WPI News

About WPI News

WPI Latest News

Publisher

WPI

Category

education

Language

unknown

Explicit

No

First episode

20 Jun 2023

Latest episode

22 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

242 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   22 Oct 2026

   From Craters and Calculus to Lehr und Kunst

   We use terms like “cutting edge” and “groundbreaking” to describe WPI’s approach to science, technology, engineering, and math education. But do we need to understand the past in order to develop a better future? People have debated that question for hundreds, if not thousands, of years—since long before the Worcester County Free Institute of Industrial Science was even a glimmer in John Boynton and Ichabod Washburn’s eyes. A fitting way to answer the question here at the most immersive STEM university in the United States is to turn to a foundational STEM axiom: To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction. When considered in tandem with WPI’s focus on future innovation, Newton’s third law of motion says it’s not only helpful, but necessary, to consider what came before. Believing that the history of science is a vital part of the future of science is what recently inspired a retired engineer from Hudson, Mass., to donate some rare books and journals to the Gordon Library’s Archives and Special Collections. The donation earlier this year from Owen Gallagher included two monographs from 17th-century polymath Athanasius Kircher and five volumes of the journal American Electrician dating from 1890 to 1901 that contain articles on early hybrid vehicle technology. One of the donated books, Mundus Subterraneus, is believed to be the earliest known geology textbook, according to Emily Ping O’Brien, head of archives and special collections and digital collections librarian at WPI. A German Jesuit priest, Kircher is reported to have descended into the crater of Vesuvius, in southern Italy, while researching the book. “There is a fascinating cut-away illustration of the Earth showing what Kircher thought the volcano system looked like,” O’Brien says. “Students can decide for themselves whether these ideas were fantastical or ahead of their time.” Direct experience with historical texts can help researchers gain a fuller understanding of their topic, she adds. “We want people, especially our students, to see firsthand how early ideas were formed, and how those ideas were the beginning of the study of the sciences.” Adding context For Dashiell Elliott ’27, MS ’27, taking that kind of long-term perspective has deepened his understanding of and interest in topics he’s studied at WPI. During A-Term of his first year, he took Theoretical Calculus III with Joseph Fehribach, a professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences. Whenever Fehribach teaches that course or Calculus IV—both of which touch on the origins of calculus—he invites students to the Special Collections Reading Room to see an original copy of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. The offer piqued Elliott’s interest. “Professor Fehribach makes a point of bringing up history in his classes because it adds context,” Elliott says, noting that he’d been surprised to learn that WPI has a copy of Newton’s masterpiece. “I knew a little bit about the history of the formalization of math, and I wanted to learn more because Principia is just a neat part of history.” When Newton was writing the first edition in the late 1600s, “calculus was still in its infancy, and he wasn’t sure he believed it, so he actually did calculations in such a way as to avoid using calculus,” says Fehribach. Even though the text of the book is in Latin and the main focus—despite the title—is on physics and not math, he adds, Newton used theorems and proofs that look very familiar to math students today. “And if someone in the group can read Latin, I take them to the page where Newton writes down his three laws of motion. They are pretty much verbatim what you learn today,” Fehribach says. “Nothing in there has really changed.” Case in point: To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction (as mentioned above). Spanning disciplines Not many people are aware that WPI’s library contains rare books, but Principia and Mundus Subterraneus are only two of the almost 8,000 volumes in its Special Collections. The Robert D. Fellman Collection on Charles Dickens, which is more widely recognized, features not only first editions of all of Dickens’ novels but also original serial installments of several works, including A Tale of Two Cities, Hard Times, Great Expectations, and Bleak House. The full collection of rare books is more extensive and spans hard sciences and humanities in a way that is uniquely WPI. In addition to a 16th-century book on metallurgy and mining, for example, there’s a 14 76 collection of writings by Pope Gregory I. That volume—one of the oldest in WPI’s collection—was published just a couple decades after the printing press revolutionized European society by allowing books to be produced and replicated en masse. By today’s standards, even those print runs were small: Only 1,250 copies of the third edition of Principia were ever printed. WPI has one of them thanks to a gift in 1916 from the widow of Levi Conant, a longtime faculty member who served as head of the math department and interim president of the university. Just because the books are rare, though, doesn’t mean they should sit on a shelf and be forgotten, says O’Brien. Gallagher, who donated the Kircher books, agrees. “We don’t want them to gather dust,” he says. “Read them!” And as he considers his education at WPI, Elliott appreciates that he’s had the opportunity to do so during his time here. Reflecting on what he’s gotten out of doing so, he naturally turns to WPI’s own history. “In a way, it feels like the theory and practice,” he says, referencing the English translation of the university’s motto: Lehr und Kunst. “You need to do some things—and then you need to back up those things by knowing the theory behind them.”

2. 

   15 Oct 2026

   Spotting Skin Cancer

   Researchers in the laboratory of Xinming Huang who are developing a tool to analyze skin images for signs of skin cancer have finished third in an international artificial intelligence (AI) competition aimed at improving early diagnosis of melanoma, a potentially lethal type of skin cancer. The team’s model combined two types of AI to finish third in the competition, which was organized by the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC). The challenge drew 181 teams of academic and corporate researchers. “Melanoma can be difficult for primary care doctors, especially those who are not skin experts, to identify in its early stages,” says Huang, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “AI has the potential to help those physicians spot patients who need to be referred to specialists.” TwinSight, the model under development in Huang’s lab, builds on research that PhD student Antony Garcia Gonzalez and Huang reported in 2025 in the peer-reviewed journal Cancers. TwinSight analyzes the visual characteristics of a lesion using both a convolutional neural network and a vision transformer, two different deep-learning computer programs that examine complex patterns in data. The TwinSight model seeks to address a critical problem: Melanoma, especially in its early stages, can be difficult to visually distinguish from benign skin moles, and delays in diagnosis and treatment raise the risk that the cancer will spread. Primary care physicians will often refer patients with suspicious lesions to dermatologists, who will typically examine the lesions using a dermoscope, a magnifying tool, and perform a skin biopsy to confirm the diagnosis. In 2024, U.S. regulators approved an AI-powered tool for use in evaluating skin lesions and providing information to primary care physicians. Yet developing an AI tool that can match the skill of a dermatologist remains elusive. The WPI team says that, in fact, they do not expect AI to replace dermatologists. “We are aiming to create a handheld tool that primary care physicians could use during a routine visit to image a suspicious lesion and get an immediate AI assessment,” says Garcia, a Fulbright scholar who is also a research associate on the electrical engineering faculty at the Technological University of Panama. “That could help them decide which patients to refer to dermatologists and potentially lead to earlier diagnosis of skin cancer.” AI models need large amounts of data to identify patterns in images. Research teams participating in the ISIC challenge each received a dataset of 5,294 anonymous images to train their models and a second dataset of 479 anonymous images to analyze. The WPI team also used a dataset of 187 images, obtained from a hospital in Florida, to validate their model. In the ISIC competition, TwinSight earned a score of 0.662 on the Dice coefficient, the measure the challenge used to rank how closely each model’s diagnoses matched those of experts. The WPI team is continuing to develop TwinSight for potential use in clinical settings. Huang says the team envisions a handheld device tethered to a laptop or computer tablet. A clinician would place the device on a patient’s skin to collect a finely detailed photograph that would be analyzed with AI. The team is collaborating with dermatologists in Florida to develop and test the tool. “The ultimate goal is to help doctors make faster and more confident decisions when they are examining patients,” says Huang. “To do that, AI tools need to evolve.”

3. 

   14 Oct 2026

   WPI Researchers Identify Bamboo as Fuel Alternative

   A new study from researchers, including those in Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s Department of Chemical Engineering, has found the fastest-growing plant on Earth may offer a sustainable and cost-effective alternative to petroleum-derived transportation fuels. The researchers, including Michael Timko, the William B. Smith Professor of chemical engineering and head of the department, and Timothy Woodard, MS’23, PhD ’26, have demonstrated that bamboo could serve as a highly promising raw material for the production of sustainable liquid fuels to power vehicles, planes, and trains. The team’s study, published in the journal Sustainable Energy & Fuels, finds that bamboo can be turned into fuel at a production cost that is competitive to conventional petroleum fuels and with substantially lower greenhouse gas emissions. The study combined laboratory experiments measuring bamboo-to-biocrude conversion efficiency with economic and life-cycle assessment modeling. “Our study suggests bamboo has a role to play in the future of fuel,” says Timko. “I think this research is especially timely and important because fuel prices are high and the transportation sector produces more greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. than any other. Bamboo would use different land than we are using for food production, so there is no food versus fuel trade-off. Farmers win, consumers win.” Key factors in the study are the hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) technology that converts biomass to fuel and the choice of feedstock. Using bamboo for fuel can reduce greenhouse gasses in two ways: The process to convert it into biocrude is more efficient than when using other feedstocks, and bamboo itself captures and stores large amounts of carbon both above and below ground. Because of the plant’s fast growth even in poor soil conditions, the study finds that converting bamboo into fuel through HTL could match the level of corn-ethanol production in the U.S. while also using roughly 13% as much cultivated land. Unlike annual crops used for many biofuels, bamboo is a perennial grass that can produce large amounts of biomass with relatively low agricultural inputs. And, compared with other perennial grasses, bamboo has very low ash content (less than 1% by dry weight), meaning that the conversion process generates negligible waste. Economic modeling indicates that bamboo-based fuel could sell for as little as $2.75 per gasoline-gallon equivalent under mature commercial-scale conditions, accounting for the money required to build and operate the fuel plant, suggesting strong economic competitiveness as the renewable-fuel industry expands. The team’s analysis also finds that using bamboo as a fuel source creates a level of greenhouse gas emissions 26 times lower than those of conventional petroleum diesel fuel: A life-cycle assessment, considering the ability of bamboo to store large amounts of carbon in its underground rhizomes , finds producing fuel from bamboo and its use would generate a greenhouse gas intensity of 3.5 grams of carbon dioxide-equivalent per megajoule of energy. In addition, the study suggests bamboo as a strong choice as a fuel source because it can grow faster and on smaller plots of land than other fuel feedstocks. “The U.S. has enormous land area under cultivation for corn ethanol, a fuel which is often blended into gasoline,” says Timko. “Freeing up at least some of that land could allow for more food production and reduce the burden on the environment.” The researchers also point out that bamboo can be cultivated on former industrial land or heavily farmed properties where other crops and vegetation may struggle to grow. “Bamboo may eventually offer industry a way to generate low-carbon liquid fuels at scale,” says Timko. “With further research and development, bamboo could be a compelling option for decarbonization in sectors that are difficult to electrify, including heavy-duty transport and aviation fuel supply chains.” Timko and Woodard co-authored the research study with Charles Cai, associate professor in the Department of Bioproducts and Biosystems at Aalto University in Finland, and James Walters, CEO of Avos BioEnergy.

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

1 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

2 ratings