Collaboration Archives -

The Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute works with many partners in government, private industry, and higher education. While the institute has had significant ties to the U.S. armed forces through the now-complete CMEDE program, HEMI researchers and staff are continuing to foster these relationships in other centers and programs, striving to bring the benefits of these collaborations to the Johns Hopkins University as a whole.

Members of the Materials Science in Extreme Environments University Research Alliance (MSEE URA) have worked closely with the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Chemical Biological Center (DEVCOM CBC) throughout the alliance’s three-year history. Many Johns Hopkins students and MSEE participants have transitioned to positions in federal labs, and researchers like Amee Polk, a DEVCOM CBC employee, have graduated from the university’s Doctor of Engineering program.

In an effort to formalize the collaborative relationships that already exist between Johns Hopkins and DEVCOM CBC, both institutions have entered into an Education Partnership Agreement (EPA). This agreement recognizes the importance of education, research, and translational activities and will expand upon collaborative opportunities between both parties.

A signing ceremony was held on Monday, Sept. 11 to commemorate this agreement. The ceremony was attended by DEVCOM CBC employees and leadership, as well as faculty, students, and staff from Johns Hopkins.

Michael Bailey, the director of DEVCOM CBC, and Ed Schlesinger, Benjamin T. Rome Dean of the Whiting School of Engineering, were among those in attendance. The pair gave remarks on the nature and history of collaboration between DEVCOM CBC and the university before signing the Education Partnership Agreement.

Other speakers included Amee Polk and Tim Weihs, professor of materials science and engineering and director of MSEE. Andrew Proulx, MSEE’s program manager, facilitated the creation of this agreement.

“DEVCOM CBC has been a valuable partner for MSEE and HEMI. JHU’s proximity to CBC and the important, related research they conduct makes it an easy decision to collaborate” said Proulx. “We’ve previously had the opportunity to work with people from DEVCOM CBC on basic research projects, short courses, seminars, and more. This agreement encourages further collaboration.”

Launched in 2012 with a $90 million grant from the U.S. Army, the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute (HEMI) is celebrating its 10^th anniversary and the progress it has made in its mission to develop the science and technology needed to protect people, structures, and the planet.

In addition to establishing itself as a global leader in the area of materials in extreme environments, HEMI also launched major research initiatives that have supported collaborations between academia, industry, and government, including the Center for Materials in Extreme Dynamic Environments (which has just completed its mission) and the Materials Science for Extreme Environments University Research Alliance. HEMI also has amplified its impact by managing more than 40 subawards to partner universities and research organizations in 20 states and four foreign countries.

In the Baltimore region, they have led partnerships with leading institutions, including the Extreme Science Internship program with Morgan State University and the Extreme Arts program with the Maryland Institute College of Art.

HEMI currently has 50 Fellows from the Whiting School and JHU’s Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and Applied Physics Laboratory.Learn more about HEMI’s accomplishments, this important milestone, and what lies ahead in their new video.

Lori Graham-Brady, HEMI associate director and professor in the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering and KT Ramesh, the Alonzo G. Decker Professor of Science and Engineering and director of HEMI, were awarded best papers by the Journal of the American Ceramic Society. On October 11, 2022, their winning papers were presented at a special awards symposium at the Materials Science and Technology Technical Meeting and Exhibition in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Graham-Brady’s paper is titled, “Fragmentation and Granular Transition of Ceramics for High Rate Loading,” and included co-authors Amartya Bhattacharjee and Ryan Hurley of Johns Hopkins University.

“Models for the Behavior of Boron Carbide in Extreme Dynamic Environments,” is the title of K.T. Ramesh’s winning paper. Co-authors included: Lori Graham-Brady, Ryan Hurley, Mark Robbins, Amartya Bhattacharjee, Qinglei Zeng, Weixin Li, and Nilanjan Mitra from Johns Hopkins University; William Goddard, California Institute of Technology; Andrew Tonge, DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory; Joel Clemmer, Sandia National Laboratories; and Qi An, University of Nevada, Reno.

Both papers were the result of research conducted in the Center for Materials in Extreme Dynamic Environments(CMEDE), a center within the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute. Funded by the DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory, CMEDE research has developed a materials-by-design process for protection materials which have military armor applications.

The Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute (HEMI) has received funding from the National Science Foundation(NSF) to expand its materials data research.

As a recipient of one of the inaugural awards in NSF’s Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable, Open Science Research Coordination Networks (FAIROS RCN) program. HEMI researchers will create the MaRCN (Materials Research Coordination Network). MaRCN will advance and coordinate findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable (FAIR) data and support open-science materials research nationally and internationally, bridging the fundamental gap between materials data and data-intensive methods including artificial intelligence and machine learning. The project will build on a range of planning and preparatory activities including the U.S. Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) and the Materials Research Data Alliance (MaRDA), a community-based network spanning stakeholders in academia, industry, and publishing.

The MaRCN project involves six institutions: Johns Hopkins University (lead institution), SUNY at Buffalo, Duke University, Northwestern University, Purdue University, and the University of Chicago. The total project budget awarded was $1,490,815. The award was jointly supported by the NSF Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences and the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure.

From self-parking cars to digital assistants such as Siri and Alexa, artificial intelligence is an integral part of many people’s daily lives. But experts say we have only just begun to explore AI’s power to transform and improve lives in areas including health care, transportation, public health, education, climate change, and more.

From 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. EDT on Thursday, July 28, in the next installment of Johns Hopkins Congressional Briefing Series, AI experts from Johns Hopkins University’s Whiting School of Engineering, School of Medicine, Applied Physics Laboratory, and Berman Institute of Bioethics will offer their insights into the opportunities and challenges presented by AI. These every-other-month briefings offer policymakers, their staff, and the public the chance to hear top experts’ views on important and relevant topics, such as gun violence, maternal health, and COVID-19. Registration is required, and attendees can submit questions in advance or during the briefing, which will be livestreamed here.

The session, titled “Artificial Intelligence: Opportunities and Challenges,” will be moderated by KT Ramesh, Alonzo G. Decker Jr. Professor of Science and Engineering, director of the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute, and senior advisor for AI to Johns Hopkins University President Ronald Daniels.

“At Johns Hopkins, we are bringing together two powerful forces, human intelligence and artificial intelligence, with the goal of understanding and improving the human condition,” Ramesh said. “The power of AI is at work in everything from autonomous technologies such as self-driving cars and robotic spacecraft to technologies that help us understand disease mechanisms and deliver better healthcare to patients. In this briefing, our experts will discuss the promise of AI, its impact, the ethical issues surrounding its use, and much more.”

Johns Hopkins experts participating are:

Lori Graham-Brady, professor of civil and systems engineering and associate director of the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute (HEMI)
Elana J. Fertig, associate professor of oncology, biomedical engineering, and applied mathematics and statistics, division director and associate cancer center director of quantitative sciences, and co-director of the Convergence Institute
Cara E. LaPointe, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Assured Autonomy
Debra Mathews, associate professor, genetic medicine, and assistant director for science programs at the Berman Institute of Bioethics

DAVINCI will send a meter-diameter probe to brave the high temperatures and pressures near Venus’ surface to explore the atmosphere from above the clouds to near the surface of a terrain that may have been a past continent. During its final kilometers of free-fall descent (artist’s impression shown here), the probe will capture spectacular images and chemistry measurements of the deepest atmosphere on Venus for the first time.

Credits: NASA/GSFC/CI Labs

Venus Oxygen Fugacity (VfOx) is a small, button-sized sensor aboard NASA’s DAVINCI mission to Venus’ atmosphere that will be designed, fabricated, tested, operated, and analyzed by undergraduate and graduate students as the mission’s Student Collaboration Experiment.

Planned for launch in 2029, the DAVINCI mission (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging) will send a spacecraft and a probe to Venus to investigate numerous unsolved mysteries of the planet. Prior to dropping its descent probe into the Venus atmosphere, the spacecraft will perform two flybys of the planet, taking measurements of clouds and ultraviolet absorption on the Venusian day side, and taking measurements of heat emanating from the planet’s surface on the night side. Two years after launch, the mission’s probe, called the Descent Sphere, will enter the Venus atmosphere, ingesting and analyzing atmospheric gases and collecting images as it descends to the surface of the planet at the Alpha Regio region.

VfOx will be mounted on the outside of the Descent Sphere, where it will measure the oxygen fugacity – the partial pressure of the oxygen – in the deep atmosphere beneath Venus’ clouds, including the near-surface environment.

By analyzing these ground-breaking VfOx measurements, scientists will, for the first time, seek to identify what minerals are most stable at the surface of Venus in the highlands and link the formation of rocks to their recent modification histories. VfOx will measure the amount of oxygen present near the surface of Venus as a “fingerprint” of the rock-atmosphere reactions that are going on today. The balance of how much oxygen is present in the atmosphere, compared to the amount of oxygen captured in the rocks of Venus, will provide information towards a new understanding of the surface minerals in a mountainous region of Venus (known as “tessera”) that has never been visited by a spacecraft.

Understanding how much oxygen is contained in Venus’ atmosphere will be important in preparation for characterizing Venus-like worlds beyond our solar system with the JWST and future observatories. How much oxygen Venus has in its deepest atmosphere will help scientists studying these remote worlds distinguish between oxygen produced by life, such as what happens on Earth, from oxygen produced solely by abiotic chemical planetary processes, such as what happens on Venus.

The instrument will operate similarly to the oxygen sensor in many automobile engines, which measures the amount of oxygen in the fuel system relative to other components of the fuel. Like all instruments aboard the DAVINCI Descent Sphere, VfOx must be adapted to survive Venus’ inhospitable atmosphere. Even though temperatures at the surface of the planet are hot enough to melt lead, the temperatures in internal combustion car engines are even hotter, so VfOx will operate in a comparatively cooler environment on Venus. Additionally, VfOx will be built out of ceramic, a material that is resistant to temperature changes.

The motivating goal for DAVINCI’s Student Collaboration Experiment is educating and training young scientists and engineers in planetary science and engineering skills and providing a real-world application for those skills. “We are trying to engage and encourage the next generation of planetary scientists and engineers,” says Dr. Noam Izenberg, principal research staff at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, and student collaboration lead for VfOx on DAVINCI.

Students will build the VfOx instrument, analyze the data it returns from Venus, and participate in science activities with the DAVINCI science team. Students involved will be advised by faculty at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

The excitement of being actively involved with a real space-flight mission as an undergraduate may be one of the best incentives to attract a diverse group of students to this project. “We want to attract more students from all backgrounds, including the less-advantaged and the less-represented,” says Dr. Izenberg. “There will be lots of mentors across the board – on the mission and science side, and the engineering side – where students can find not just mentors of the professions that they might be looking for, but also mentors who look like them, because the DAVINCI team itself is fairly good in its own diversity.”

Johns Hopkins will be working in collaboration with the Applied Physics Lab to plan and implement the student experiment. Johns Hopkins will also work in collaboration with the Maryland Institute College of Arts in Baltimore, which has an extreme arts institute that will be involved with an intersection between science and art. The Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute in Baltimore will help coordinate this project, and Morgan State University in Baltimore is an intended partner.

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is the principal investigator institution for DAVINCI and will perform project management and scientific leadership for the mission, as well as project systems engineering to develop the probe flight system. Goddard also leads the project science support team and provides two key instruments on the probe.

These images of a prototype of the shirt-button-sized VfOx instrument show the disk of the sensor itself. It has a diameter of just under one centimeter (almost 0.4 inches) and will be located on the side of the DAVINCI Descent Sphere.

Credits: Johns Hopkins APL

Brooke Hess
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland

Media Contacts:

Bill Steigerwald
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland
[email protected]

This article originally appeared on the NASA website.

The 2022 Mach Conference, held virtually in April, brought together representatives from academia, government and industry to share their work in the field of materials, with an emphasis on advancing the fundamental science and engineering of materials and structures in extreme environments.. The conference’s plenary speakers included Prof. Wei Chen (Northwestern University), Prof. Reuben Kraft (Penn State University), and Prof. Tao Sun (University of Virginia).

Conference-goers attended lectures, presented on research, and socialized with their peers in the discipline. Attendees also participated in the Student/Postdoc poster competition. Winners in each category are listed below.

Judge’s Award:

High-throughput methods using laser-driven micro-flyers for interrogating spall failure, Presenter: Christopher DiMarco, Johns Hopkins University

High pressure induced precipitation in Al7075 alloy, Presenter: Abhinav Parakh, Stanford University

People’s Choice Award:

Interaction-Based Damage Model for Heterogeneous Brittle Solids under Uniform High-Rate Loading, Presenter: Sakshi Braroo, Johns Hopkins University

The Mach Conference is held in April each year. For more information, visit www.machconference.org.

Despite restrictions due to COVID-19, summer 2021 was an exciting time for HEMI, with five different internship and apprenticeship programs highlighting a diverse array of research opportunities.

The High School Apprenticeship Program (formerly known as REAP), sponsored by the Army Educational Outreach Program, sought out high school students from groups historically underrepresented in STEM fields. Working with a mentor, these students pursued research into topics ranging from breaking bonds in crystal quartz, to the development of 3D models simulating surface growth.

The Undergraduate Apprenticeship Program (formerly known as URAP), provided undergraduate researchers with the resources to develop and pursue individual research projects. Sponsored by the Army Educational Outreach Program and CMEDE, this program provided valuable Army research, as well as experience that will prepare these students for careers in science and engineering.

Students participating in the HEMI/MICA Extreme Arts Summer Project/Internship had the opportunity to artistically engage with HEMI research and projects. They translated scientific research into expressive, thought-provoking art, as well as to research and develop new materials.

Students in the Morgan State Extreme Science Internship (ESI) participate in both internal and external internships associated with the CMEDE. ESI opportunities are STEM-focused with a particular emphasis on providing research opportunities related to MEDE. Internal ESI are hosted by MSU faculty on the campus of Morgan State University. External ESI are conducted at one of the CMEDE university and research institutions located across the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany.

Finally, with the addition of the Materials Science in Extreme Environments University Research Alliance (MSEE URA) to HEMI, the Undergraduate Research Award program was offered this summer for the first time. In this program, students work under the mentorship of an MSEE URA principal investigator within the technical areas of chemical and biological agent defeat, and nuclear blast.

If you would like to read more about our summer programs and the research completed by this year’s participants, click here.

HEMI Fellows Susanna Thon, associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Paulette Clancy, professor and head of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Rama Venkatasubramanian, team leader in Energy and Thermal Management at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, have collaborated with researchers at Morgan State University in an initiative designed to not only advance materials research but also to establish the first center of its kind at any Historically Black College or University.

Ramesh C. Budhani, professor of physics at Morgan State, has recently been awarded a $7.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to found the Center for Advanced Electro-Photonics with 2D Materials. Thon and Clancy serve as co-PIs on the grant. Other key contributors to the project include Venkatasubramanian and David Shrekenhamer from the JHU Applied Physics Laboratory.

“Johns Hopkins is pleased to be a partner with Morgan State on this initiative. By furthering the relationship between our institutions via the Center for Advanced Electro-Photonics with 2D Materials, we are creating pathways of success for students while increasing our research capacity in the area of next-generation materials for a variety of applications,” said Thon. “We are especially excited about the potential to attract top-notch talent to Baltimore by combining the strengths of our two schools.”

Fundamental to the Center’s research operations will be its mission to train underrepresented diverse students by expanding talent pipelines within the technology workforce and defense sector. The exposure of students to specific technologies, and their accumulated experience attained at the newly created center, will increase proficiencies and marketability within private and public sector industries. The cornerstone of the applied experience made available through the Center’s research will be summer internships for both Morgan and JHU students, co-advising of PhD dissertations, and joint annual workshops. Additional funding from the grant will underwrite internships for 10 to 15 undergraduate students and five students from area high schools and community colleges.

“Through the establishment of this center, STEM students have a space to perform cutting-edge research on an emergent class of quantum materials and technologies for clean energy, electromagnetic sensing and information processing,” says Clancy. “They also have the opportunity to create lasting relationships with researchers outside of their home institution. The impact this center will have on the workforce within the materials research community will be significant.”

The DoD funding will provide vital resources in the realm of scientific research rooted in thin films and nanostructures of refractory metal dichalcogenides and layered materials of a semiconductor and thermoelectric material called bismuth telluride, which is often used as a topological insulator. These layered materials will be synthesized at Morgan. Subsequent highly critical stability calculations and growth kinetics modeling of the 2D materials, along with experimental device development, will be performed by JHU and APL researchers.

Johns Hopkins University and DEVCOM CBC enter into Education Partnership Agreement

HEMI Celebrates 10th Anniversary

HEMI Fellows awarded best papers at MS&T conference

HEMI receives funding from NSF for materials data research

HEMI leaders join other JHU experts to brief Congress and the public on artificial intelligence on July 28

Student-Built, Dime-Sized Instrument Is Venus-bound on NASA’s DAVINCI

Media Contacts:

Mach Conference celebrates 10th year

HEMI Collaborations Showcased Through Five Summer Student Opportunities

Susanna Thon, Paulette Clancy, and Rama Venkatasubramanian join researchers from Morgan State University to establish innovative materials research center