Now, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has taken notice.

Deneé Lichtenberg was awarded the DOE’s Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship, giving her the opportunity to further her research at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. This premier multidisciplinary research institution is advancing breakthroughs in science and technology to address national security challenges.

The opportunity brings her closer to achieving one of her biggest goals: working at a national laboratory, where she’ll collaborate with experienced researchers and learn how large-scale scientific projects are conducted.

Raised in Titusville, less than an hour away from UCF’s main campus, Lichtenberg says she always knew she’d attend UCF, especially given the strength of its engineering programs. What she didn’t yet know was how far that decision would take her.

“The ability to design and improve materials that impact a variety of fields really motivated me to pursue this discipline.”

She found her path in materials science — a field where physics, chemistry and engineering intersect — which would allow her to study materials from the atomic level to real-world applications.

“Ultimately, everything is made up of materials,” she says. “By changing a material’s structure or composition, you can drastically alter its performance. The ability to design and improve materials that impact a variety of fields really motivated me to pursue this discipline.”

That curiosity has evolved into something bigger: tackling the challenge of sustainably recovering rare earth metals that are vital to the future of energy and technology.

Advancing Sustainable Extraction

Over the past year in the , led by Assistant Professor of Engineering Kausik Mukhopadhyay, Lichtenberg has focused on a breakthrough approach that uses a naturally occurring protein, lanmoudulin.

“The protein can capture rare earth elements from dilute waste streams, and then a small temperature change can trigger the protein to release them so they can be collected,” she says. “This could create a more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly way to recover valuable materials.”

Those materials are critical to everything from renewable energy systems to manufacturing; however, traditional extraction methods rely heavily on large amounts of energy and chemicals sourced from acid mine drainage, coal byproducts and electronic waste.

Lichtenberg’s work points to a sustainable future.

“By developing protein-based systems that selectively capture and release these elements, we could potentially reduce the reliance on traditional extraction,” she says.

At Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lichtenberg will take that work further, designing modified proteins, producing them in the lab and testing how effectively they bind and release rare earth elements.

“It is a very exciting interdisciplinary project that combines protein engineering, materials science and sustainability,” she says. “I hope to continue this research after the internship ends.”

It Takes a Lab — and a Team

But just as impactful as the research has been, the environment that’s shaped it has been.

“Dr. Mukhopadhyay is a fantastic mentor who creates a very supportive and positive environment that encourages learning [both] in and out of the lab,” Lichtenberg says. “The graduate students in the lab have [also] played a huge role in … helping me learn new techniques and [understand] the experiments and science itself.”

Next, she plans to continue her journey as a Knight by pursuing a doctoral degree at UCF, advancing her research as a graduate member of the KM Lab.

For Lichtenberg, this internship isn’t the finish line — it’s just the beginning of reimagining how the world sources its most essential materials.

The focus of the research behind the patent is to create a cost-effective, high-efficiency and sustainable method for manufacturing nano-materials to enhance energy and chemical production. Yang says he hopes that this will in turn address the current limitations of traditional, expensive fabrication techniques.

“The idea stemmed from the challenge of making solar hydrogen production more efficient and affordable,” says Yang, a member of the .  According to Yang, the materials were tested and validated for their application as catalysts. The recent findings were also published in the Royal Society for Chemistry.

A Catalyst for Innovation

The technology uses particles designed to optimize the generation and production of hydrogen and oxygen that serve as catalysts for energy production.   Traditional catalysts only respond to ultraviolet light, however this new development can harness a broader spectrum of sunlight.

To achieve this, Yang engineered particles within precise nanoscale structures that were grown inside titanium oxide (TiO₂) cavities, or light traps. These cavities can capture and control a wider spectrum of light, including sunlight, ultraviolet and near-infrared.

With this method, the particles can efficiently harvest solar energy through a process known as localized surface plasmon resonance. In simple terms, when light interacts with specialized nanomaterials it creates a synchronized ripple of mobile electrons — thus creating usable energy.

“In daily life, this could be implemented in solar-powered hydrogen generators for clean fuel in homes, cars or industrial settings, helping reduce reliance on fossil fuels and carbon emissions,” Yang says.

Shaping the Future of Energy

The research and industrial applications of this patent could expand as the technology develops, Yang says. By tailoring the composition of Yang’s particles, the catalysts can be integrated into technologies like electrolyzers used in seawater splitting, which is a process that aims to produce green hydrogen. Because the catalyst can be produced using renewable materials, it may reduce the environmental footprint of research and industry by limiting the need for freshwater use.

“There’s a strong potential to optimize plasmonic tunability, [or how metallic nanostructures interact with light], by engineering the composition of our engineered particles,” says Yang, “This platform also inspires new designs for full-spectrum solar utilization and could be adapted for CO₂ reduction or nitrogen fixation.”

This technology is fully available for licensing. Interested parties can contact the or reach out directly to Yang Yang at Yang.Yang@ucf.edu for more information. 

Funding for the research was provided by UCF through a startup grant No. 20080741. STEM, EELS, and XPS data analysis was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Early Career Research Program under award No. 68278. The technology was developed by faculty and students from the UCF College of Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering, and NanoScience Technology Center.

They had been tasked in a semester-long class assignment to build a carbon fiber rocket that would successfully carry the professor’s payload. While their design may have failed epically — while being broadcast live on the internet — they noticed one very important element that turned out to be the spark for their future company.

“When we walked up to the rocket, we saw that the motor had gone through a 2-inch-thick steel plate, but the carbon fiber that we had made was intact and still super strong and actually protected the professor’s payload after exploding and crashing,” Saltzman says. “We said, ‘Hey, we’re pretty good at manufacturing this [carbon fiber] stuff.’ ”

They took it as a sign to change their majors from aerospace engineering to materials science and engineering, and the earliest roots of Soarce were planted.

Sustainably Strengthening Industries

Soarce is at the forefront of bio-based nanomaterials and seeks to solve society’s greatest climate challenges by leveraging natural materials to create products that can outperform those made synthetically.

Drawn from seaweed, hemp and elephant grass, their nanocellulose coating can be applied to and fortify carbon fiber structures — everything from hockey sticks to electric vehicles to rocket ships.

“That allows engineers to design parts that are lighter, stronger and more efficient,” Saltzman says. “For electric vehicles, they can now go farther. In the world of aerospace, we’re making those materials stronger so now you have more payload mass that you can put into space.”

Their innovation has so much promise it has already secured $3.2 million in funding.

“Ů��AV is about dreaming big, going as big as you can. And that’s how we feel.” — Derek Saltzman

“Ů��AV is about dreaming big, going as big as you can. And that’s how we feel,” Saltzman says. “We’re on pace to what we feel is going to be the largest global nanocellulose producer in the world. And we are not afraid to say that and stand behind it. That’s a big dream, but that’s kind of what we’re here to do — make big changes.”

UCF-Backed Entrepreneurship

Their entrepreneurial journey has gone through several iterations since Saltzman and Mincey were randomly assigned as roommates in during their freshman year. The pair dabbled in enterprises involved with agriculture and drone racing, cutting their teeth on the business side of running a company through resources UCF offers including the ’s .

To this day, they’re still partnering with the UCF ecosystem, utilizing the UCF Business Incubation Program’s Life Sciences Incubator in Lake Nona, which gives Soarce access to a fully equipped, Biosafety Level II wet lab to foster their work in advanced materials.

“UCF has really strong partnerships and connections to industry that allow you to funnel your idea from a lab-benchtop scale all the way to integrating into a Fortune 500 company to get that product off the ground,” Saltzman says.

Now, along with fellow UCF alums and Soarce co-founders Matthew Jaeger ’22, an actuarial science alum, and Patrick Michel, a former management student, they’re looking forward to expanding their operations into an 8,000-square-foot facility in partnership with Tavistock and heading into pilot trials with Fortune 500 companies.

“It’s really cool to see how far we’ve come, from an idea in a notebook that we started eight years ago to now within the next three to five years, we’ll have that material not only created, but actually being flown into space and amongst the stars,” Saltzman says.

The Soarce co-founders were recognized on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Manufacturing & Industry list in 2026.

UCF researchers aim to prevent such bleeding in potentially deadly situations with a new hemostatic spongelike bandage with antimicrobial efficacy that they recently developed and detailed in a newly published study in the journal Biomaterials Science.

“What happens in the field or during an accident is due to heavy bleeding, patients can die,” says Kausik Mukhopadhyay, assistant professor of materials science and engineering at UCF and study co-author. “These fatalities usually occur in the first 30 minutes to one hour. Our whole idea was to develop a very simple solution that could have the hemostatic efficacy within that time. If you can save the patient, then the doctors and the nurses can then save the patient.”

Chemistry and Mechanisms

The method Mukhopadhyay and his team developed is called SilFoam as it’s more of a foam than a traditional bandage wrap. SilFoam is a liquid gel comprised of siloxanes (silicon and oxygen) that is delivered via a special two-chamber syringe which rapidly expands into a spongy foam upon exposure to each other within the wound in under one minute. The sponge applies pressure to restrict the hemorrhage at the delivery site while also serving as an antibacterial agent because of the silver oxide in it.

For every five milliliters of gel injected, you can expect an expansion of about 35 milliliters, Mukhopadhyay says.

“Anytime you have a profuse bleeding or bleeding, you want to press on top and stop the bleeding,” he says. “So, what we did here is actually the same thing. Instead of putting the hand, we injected it, and it creates a voluminous expansion.”

Mukhopadhyay and his collaborators found that their sponge also resulted in a more gentle removal.

“The adhesive property of this bandage is optimized so that when you take it out from the system, the smaller vessels don’t get ruptured, but it has the right amount of addition that can adhere to the muscles, veins and the arteries so that the blood doesn’t leak,” he says.

The sponge’s porosity and adhesion properties help it expand and seal the wound, allowing the body’s natural clotting process to take over, Mukhopadhyay says.

“During the reaction, it generates a little bit amount of heat that helps the process very fast,” he says. “On top of that, oxygen gas as part of the reaction’s byproduct, tries to come out. So instead of making it a cross-linkable rubber, it’s a soft sponge with a lot of internal porosity.”

Experimentation and Methods

Researching ways to address wounds requires special care and consideration to ensure no harm comes to test subjects, however, the researchers were able to bypass this by using a functional anatomic model to test their methods.

They used specially crafted mannequins designed with realistic blood vessels and wounds developed by a local company called SIMETRI to test their foam on in hopes the preliminary results were promising enough to proceed with further testing.

“One of the most important parts of this was that we used non-invasive models,” Mukhopadhyay says. “At this phase, we can get approvals and move forward to study the in vivo models. At this stage, there are no psychological effects on vets or surgeons either.”

The experimentation showed promise, especially when the researchers compared SilFoam to five other existing treatment methods.

They found that SilFoam had many advantages such as significantly less leakage, room-temperature storage versus requiring cold temperatures, ultimately lower cost of materials, little to no training requirements to use the syringe.

Pritha Sarkar, a graduate student in the materials science department at UCF, assisted with the experimentation.

“We had to check the reactivity of the two parts, because we wanted enough oxygen gas that can expand the sponge, but at the same time, we didn’t want the material to get too hot, because the reaction itself generates heat,” she says.

Sarkar texted the toxicity and strength of the materials as well to ensure it was safe for human bodies and durable yet not too rigid.

She also worked to make sure the composition of the SilFoam doesn’t harm the patient upon removal.

“If you have something that’s very sticky, like a bandage that you can slap onto your wound, that that will prevent blood from coming out, but if you want to remove that bandage, it can cause tissue damage or pain,” Sarkar says. “Our polymer system doesn’t stick to your skin, so it’s very easy to remove. We have a dressing that can expand onto your wound and seal it shut, but at the same time, once it’s done its job, you can remove it very easily.”

Reducing Infections and Next Steps

The antibacterial component of the research was through Melanie Coathup, a UCF College of Medicine professor and director of the Biionix Cluster at UCF.

She works alongside material scientists and mechanical engineers with the goal of creating new medical technologies and therapies.

“My post-doc Dr. Abi Sindu Pugazhendhi and I worked alongside Dr. Mukhopadhyay and team to investigate the potency of his material and how well it stopped bacterial growth,” Coathup says. “We assessed bacteria that would typically infect a traumatic injury to the torso, and our results showed that the material was highly effective and so utilizing this material within the bandage system developed by Dr. Mukhopadhyay and confirming its efficacy as a novel hemostatic and antibacterial strategy is a great and important find.”

She says the opportunity to save lives as part of this research was extremely rewarding.

“The research is significant, because at the moment, there are no effective treatments available to treat people with these conditions, and new strategies are really needed,” Coathup says. “This means that teaming up with Dr. Mukhopadhyay to investigate a novel antibacterial sponge that could in the future provide life-saving treatment following major traumatic injury, was an absolute pleasure and right up my street.”

Mukhopadhyay also recently received a GAP award to assist in licensing SilFoam and deploying it. He says the next step is to collaborate with the University of Nebraska Medical Center and perform in vivo studies at their facilities.

Those interested in licensing this technology may .

Researcher’s Credentials

Mukhopadhyay is an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at UCF, and he directs the Hybrid Materials and Surfaces Laboratory. He received his doctoral degree in chemistry in 2004 from the National Chemical Laboratory in Pune, India. Mukhopadhyay joined ��AV in Fall 2017 as a senior lecturer and researcher.

Coathup joined ��AV in 2017 and is a professor of medicine and director of Director of the Biionix (Bionic Implants, Materials and Interfaces) Cluster. Prior to UCF, she was an associate professor at University College London where she also earned her doctoral degree in orthopedic implant fixation.

A team of UCF researchers is exploring the use of the metal to develop a novel method to rid drinking water of harmful algal blooms, or HABs, which occur when colonies of algae grow out of control and produce toxic or harmful effects on people, fish, birds and other living creatures.

Their project is supported through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s People, Prosperity and the Planet (P3) program, which recently awarded $1.2 million to 16 collegiate teams across the United States.

UCF received $75,000 for their two-year project that aims to develop a gold-decorated nickel metal-organic framework (MOF) that removes microcystins — toxins produced by harmful algae blooms — from the water. MOFs are porous clusters of metal polymers that are used in many practical applications.

The UCF student team includes environmental engineering doctoral student Samuel Adjei-Nimoh, materials science and engineering doctoral student Nimanyu Joshi, and environmental engineering undergraduate students Jennifer Hughes and Julia Going. The principal investigator of the grant is Associate Professor of Environmental Engineering Woo Hyoung Lee, and the co-principal investigator is Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Yang Yang.

“MOFs have been used as a catalyst for many research areas such as hydrogen storage, carbon capture, electrocatalysis, biological imaging and sensing, semiconductors and drug delivery systems,” Lee says. “In this project, we’re using the gold-decorated nickel MOF as a photocatalyst to remove water pollutants.”

The gold will be coated in an MOF, which will help it react to the sunlight. That reaction, known as photocatalysis, will result in the oxidation of the microcystins, removing them from the water.

Microcystins are the most common cyanotoxins linked to harmful algal blooms in freshwater environments, notably in regions such as Florida with abundant lakes. They’re known to cause liver damage, kidney failure, gastroenteritis and allergic reactions in humans. With the UCF team’s novel solution, water treatment facilities can produce cleaner, safer drinking water.

“Clean drinking water isn’t just a necessity, it’s a fundamental right, especially for Floridians who rely on our abundant lakes and waterways,” Lee says. “By leveraging the innovative nanotechnology for water treatment,  we’re not only removing toxins but also safeguarding the health and well-being of our communities, ensuring a brighter, healthier future for all.”

This is Lee’s second consecutive year receiving the P3 award. In 2023, his team was selected for their work on a biosensor that could detect microcystins early in their formation for faster eradication.

This is the 20th anniversary of the P3 program. Projects funded this year will tackle critical issues such as removing PFAS from water, combating harmful algal blooms, and materials recovery and reuse, says Chris Frey, assistant administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development, in a release.

“I commend these hardworking and creative students and look forward to seeing the results of their innovative projects that are addressing some of our thorniest sustainability and environmental challenges,” Frey says.

About the Researchers

Lee is an associate professor in the UCF Department of Civil, Environmental and Construction Engineering. He received his bachelor’s degree in environmental engineering from Chonnam National University in 1996, his master’s degree in environmental engineering from Korea University in 2001 and his doctoral degree in environmental engineering from the University of Cincinnati in 2009. Before joining UCF, he was an Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education postdoctoral research fellow at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s National Risk Management Research Laboratory in Ohio.

Yang holds joint appointments in UCF’s NanoScience Technology Center and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, which is part of the university’s College of Engineering and Computer Science. He is a member of UCF’s Renewable Energy and Chemical Transformation Cluster. Before joining Ů��AV in 2015, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Rice University and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. He received his doctoral degree in materials science from Tsinghua University in China.

The Pegasus Professor and chair of the says this patent was awarded much faster than most, which demonstrates the importance of the disinfectant.

“We are very excited to get this patent accepted so quickly, and we’re glad that the work is of great value for combatting viruses and pathogen-born infections,” Seal says. “Thanks to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for recognizing this work and to the UCF Office of Technology Transfer for its support.”

Co-recipients of the patent include Seal’s postdoctoral researcher, Craig Neal ’14 ’16MS ’21PhD, and his former research assistant, Udit Kumar ’22PhD.

How the Disinfectant Works

The COVID-killing coating is made with a nanomaterial that activates under white light, such as sunlight or LED light. As long as the nanomaterial is exposed to a continuous light source, it can regenerate its antiviral properties, creating a self-cleaning effect.

The efficacy of the disinfectant was tested and proven through a study that was published in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces this past year. The study found that the coating can not only destroy the COVID-19 virus, but it can also combat the spread of Zika virus, SARS, parainfluenza, rhinovirus and vesicular stomatitis.

The research was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s RAPID program and conducted by a multidisciplinary team of researchers, including Griff Parks, a professor in the UCF and the co-principal investigator of the grant.

Next Steps

Now that the disinfectant has been patented, the research team will continue testing the product and UCF will seek a commercial partner to manufacture and sell it to a wide range of customers within the next few years.

“We plan to carry on the work in larger samples and also to test in vivo models and other means of infection control,” Seal says. “The process is well defined, and we plan to work with an industry partner to bring it to the mass market.”

Seal joined UCF’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the , which is part of UCF’s College of Engineering and Computer Science, in 1997. He has an appointment at the College of Medicine and is a member of UCF’s prosthetics cluster���������DzԾ���. He is the former director of UCF’s and Advanced Materials Processing Analysis Center. He received his doctorate in materials engineering with a minor in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California Berkeley.

This means technology ranging from natural language processing programs, like Siri or Alexa to robots and other advanced applications, could work in remote regions of the globe or even on other planets.

The researchers’ latest findings, which demonstrated a new technique to create the advanced devices, were published in a new study in the journal ACS Nano.

Currently AI depends on connections to remote servers to perform the heavy computing and complex calculations needed to run AI processing or perform unsupervised learning, says study principal investigator Tania Roy, an assistant professor in UCF’s .

“Our goal is to make the artificial intelligence circuitry very small and compact,” Roy says. “That way technology like portable, handheld devices can have the circuitry on them and don’t need an internet connection. They can operate in remote areas, and have all of those functionalities, like image search or voice understanding, from any place on Earth.”

And while smart phone voice assistants are current technology that could benefit from having brain-like computing power as part of their hardware, robots are another.

“If somebody is stuck in a remote area, then the robots now will have the capacity of functioning and going to that remote area and rescuing the human being,” Roy says. “Or if we have elderly parents living alone in their homes, we can have devices that can monitor their health conditions all the time and give them some triage if something goes wrong. We would feel much more at peace if there is something to take care of them.”

For space exploration, this means robots, such as rovers, wouldn’t need a person telling them what to do.

“What happens now is that because the devices are not capable of doing unsupervised learning there is a supervisor,” Roy says. “We have to tell them what to do in the environment. But after years in space, rovers will need the power of unsupervised learning to adapt to changing environments.”

The complex, neuromorphic — or brain-like —devices the researchers have created are placed upon small, rectangular chips, about an inch wide.

Although other researchers have worked to develop this type of technology, the UCF-developed devices are more reliable due to the unique engineering and nanoscale materials they used, says the study’s lead author, Adithi Krishnaprasad ’18MS, a doctoral student in UCF’s .

“We grew the material in a different way compared to how other labs grow it,” Krishnaprasad says.

“We did not grow it on some other substrate and then transfer it, rather, we grew it on the main chip itself,” she says. “We fabricated within the same platform, so that reduced the anomalies brought in by the chemistry when transfer is used. So, we completely avoided that. By using this different technique, we have changed the way the current moves through the device. This provides better reliability by reducing variability within the device.”

The team’s advancements allow for parallelism and in-memory computing, similar to the brain, that’s required for AI and unsupervised learning, the researchers say.

The critical task of growing, or synthesizing, the nanoscale material on the chip was performed by UCF researcher Eric Jung’s group. Jung is a study co-author and an assistant professor with UCF , NanoScience Technology Center, and Electrical & Computer Engineering.

For their next steps, the researchers will work to further advance the technology, including building networks with the devices to enable new applications, such as image recognition.

The chips could appear in modern technology in the next 10 years, the researchers say.

Study co-authors also included Durjoy Dev ’21PhD, a graduate of UCF’s doctoral program in electrical engineering; Sang Sub Han and Changhyeon Yoo, both postdoctoral associates in the Jung Research Group at UCF; Yaqing Shen, with the Institute of Functional Nano & Soft Materials, Soochow University, Suzhou, China; Hee-Suk Chung and Tae-Sung Bae, both with the Analytical Research Division, Korea Basic Science Institute; and Mario Lanza, with the Department of Material Science and Engineering, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.

Roy joined Ů��AV in 2016 and is a part of the NanoScience Technology Center with a joint appointment in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the . Her recent  focuses on the development of devices for artificial intelligence applications. Roy was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley prior to joining UCF. She received her doctorate in electrical engineering from Vanderbilt University.

The National Academy of Inventors and the Intellectual Property Owners Association on the number of patents received and filed through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Only the first institution listed on the patent is credited. The shows UCF on a steady trajectory of growth, climbing five spots in the world rankings and four nationally.

With 46 patents, UCF was ahead of Carnegie Mellon, Texas A&M and Penn State, and just behind Ohio State (48) and Michigan State (47). The University of California system (597), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (383) and Stanford University (229) took the top three spots. UF ranked the highest among the Florida universities, coming in 11^th with 140 patents.

“Patents is one measure of our growth and impact,” says Elizabeth Klonoff, vice president for Research at UCF. “We are strategic about selecting the inventions for patent protection to ensure fiscal responsibility and to maximize the potential of receiving valuable patents. Steady growth of UCF’s research base, inventions, patents and industry licensing partnerships feeds our economic ecosystem, which brings not only financial benefit to UCF, but also solidifies our place as a top-tier research institution. Doing our part means we benefit the local community and the society at large by contributing to technological advancements that improve people’s lives and drive the economy.”

Some of the 46 patents secured in 2020 have been licensed to companies, which invest in taking the product to market. That means more jobs and often investing in facilities, which all impact the economy. For example, one of UCF’s patents for a natural killer-cell therapy against cancer, was licensed to a local company, which was recently acquired by Sanofi, an international pharmaceutical company. Patents are a long-term investment for a university, says Svetlana Shtrom ’08�ѵ���, director of UCF’s Technology Transfer Office.

“Patents themselves do not generate revenue,” she says. “Licensing patents to industry partners to facilitate transformation of promising research results into valuable products brings true benefit to the university and society.  Our data has shown that it takes on average 5 years for 50% of our inventions/technologies to be licensed.  It takes an additional 3 to 5 years or longer for companies to commercialize technologies licensed from the university and to begin selling products.  The benefit to the university is realized when these products positively impact the well-being of our society through improvements in technology and public health.”

Here are some of the inventions and technologies that led to patents in 2020.

Nanoparticle platform stimulates production of natural killer cells

Lead researcher: Associate Professor of Medicine Alicja Copik,

This invention relates to a nanoparticle-based platform for generating potent natural killer (NK) cells for cancer and anti-viral treatment. NK cells are part of the body’s immune system and can kill tumor cells and virus-infected cells. The nanoparticle platform contains agents that stimulate the NK cells to increase their numbers, essentially creating an army of NK cells. This technology is licensed and in development for clinical use.

Combination drug treatment to treat neurological disorders

Lead researcher: Professor of Medicine Kiminobu Sugaya,

This invention relates to a combination therapy to treat neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. , and phenserine, which reduces the production of toxic amyloid plaques in the brain. Mice treated with this combination therapy had increased neural stem cells production and improved performance in memory tasks.

Drug characterization for FDA

Lead Researcher: Associate Professor Debashis Chanda,

This invention relates to a system that can accurately identify the chirality (molecular mirror images) of drugs, proteins, DNA and other molecules at lower detection limits than conventional detection systems. The new technology enables pharmaceutical companies to identify both enantiomers (right- and left-hand versions) of a molecule. Pharmacological and toxicological characterization of chiral molecules plays a crucial role in the Food and Drug Administration approval process since some enantiomers can cause toxic or severe side effects.

High Performance Energy Storage

Lead Researcher: Assistant Professor YeonWoong (Eric) Jung,

This invention relates to low-cost, non-toxic novel materials that enable next-generation supercapacitors to outperform current state-of-the-art energy storage technologies. The new hybrid core/shell nanowires enable manufacturers to produce flexible supercapacitors with exceptional charge−discharge endurance for portable, lightweight consumer electronic devices.

High-power lasers

Lead researcher: Associate Professor Arkadiy Lyakh,

This invention relates to new quantum cascade lasers that provide the ultra-high output power, brightness, and beam quality needed for applications such as hyperspectral imaging, infrared illumination, and military countermeasures that protect aircraft against shoulder-fired heat-seeking missiles.

Track contamination in wetland environments

Lead Researcher: Professor Ni-bin Chang, Civil Engineering Department,

This invention relates to two novel velocimeter devices that assist in the measurement of low-flow velocity and direction of water in both wells and wetland environments. Tracking the movement of nutrients, metals, sediments, and other contamination in slow-moving water is challenging, and these new device designs are easy to use, cost-efficient, have improved accuracy, and are equipped with wireless communication units.

Eco-Friendly Targeted Removal of Fire Ants

Lead researcher: Associate Professor Joshua King,

, such as fire ants and termites, without the use of pesticides. The and provides large volumes of hot water (approximately heated to boiling temperature, 212^oF) to a targeted area. The technology can be used as an alternative to chemical mound treatments or chemical baits in areas unsuitable for pesticide application such as parks and wildlife preserves.

UCF and other public universities in the Florida High Tech Corridor region — the University of South Florida and University of Florida — together were awarded 309 U.S. utility patents last year, more than 1½ times the number of patents granted to other globally recognized centers of innovation, including North Carolina’s Research Triangle and the University of Texas System.

“This achievement by the Corridor Council’s three universities demonstrates the strength of Florida’s innovation ecosystem and its role as a catalyst for statewide economic growth,” says Florida High Tech Corridor Council CEO Paul Sohl, retired Navy rear admiral.

The selection, which was , is part of a year-long initiative known as the Breakthrough, Innovative and Game-changing (BIG) Idea Challenge, in which undergraduate and graduate students have the opportunity to design, build and test new technologies that mitigate dust or are dust tolerant, based on proposals they submitted to NASA.

The UCF team’s proposal is a design for a new type of material to cover the exterior of spacesuits.

The material’s nanostructure design is based on how honeybees and other pollinators can manipulate tiny pollen using both microstructures and electric fields. The researchers are also incorporating techniques from the Japanese art of paper-folding, origami, to increase the material’s range of motion and also longevity by reducing the stress the material would face through repetitive movements.

“This research is trying to tackle one of the unsolved problems from the Apollo missions —  lunar dust,” says David Fox, a doctoral candidate in UCF’s who is helping lead the UCF team.

“This tiny dust clings to everything through static electricity and ends up coating the astronaut’s spacesuits and equipment,” he says. “The health dangers of this dust, and the damage to astronauts, their spacesuits and their equipment, could be detrimental to the upcoming Artemis missions.”

Fox says that since the Artemis lunar missions will be longer than the Apollo missions, they will involve astronauts living and working on the moon.

“Our research aims to remove dust from spacesuits easily and before it has a chance to enter the lunar habitats where they will be stationed,” he says.

The researchers got their idea for the pollinator-inspired design by thinking about how nature deals with small particles. They began looking at origami designs when considering how to decrease the amount of stress the material would face from repeated movements and the cold temperatures of the moon.

The seven selected teams, which includes the California Institute of Technology, the Colorado School of Mines and the Georgia Institute of Technology, will receive funding from NASA to develop their designs and will work through 2021 to build, test, and present them to NASA.

The UCF team’s proposal is titled Lunar Dust Mitigating Electrostatic micro-Textured Overlay, or LETO. The team includes Nilab Azim ’20MS, doctoral candidate in the Department of Chemistry; Yuen Yee Li Sip ’17 ’19MS, doctoral student in the Alex Burnstine-Townley ’16, doctoral student in the Department of Chemistry; Trisha Joseph ’20, a recent graduate with her bachelor’s in physics; Adam Rozman, an undergraduate researcher in the ; Nicholas Alban, undergraduate researcher in the ; and Lei Zhai, director of UCF’s and a UCF Department of Chemistry professor, as the team’s advisor.

They are also working with leading Dutch nanoimprint and microreplication technology company to help produce the material and get the innovation, if successful, rolled out to industrial-scale manufacturing.

The challenge is supported by NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate’s Game Changing Development Program’s efforts to mature innovative and high-impact capabilities and technologies for use in future NASA missions.

The team’s next steps will be to assemble and test its designs after further consultation with NASA’s BIG Idea Challenge team.

Zhai received his doctorate in chemistry from Carnegie Mellon University. He joined UCF’s NanoScience Technology Center and Department of Chemistry, part of UCF’s , in 2005.

In a study published recently in the journal , UCF assistant professor Yang Yang and co-authors demonstrated the ability of the new design to be both durable and high performing.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, it’s important to work toward developing batteries with environmentally friendly and nonflammable components, as Americans throw billions of batteries into the trash every year.

These batteries contain toxic metals and solvents that can leak from buried batteries and contaminate soil and groundwater.

The new seawater battery UCF helped develop is a step in the environmentally friendly direction as it replaces the toxic solvent that current lithium-ion batteries contain with benign seawater.

Current lithium-ion battery solvents are also flammable, making the batteries a fire hazard if they are damaged or overheat. They can also cause fires in landfills when improperly disposed there.

Researchers have tried to overcome the problem of a toxic and flammable solvent by using water-based zinc batteries, but this has been limited by problems with internal zinc growth on the anode, which hinders battery lifespan and durability.

The new design fixes this issue by using a zinc-manganese nano-alloy to form the battery’s anode, which is an internal metal structure that generates electrons that travel to a similar structure, the cathode, inside the battery, thus creating a current and power.

Anodes and cathodes are known as electrodes because of their ability to conduct electricity.

“We developed a durable and robust 3D electrode that can be used for seawater batteries under extreme conditions,” Yang says. “We’ve worked on aqueous batteries and the use of seawater resources for many years, so we have expertise in the field and know where it should go.”

Yang is an expert in battery improvement and alternative fuel cell technologies.

He says they used seawater as the battery electrolyte, or chemical medium that allows the electrical charge to flow between anode and cathode, because of its abundance and for its potential use in deep-sea energy storage applications.

For example, seawater batteries could be used to power undersea vehicles. And for the alloy they developed, it could be used in both water and non-water-based batteries, Yang says.

In the study, the researchers tested the design and found that the alloy-coated anode remained stable without degrading throughout 1,000 hours of charge and discharge cycling under a high current density of 80 milliampere per square centimeter.

The alloy’s stability was confirmed with synchrotron X-ray characterizations that tracked atomic and chemical changes of the anode in different stages of operation.

The researchers are also currently investigating the use of other metal alloys in addition to zinc-manganese.

Study co-authors were Huajun Tian, Zhao Li, David Fox, Lei Zhai and Akihiro Kushima with UCF; Guangxia Feng and Xiaonan Shan with the University of Houston; Zhenzhong Yang and Yingge Du with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; Maoyu Wang and Zhenxing Feng with Oregon State University; and Hua Zhou with Argonne National Laboratory.

The research was funded primarily by the National Science Foundation.

Yang holds joint appointments in UCF’s NanoScience Technology Center and the , which is part of the university’s College of Engineering and Computer Science. He is a member of UCF’s Renewable Energy and Chemical Transformation (REACT) Cluster. Before joining Ů��AV in 2015, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Rice University and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. He received his doctorate in materials science from Tsinghua University in China.