where each wire goes and what each wire does,” Tye said.
Kay Tye in the lab
Tye’s postdoctoral training was in the Stanford University lab of Karl Deisseroth, who had recently developed optogenetics. Many young neuroscientists wanted to be among the first to use optogenetics, and Tye was eager to use it to study behavior and emotion. Tye recalled that period.
“It was a very exciting time in neuroscience, and in 2009 I already felt like I had come late to the party, and knew I needed to push the field forward to make a new contribution,” Tye says. “I worked absurdly hard during my postdoc, fueled by the rapidly changing landscape of neuroscience, and feel like I did five years of work in that two-year period.”
Analyzing Neural Circuits
Tye’s research program initially focused on the neural circuits that process emotional valence, the degree to which the brain assigns positive or negative value to certain sensory information. Her lab has analyzed the neural circuits controlling valence processing in psychiatric and substance abuse disorders.
This work includes the discovery of a group of neurons connecting the cerebral cortex to the brainstem that can serve as a biomarker to predict whether an animal will develop compulsive alcohol drinking behavior. Recent research has focused on neurons activated when animals experience social isolation and enter “loneliness-like” states.
Kay Tye in the lab
Tye and her research team are also exploring how the brain represents “social homeostasis”— a new field of research which seeks to understand how individuals know their place within a social group and identify optimal amounts of social contact.
Kay Tye and her lab team
Pushing Boundaries in Her Field
Even after considerable success in her field, Tye says she still feels as though she is pushing boundaries of her discipline. In doing so, she is continuing to bring neuroscience rigor to the study of feelings and emotions. Referring to her recent work, Tye said:
We faced a lot of pushback with this line of research, just because “loneliness” isn’t a word that has been used in neuroscience until now. These types of processes, these psychological constructs didn’t belong in what people considered to be hardcore neuroscience.
We are now bringing rigorous neuroscience approaches to ideas that were purely conceptual before. And so we’re being quantitative. We are being mechanistic. We are creating biologically grounded, predictive dynamical models for these nebulous ideas like “feelings” and “emotions.” And this is something that I find extremely gratifying.
The honorees, listed below, were each awarded US$100,000:
Physical Sciences & Engineering
Prof. Ido Kaminer, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, 2021 Laureate
Prof. Guy Rothblum, Weizmann Institute of Science, 2020 Laureate (in absentia)
Chemistry
Prof. Rafal Klajn, Weizmann Institute of Science, 2021 Laureate
Prof. Emmanuel Levy, Weizmann Institute of Science, 2020 Laureate
Life Sciences
Prof. Yossi Yovel, Tel Aviv University, 2021 Laureate
Prof. Igor Ulitsky, Weizmann Institute of Science, 2020 Laureate (in absentia).
Israel’s newly-appointed President, Isaac Herzog, graced the ceremony with an appearance and a short speech. Herzog thanked Len Blavatnik for his philanthropy and support of scientific research, and praised scientists and their role in fighting COVID-19 in Israel, saying “Just as Pasteur’s experiments 150 years ago were the torch that illuminated the path to modern vaccines, the young scientists receiving the Blavatnik Awards tonight are illuminating the path to the future.”
Anchor of Israel TV’s Reshet 13, Dr. Hila Korach, served as Emcee. The President of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Prof. Nili Cohen, gave opening remarks and introduced President Herzog. Afterward, The New York Academy of Sciences President and CEO, Nicholas B. Dirks, spoke about the importance of science to help humanity tackle the challenges ahead, and congratulated the Laureates.
Kfir Damari, Co-Founder of SpaceIL, was the keynote speaker and inspired the audience by sharing the story behind the inception of the Beresheet spacecraft and the creation of SpaceIL. Equally inspirational were Israeli Singer Marina Maximillian, youth performer Lia Schapira, and dancer Liron Ozery, who gave notable performances during the evening.
2020 and 2021 Laureates of the Blavatnik Awards in Israel. (L to R) Ido Kaminer, Rafal Klajn, Emmanuel Levy and Yossi Yovel.
VIP Guests at the event included:
Peter Thorén, Executive Vice President, Access Industries; Member of the Board of Governors, The New York Academy of Sciences
Avi Fischer, Chairman & CEO of Clal Industries
Uri Sivan, President of Technion – Israel Institute of Technology
Alon Chen, President of Weizmann Institute of Science
Ariel Porat, President of Tel Aviv University
Robert John Aumann, 2005 Nobel Laureate in Economics
Roger Kornberg, 2006 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry
Ambassador Neil Wigan, United Kingdom Ambassador to Israel
Ami Appelbaum, Chairman of Israel Innovation Authority;
Yulia Berkovich Shamalov, former Israeli politician
Ron Levkowitz, Chairman of First International Bank of Israel
To learn more about the Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists, visit blavatnikawards.org.
Israel President Isaac Herzog.The New York Academy of Sciences President, Prof. Nicholas B. Dirks.Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities President Prof. Nili Cohen.The 2021 Toast to Science. From left: Kfir Damari, Hila Korach, Nili Cohen, Peter Thorén, and Nick Dirks.“Science of Tomorrow” Panel Discussion. (L to R) Moti Segev, Oded Rechavi, Erez Berg, Tamar Ziegler.Israeli Singer and Songwriter, Marina Maximillian and youth performer Lia Schapira.Full-scale model of the Beresheet Spacecraft built by SpaceIL, on display at the Ceremony reception.
Growing up in Romania, Mircea Dincă’s was first exposed to science. Now he’s engineering an electric Lamborghini.
Published October 1, 2021
By Roger Torda
Mircea Dincă (left) poses with Nick Dirks, President and CEO of The New York Academy of Sciences.
Mircea Dincă creates materials in the lab with surface features that can’t be found in nature. He then makes variants with electrical properties that other scientists once thought impossible. This is groundbreaking basic research with many emerging applications. One is particularly exciting: a supercapacitor to power a Lamborghini supercar.
Dincă, a professor of chemistry at MIT, is this year’s Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists Laureate in Chemistry. He heads a lab that synthesizes novel organic-inorganic hybrid materials and manipulates their electrochemical and photophysical properties.
Dincă and his students work with metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs. “These are basically what I like to call sponges on steroids because they are enormously porous,” Dincă told the Academy in a recent interview. “They have fantastically high surface areas, higher than anything that humanity has ever known.”
Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs)
MOFs have a hollow, crystalline, cage-like structure, consisting of an array of metal ions surrounded by organic “linker” molecules. Scientists can “tune” their porosity, creating MOFs that can capture molecules of different properties and size.
To help conceptualize the large surface area of MOFs, Dincă says a gram of the material would, if flattened out, cover an entire football field. This means their pores can hold an almost unimaginably large number of molecules. One application capitalizing on this capacity is gas storage. For example, a canister filled with MOFs would hold nine times more CO2 than an empty canister. Other emerging uses have included devices to manage heat, antimicrobial products, gas separation, and devices for scrubbing emissions and carbon capture.
Dincă first encountered MOFs as a graduate student. Several years later, after considerable research on the electronic structure of materials, he started envisioning MOFs with properties that had not been widely considered before. “Previously, people thought that metal-organic frameworks are just ideal insulators,” Dincă said. “But we realized that there are certain types of building blocks that, when put together, would allow the free flow of electrical charges.” This was something of a paradigm shift in the field.
A Partnership with Lamborghini
Dincă and his students started synthesizing MOFs with a variety of organic ligands and metal combinations to create materials that are both porous and conducting. They also developed ways to grow MOF crystals so they can be more easily studied with imaging tools, permitting analysis of their structure, atom-by-atom. The new techniques and materials have led to MOFs that might prove valuable for batteries, fuel cells, and energy storage. Dincă’s lab and MIT have signed a partnership with Lamborghini to use MOF supercapcitors in the company’s planned Terzo Millennio sportscar.
Dincă and his students also study the use of MOFs as catalysts, and as chemical sensors. They explore how these materials interact with light, which could lead to smart windows that lighten or darken automatically. Better solar cells are yet another possible application.
More efficient air conditioning, with considerable environmental benefit, is another goal. Dincă has co-founded a start-up called Transaera to build MOF-based cooling equipment that pulls water molecules out of air so that the AC doesn’t work as hard. The key is tuning the pores of the MOFs to just the right size to capture water at just the right humidity.
Scaling up remains a challenge for many of these applications. “It’s one thing to make a few grams in a laboratory, it’s quite another to make hundreds of kilograms so you can take them out into the real world,” Dincă said.
“Thirsty for Knowledge”
Dincă grew up in Romania, and says he got his first taste of chemistry in 7th grade. An MIT departmental biography playfully suggests “that having a dedicated teacher that did spectacular demonstrations with relatively limited regard for safety” was the initial influence. One imagines awe-inspiring, semi-controlled explosions in the front of a classroom of 12 year olds. In the following years, Dincă started participating in the Chemistry Olympiads, and in 1998, when he was in high school, he won first place at an international competition in Russia.
At the time, Dincă found he was running up against limits to his education. “I think the biggest challenges to my becoming a scientist were, early on in Romania where I grew up, that we just didn’t have access to labs, to books,” Dincă said. “That made me thirsty for knowledge.” So Dincă was eager to travel to the U.S. when he was offered a scholarship for undergraduate studies at Princeton. He then earned a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. He has been teaching and conducting research at MIT since 2008.
Dincă met his wife, who is also from Romania, while they were both students at Princeton. She is a lawyer, and the couple have two children, Amalia and Gruia. Dincă’s father is a retired Romanian Orthodox priest, and his mother, a retired kindergarten teacher.
When he is not with his family or at work, Dincă might be running, hiking, or taking photographs.
Constant Exposure to the Unknown
Dincă enjoys teaching, including freshmen chemistry. For his more advanced students and postdocs, Dincă says he fosters original thinking by giving them as much responsibility as possible. “As a Principal Investigator myself, I tend to be very hands-off,” Dincă explained. “And that’s good because it allows students to take ownership of their projects and become creative themselves. In fact, most of the best ideas in my lab come from the students, not myself.”
One of the best things about being a scientist, Dincă said, is constant exposure to the unknown, and he is pleased when his commitment to basic research is recognized. “Being a Blavatnik National Award Laureate is, of course, fantastic recognition of my research, of my group’s efforts,” Dincă said. “But also, most importantly for me, it is recognition of the fact that curiosity-driven research is still appreciated.”
While curiosity may drive Dincă’s scientific inquiries, he believes applied research with new classes of MOFs will help address important environmental challenges. At the same time, there can be no doubt that one application may prove especially thrilling. “Never in my wildest dreams did I believe that just thinking about electrical current in porous materials would take me on a path to helping make an electric Lamborghini,” Dincă said. “But that is where our research has led us.”
Andrea Alù is challenging the laws of physics to improve data transmission. Oh yeah, he’s working on an invisibility cloak, too!
Published October 1, 2021
By Roger Torda
Andrea Alù
Andrea Alù isn’t satisfied with how light waves and sound travel through objects and space. So he engineers new materials that appear to violate some well-established laws of physics. Enhanced wireless communication and computing technologies, improved bio-medical sensors, and invisibility cloaks are just some of the achievements of his lab.
“We create our own materials, engineered at the nanoscale,” explained Alù, who is Director of the Photonics Initiative at the Advanced Science Research Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). “We call them metamaterials, which push technologies forward, to realize optical properties, electromagnetic properties, or acoustic properties that go well beyond what nature and natural materials offer us.”
In a recent interview with The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy), Alù explained a core behavior of light that is at the heart of his research:
One of the most basic phenomena in optics is light refraction, which describes the change in direction of propagation of an optical beam as it enters a material. We can understand this as the collective excitation of molecules and charges in the material, produced by light. In metamaterials, we make up our own molecules—we call them metamolecules.
Metamaterials feature many different geometries of at the nanoscale. Some can be engineered to interact with light in such a way that they may actually make objects disappear from sight. It is a phenomenon called “cloaking.” Alù continued:
Engineering at the Nanoscale
This engineering at the nanoscale allows us to change the ways in which light refracts as it enters a metamaterial. By bending light in unusual ways, we can actually realize highly unusual optical phenomena, like enhancing or suppressing the reflections and scattering of light from an interface, making a small object appear much larger, or conversely, even disappear altogether, by hiding it from the impinging electromagnetic waves.
“Invisibility” has long been part of our popular imagination and science fiction, from H.G. Wells’ novels to Star Trek and Harry Potter. A pioneering theoretical step dates back to 1968, when a Russian physicist wondered if a phenomenon called “negative refraction” might be possible. But no materials featuring this property were known, and some scientists believed none would be found because negative refraction might violate widely-used equations describing the propagation of light. Thirty years later, in 2000, a team of scientists was able to demonstrate negative refraction in a metamaterial for a certain frequency of electromagnetic radiation. A few years later, experiments demonstrated actual metamaterial cloaking, and Scientific American proclaimed: “Invisibility Cloak Sees Light of Day.”
Alù started working on metamaterials in 2002, when he spent a year at the University of Pennsylvania as a visiting student. He has conducted pioneering research in the field ever since. A major achievement came in 2013. Alù, then at the University of Texas at Austin, and his collaborators, demonstrated the cloaking of a three-dimensional object using radio waves. The work showed that antennas, like the ones in our cell phones, could be made transparent to radio-waves, a finding of potential commercial and military value, as it eliminates interference between closely-spaced transmitters.
A Childhood Fascination
Alù’s interest in light and other electromagnetic waves began as a child in Italy when he was fascinated by how our radios and television sets receive broadcast information without wiring. His interest intensified in high school when he realized a “beautiful common mathematical framework” describes the propagation of light, radio signals, and sound, and the fact that no information can be transmitted faster than the speed of light.
Alù went on to study at the University of Roma Tre, where he earned a Ph.D. in electronic engineering. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, he joined the faculty of UT Austin in 2009, and moved to CUNY in 2018.
Nanomaterials being developed in Alù’s lab may also improve near-field microscopy for better biomedical imaging, and lead to optical computers, enabling faster and more efficient PCs that use light instead of electric signals.
Yet another area of intense research for Alù and his research team has been “breaking reciprocity,” with implications for improved transmission of sound as well as radio waves and light. “Light, sound, and radio waves, typically travel with symmetry between two points in space,” Alù explained. “If you hear me, I can hear you back. If you can see me, typically you can see me back. This property is rooted into the time reversal symmetry of the wave equations.”
Connecting Basic and Applied Research
Alù said his lab’s work in breaking this symmetry with metamaterials is a good illustration of the connection between basic and applied research:
Interestingly, making materials that transmit waves one way and not the other started as a curiosity, but it has rapidly become extremely useful, from improving data rates with which our cell phones or WiFi technologies operate to protecting sensitive lasers from reflections. This has been a very exciting quest, from basic research to applications.
Alù began his research and teaching career in the U.S. only after he earned his Ph.D. in Italy and, as a result, he found he initially had a smaller professional network than many of his peers. But Alù says the U.S. was very welcoming, and he quickly caught up:
I come from Italy and I did all my undergraduate and graduate studies there. So, coming to the U.S. first as a postdoc, then as a faculty member, I didn’t have a large support network around me, I didn’t initially have a lot of connections…. But at the same time, I have to say, the United States offers tremendous opportunities, in particular to young scientists, to help build up their research groups, and to thrive.
Alù continued: “The U.S. is an amazing country in welcoming young people, new talent, and supporting them in the broadest possible terms… An excellent example of this is the Blavatnik National Awards program, and the broad range of scientists it recognizes.”
A married research duo are studying ways to better predict the feasibility and potential economic benefits of adopting battery technologies for renewable energy.
Published May 13, 2021
By Roger Torda
(Left to Right) Graham Elliott and Shirley Meng at the 2019 Blavatnik National Awards Ceremony at the American Museum of Natural History
What can we learn from a marriage of physical and social sciences?
In an intriguing collaboration, they developed ways to better predict the feasibility and potential economic benefits of adopting battery technologies to integrate renewable energy, such as solar and wind energy, into energy grids. Together with their research team members, they published “Combined Economic and Technological Evaluation of Battery Energy Storage for Grid Applications” in the journal Nature Energy.
Meng is the Zable Chair Professor in Energy Technologies and Director of the Institute for Materials Design and Discovery at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). Elliott is also at UCSD, where he is Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics. We recently interviewed both to discuss this collaboration and what they learned through the process.
Can you tell us how this collaboration was initiated?
Meng: UCSD is a place where interdisciplinary and convergent research is not only highly valued but practiced. I founded the Sustainable Power and Energy Center (SPEC) at UCSD in 2015. SPEC reaches out beyond engineering and physical sciences to study economic and sociological issues that need to be addressed to create truly robust ecosystems for low-carbon electric vehicles and carbon-neutral microgrids. We won a competitive grant from the US Department of Energy, which provided the resources for this work.
Why did you choose to study batteries for energy grid applications? What question about batteries did you study?
Meng: With energy grids showing their age and continuing to distribute energy generated with high environmental costs, efforts that enable grids to distribute cleaner, renewable energy more efficiently would be a technological advance with a positive societal impact. While there have been exciting moves toward renewables, many problems lie ahead if we are to move from renewables being important to renewables being dominant.
Elliott: Grid energy storage remains a major challenge both scientifically and economically. Batteries, or energy storage systems, play critical roles in the successful operation of energy grids by better matching the energy supply with demand and by providing services that help grids function. They will not just transform the market for supplying energy but also transform consumer demand by lowering the prices of energy for households and businesses.
In this work, we studied the potential revenues that different battery technologies deployed in the grid will generate through models that consider market rules, realistic market prices for services, and the energy and power constraints of the batteries under real-world applications.
Bringing these together in an interactive way—examining the engineering and economic aspects as two parts of the problem together—allows for a complete look at the problem, and ultimately a better outcome for the economy.
Graham Elliott
What was the biggest finding of this collaboration? Were you surprised by your findings?
Meng: We found that while some battery technologies hold the greatest potential from an engineering perspective, the choice based on economics is less clear. The current rules of grid operations dictate which battery technologies are used for those particular grids—some of these rules may be out-of-date, and will be updated as the grids modernize. So even though we continue to see improvement in the energy/power performance of battery technologies and reduction in cost, policymakers are the ultimate decision-makers. Policymakers setting those rules have considerable influence on how fast and how successfully those battery technologies can be deployed, and therefore industry needs to work closely with policymakers to define the best practices for faster deployment of battery technologies.
We also found that there are a wide variety of factors that should be considered in choosing a battery technology. For instance, the battery recycling method is an important technical variable that determines the sustainability of a particular battery technology.
How could your findings eventually affect individual people and society? How can it help our economy?
Elliott: All gains in human welfare arise from what economists call productivity gains—people creating more with less effort, so there is more to go around. Technological advances in energy storage enable productivity gains. But for it to work, we need not only to be able to provide effective energy storage from an engineering perspective, but also it needs to be economically feasible. Different choices at the engineering stage mean differences in the economic feasibility, and how markets are arranged impacts engineering choices. Bringing these together in an interactive way—examining the engineering and economic aspects as two parts of the problem together—allows for a complete look at the problem, and ultimately a better outcome for the economy.
Meng: We are delighted to see to see that battery grid storage is starting to gain more momentum—policymakers are becoming informed about both economic and scientific, and engineering aspects of battery technologies.
A small-scale energy grid at the University of California San Diego, consisting of a network of solar cells with battery storage (Credit: University of California San Diego)
What did you learn from this collaboration? Are there any tips you would like to share with other researchers who would like to pursue similar collaborations between physical and social sciences?
Meng: Perhaps the most important thing for the collaborative team to do is to build a common vocabulary so we can truly understand each other. In our case, we started by explaining the most basic symbols and units in engineering, like the energy unit Wh (Watt-hour) and the power unit W (Watt). Without understanding the differences between these symbols, we will make mistakes in constructing important parameters in our economic modeling.
Elliott: Another thing we learned is that different fields have very different understandings of the big picture. Collaboration across fields helps focus everyone’s efforts. For example, engineers typically view markets as fixed, and the engineering problem is to find something that works for the market. Economists tend to think of products (such as batteries) as fixed and design markets that work for the available products.
There is a whole research area waiting patiently for economists to understand which parts of the engineering problem are important and for scientists and engineers to understand from their perspective which parts of the market design are important.
Early-career scientist, outstanding senior scientist each to receive US$200,000 in program sponsored by Takeda Pharmaceuticals
New York, NY | April 14, 2021 – The New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) has opened nominations for the 2022 Innovators in Science Award, which will recognize significant achievement among early-career and senior scientists in the field of gastroenterology. This marks the first time scientists engaged in transformative research in gastroenterology will be eligible for the award, administered by the Academy and sponsored by Takeda Pharmaceuticals.
The program accepts nominations from eligible research institutions around the world to recognize the work of a promising early-career scientist and an outstanding senior scientist. Winners in each category will receive an unrestricted award of US$200,000 for having distinguished themselves for the creativity and impact of their research.
The Academy is accepting nominations through May 27, 2021, from more than 400 international universities and academic institutions, select government-affiliated and non-profit research institutions and the program’s Scientific Advisory Council, composed of renowned science and technology leaders. Candidates must be nominated by their institution and may not be self-nominated.
A judging panel composed of scientists, clinicians and international experts in gastroenterology will determine the two winners based on the quality, impact, novelty and promise of their research. They will be announced in January and honored at the 2022 Innovators in Science Award ceremony and symposium, scheduled for March 28-29, 2022, in Tokyo, Japan, as health and travel conditions allow.
“After one of the most challenging years of our time, recognizing and celebrating advancements in science is more important than ever,” said Nicholas B. Dirks, President and CEO of The New York Academy of Sciences. “The world is seeing firsthand how innovative science and thinking can improve human health, and we are committed to honoring those who are leading the way. The Innovators in Science Award salutes ground-breaking researchers who have developed science-based solutions to debilitating diseases, improving quality of life for people all over the world.”
Since its inception, the Innovators in Science Award has focused on acknowledging outstanding research and contributions in fields of medicine aligned with Takeda’s core therapeutic areas. The inaugural award recognized neuroscience discovery, followed the next year by regenerative medicine, rare disease research in 2020 and the latest on research in gastrointestinal and liver diseases. Recent research shows that 20-40% of adults worldwide are affected by at least one functional gastrointestinal disorder, which can dramatically impact quality of life.
Nominations may be submitted by representatives from the nominating institution through the Innovators in Science Award website via its online submission platform: https://innovatorsinscienceaward.smapply.io. Please refer to the guidelines and FAQ sections for other details on eligibility, nomination materials and the selection process.
Shruti Puri, PhD, helps explain the challenges and the potential computational power this exciting new technology may bring about.
Published March 22, 2021
By Liang Dong, PhD
Shruti Puri, PhD, Yale University
Quantum computing is a radically new way to store and process information based on the principles of quantum mechanics. While conventional computers store information in binary “bits” that are either 0s or 1s, quantum computers store information in quantum bits, or qubits. A qubit can be both 0 and 1 at the same time, and a series of qubits together remember many different things simultaneously.
Everyone agrees on the huge computational power this technology may bring about, but why are we still not there yet? To understand the challenges in this field and its potential solutions, we recently interviewed Shruti Puri, PhD, who works at the frontier of this exciting field. Puri is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Physics at Yale University, and a Physical Sciences & Engineering Finalist of the 2020 Blavatnik Regional Awards for Young Scientists, recognized for her remarkable theoretical discoveries in quantum error correction that may pave the way for robust quantum computing technologies.
What is the main challenge you are addressing in quantum computing?
Thanks to recent advances in research and development, there are already small to mid-sized quantum computers made available by big companies. But these quantum computers have not been able to implement any practical applications such as drug and materials discovery. The reason is that quantum computers at this moment are extremely fragile, and even very small noise from their working environment can very quickly destroy the delicate quantum states. As it is almost impossible to completely isolate the quantum states from the environment, we need a way to correct quantum states before they are destroyed.
At a first glance, quantum error correction seems impossible. Due to the measurement principle of quantum mechanics, we cannot directly probe a quantum state to check if there was an error in it or not, because such operations will destroy the quantum state itself.
Fortunately, in the 1990s, people found indirect ways to faithfully detect and correct errors in quantum states. They are, however, at a cost of large resource overheads. If one qubit is affected by noise, we have to use at least five additional qubits to correct this error. The more errors we want to correct, the larger number of additional qubits it will consume. A lot of research efforts, including my own, are devoted to improving quantum error correction techniques.
What is your discovery? How will this discovery help solve the challenge you mention above?
In recent years, I have been interested in new qubit designs that have some in-built protection against noise. In particular, I developed the “Kerr-cat” qubit, in which one type of quantum error is automatically suppressed by design. This reduces the total number of quantum errors by half! So, quantum computers that adopt Kerr-cat require far fewer physical qubits for error correction than the other quantum computers.
Kerr-cat is not the only qubit with this property, but what makes the Kerr-cat special is that it is possible to maintain this protection while a user tries to modify the quantum state in a certain non-trivial way. As a comparison, for ordinary qubits, the act of the user modifying the state automatically destroys the protection. Since its discovery, the Kerr-cat has generated a lot of interest in the community and opened up a new direction for quantum error correction.
As a theoretician, do you collaborate with experimentalists? How are these synergized efforts helping you?
Yes, I do collaborate quite closely with experimentalists. The synergy between experiments and theory is crucial for solving the practical challenges facing quantum information science. Sometimes an experimental observation or breakthrough will provide a new tool for a theorist with which they can explore or model new quantum effects. Other times, a new theoretical prediction will drive experimental progress.
At Yale, I have the privilege to work next to the theoretical group of Steve Girvin and the experimental groups of Michel Devoret and Rob Schoelkopf, who are world leaders in superconducting quantum information processing. The theoretical development of the Kerr-cat qubit was actually a result of trying to undo a bug in the experiment. Members of Michel’s group also contributed to the development of this theory. What is more, Michel’s group first experimentally demonstrated the Kerr-cat qubit. It was just an amazing feeling to see this theory come to life in the lab!
Are there any other experimental developments that you are excited about?
I am very excited about a new generation of qubits that are being developed in several other academic groups, which have some inherent protection against noise. Kerr-cat is one of them, along with Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill qubit, cat-codes, binomial codes, 0−π qubit, etc. Several of these designs were developed by theorists in the early 2000s, and were not considered to be practical. But with experimental progress, these have now been demonstrated and are serious contenders for practical quantum information processing. In the coming years, the field of quantum error correction is going to be strongly influenced by the capabilities that will be enabled by these new qubit designs. So, I really look forward to learning how the experiments progress.
