Cub Kahn, center, leads Oregon State faculty in the development of hybrid courses. Participants in the spring Learning Community included Kathy Greavesleft, who teaches family development and human sexuality, and Margie Haak, who teaches chemistry. (Photo: Jeff Basinger)

Nationally, college faculty have been experimenting with hybrid courses for many years, but they are only now gaining traction in standard curricula, says Kahn, an instructional designer for Oregon State University’s Extended Campus and the Center for Teaching and Learning. Test scores and grades show they are at least as effective as traditional classrooms. Moreover, they appear to help students prepare more effectively for class.

“Think of education as a whole — what is it? Is it just the transfer of information? If that’s the case, then Harvard has a problem, and all other universities have a problem too.”

— Eric Mazur, physicist, Harvard Magazine

“If you walk into classrooms today, you’re likely to see someone reading PowerPoint slides to students. In 10 years, if you walk around the hallways, you’ll see something substantially different,” says Kahn. “Nobody will be talking about hybrid courses. They will be the norm.”

Teaching in this fashion requires a sea change in academia. The hallowed “sage on the stage” tradition — an instructor who lectures uninterrupted for 50 minutes or more, students who sit passively and take notes — is giving way to a more interactive process leavened by Wi-Fi and the Web. The shift pushes against centuries of ingrained pedagogical practice, so Kahn leads OSU faculty members in their own course of study. Through collaborations that he calls Learning Communities, instructors are creating hybrid courses that fit their teaching styles and disciplines.

The move to hybrids is only one example of a broader trend at Oregon State. As one-way information delivery moves online, face-to-face classes are getting recharged. Students are engaging in debates, creating videos, building three-dimensional models, visualizing ideas and even reviewing each other’s exams. Instructors roam the room and vary the pace by challenging students to solve problems or address questions in small groups.

To advance this vision, a new classroom building is on the drawing boards, one that will offer unusual room arrangements and a hub for faculty who want to conduct research on new teaching methods (see “Flexibility to Learn” sidebar).

Activist Students

Jon Dorbolo directs Oregon State’s Technology Across the Curriculum program and was recognized by the Center for Digital Education (an educational research institute in Folsom,

California) last fall as one of 50 Top Innovators in Education. He works with faculty members on methods for stimulating student engagement. “Ultimately what we work for academically,” he says, “is for our students to see themselves as scholars. Not as passive recipients of information but as active scholars, researchers.”

Teaching, he adds, is an example of the scientific method in action. “Every lecture is a hypothesis. An instructor goes in there saying, ‘I’m going to communicate in this fashion, with the expectation that what I’m doing — the examples I’m giving, the analogies I’m using, what I’m drawing on the board, the questions I ask — is going to have an effect on the learner. If they (the students) pay attention and follow along with me, by the end of this, they ought to be different than they were before.’”

Measuring student learning is typically done through exams, which Dorbolo calls “this blunt and unsatisfying instrument.” Ultimately, evidence of teaching effectiveness, faculty members say, lies in the ability of students to think creatively and apply new knowledge.

The foundation for this new approach comes down to how people learn. “We have to allow the integration of knowledge,” says Kay Sagmiller, director of the OSU Center for Teaching and Learning. That requires active engagement in an environment in which students feel welcome, safe and confident. “Our challenge is to figure out how to open up the hearts and minds of those in the classroom to integrate what we offer into their existing knowledge,” she adds.

“Many faculty members don’t want to talk to a sea of faces. They prefer to engage with each person,” adds Dedra Demaree, assistant professor of physics who studies instructional methods in introductory courses. In her research, she has focused on how her own teaching affects student engagement. “My general philosophy is that I want to be able to quantify things so I can measure outcomes. But,” she says, “there are a lot of deep things you can’t get to by measurement.”

Classroom as Studio

While Demaree teaches first- and second-year students in lecture halls, she has also designed a classroom — a “physics studio” — that invites student participation. Instead of facing forward in rows, students work together at round tables. They get out of their seats to demonstrate concepts on electronic displays positioned around the room. A low-friction floor enables them to experiment with phenomena such as momentum and inertia.

With her graduate student team, Demaree analyzes videos of activity in class to understand what students actually do as she leads a discussion. She wants to know if they are disconnected or partially or fully engaged and how they are engaging in and interpreting discourse in the classroom. The team complements those analyses with interviews of students to delve deeply into the learning process.

Demaree’s group has shown that even small unintentional cues from the instructor can make a big difference for students. For example, in two separate sections of a class, Demaree gave two different messages about her expectations. “I told one section, ‘Remember this course is for everyone, even if you’ve never had physics before. We should all be able to reason through the process.’” To the other group, she said, “We started this on Friday and you should already know the answer.” Her explanation stimulated engagement in the first group and depressed it in the second. “The difference in engagement was phenomenal,” she says.

Pushing this educational shift, adds Kahn, is communication technology that students already know and trust. From laptops to smart phones to tablets, students have many opportunities to get information and exercise their brains. “Students are quite adept at accessing information. They’re going to use these devices no matter what. Why not try to get them to use those tools to accomplish the learning outcomes of the course? For better or worse,” he says, “they’re going to educate themselves.”

“In general,” says Sagmiller, “we underestimate how complex teaching and learning and assessment are. It’s exceedingly complex. It’s hard. Anybody who thinks it’s easy should stand up in a classroom of 600 undergraduates and give it a go and see how that feels. Or be held captive in a classroom with 35 kindergartners.”

Engagement Across the Curriculum

Many Oregon State faculty members are challenging their students in new ways. Here are a few examples from across campus.

Applets for Algebra. Scott Peterson wants students to think mathematically, not just to memorize formulas. He teaches introductory algebra, a fundamental course for most students. Online, he provides applets, software that allows students to visually perform mathematical tasks. Two of three weekly classes are spent in active exploration of algebraic concepts. In weekly lectures, he prompts students to discuss problems. He monitors conversations and tracks solutions through a rapid response system known as a clicker. He uses the results as a springboard for deeper discussion. About 2,000 OSU students take introductory algebra every year. Next fall, all sections are scheduled to adopt Peterson’s methods.

Roaming with an iPad. Devon Quick typically has 500 to 600 students in her introduction to human anatomy and physiology class. Like Peterson, she uses clickers, and she posts her lectures and other materials online for students to review. During class, she roams the room with an iPad. Using software from Doceri.com, she draws and manipulates images on a screen at the front of the room. She may hand the iPad to a student to demonstrate a concept. In surveys, 88 percent of her students have indicated that they like her use of the iPad and feel it makes the class more interactive.

Hybrid Versus Traditional. In two sections of Introduction to Psychology (300 or more students), Kathy Becker-Blease compared a hybrid to a traditional teaching approach. Each section used the same classroom, time of day, learning objectives, textbook and exam questions. Through quizzes, exams and homework scores, Becker-Blease found that student learning was equivalent. She also works with textbook publishers who offer online “diagnostic quizzing.” Students get immediate feedback as they answer questions, and instructors see how individuals and the class as a whole perform. Becker-Blease says students come to class better prepared. She is planning research to analyze the effectiveness of this approach.

Collaborative Testing. Tests need not be a cause for jitters. Engineering professor John Selker’s high-tech secret: two pens with different colors. After students complete their tests with one pen, he hands out the second and has them work in groups to identify mistakes and come up with the right answers. Students get full credit for their initial work in the first color and partial credit for writing corrections in the second color. By working out solutions with their peers, students fill in knowledge gaps and strengthen peer relationships. “At last,” says Selker, “the smartest student is also the most popular!”

Video Demonstrations. An engineering course, Strength of Materials, focuses on the forces that push, pull, bend and break everything from steel to carbon fiber. To help his 230 students master the mathematics and the concepts, Joseph Zaworski created 35 short online videos. Playable on any device from desktop computer to mobile phone, they allow students to pause and review as often as necessary. Between classes, students review videos and read the textbook. Class meetings include quizzes and team-based problem solving. Zaworski uses software from TopHatMonacle.com to monitor student responses and address common concerns.

This “new recipe” for advanced, energy-efficient window coatings got a big push toward the marketplace in March, when Oregon BEST (Built Environment & Sustainable Technologies Center) awarded a commercialization grant to an industry-university team to support research, testing and product development. Oregon State’s Chih-hung Chang and University of Oregon’s G.Z. “Charlie” Brown will be working with startup companies CSD Nano of Corvallis and Indow Windows of Portland.

The saved energy and reduced costs could be gigantic, says Paul Ahrens, CEO of the OSU spinout company CSD Nano. “If you were to put the coating we’re developing on all the architectural glass out there, you would save hundreds of millions of dollars in electricity currently used for lighting,” says Ahrens.

In 2010, he began a graduate program in mechanical engineering at Oregon State University. He wanted to work on innovative, high-risk projects that solve problems and push technology in new directions. So for his thesis, he aimed to reduce injury risk for chainsaw users. The problem is called “kickback” and happens when the tip of a fast-moving chain accidentally hits an object and lurches toward the user’s face. Chainsaw injuries now send about 36,000 Americans to the emergency room every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Arnold combined a miniature gyroscope with other sensors to create a brake that would stop the chain more rapidly than the mechanical devices used on most saws today.

When baby Claire entered the world, she shifted priorities for Drew and his wife Ashleigh. Education became more than progress toward a degree and an engineering career. It became a stepping stone toward a secure future for their daughter.

Personal and professional lives overlap. Take two other examples from this issue of Terra. Ruth Milston-Clements is on-call 24/7 for the care of laboratory fish. The phone might wake her from a deep sleep or interrupt dinner for her family. Scott Ashford, an earthquake engineer, understands what will happen when the next major quake hits the Northwest. He worries about the safety of his own family as well as the future of communities across the region.

Drew Arnold now works as a product engineer for one of Oregon’s most respected manufacturers, Blount International in Portland. His job is demanding, but the Arnold family also enjoys company-sponsored Easter egg hunts, barbecues and other activities. Moreover, through the Oregon State University Advantage program, Blount sharpens its competitive edge with research by Oregon State engineers. The company’s long-term success rides on the shoulders of such partnerships and on the babies who are our future.

Illustration by Leslie Herman

Like the auto industry, trucking companies are looking for new ways to cut fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. A partnership between Oregon State University and Daimler Trucks North America is making inroads by developing an 18-wheeler that combines high strength for heavy payloads and increased fuel efficiency for sustainable performance.

Part of the Super Truck program funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and Daimler, this effort already has yielded promising early results: a prototype carbon-fiber chassis rail and an innovative design for cruise control. The partnership began in 2009 when Daimler contacted John Parmigiani, a research assistant professor in Oregon State’s School of Mechanical, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering (MIME), seeking ideas. Daimler is the leading commercial truck manufacturer in North America.

Parmigiani led a research project to replace the rails, key chassis components that run from front to back, with lighter materials. By using carbon fiber — the same material used for rocket nose cones — instead of steel, Daimler achieved significant weight reduction.

“Carbon fiber is a great material to use. The weight difference is amazing.”

— John Parmigiani

The partnership with Oregon State was a positive experience, says Derek Rotz, a senior manager in advanced engineering for Daimler — so positive, in fact, that the company hired Brian Benson, one of the graduate students who worked on the project.

“We learned a lot about the design,” Rotz adds. “There still needs to be more work done before we put the carbon fiber rails into mass production, because they are more expensive.”

The next step will be to integrate the rails into a production prototype. Headquartered in Portland, Daimler Trucks North America manufactured 141,000 vehicles in 2012. Its brands include Freightliner, Western Star, Freightliner Custom Chassis, Thomas Built Buses and Detroit.

In a separate project, MIME professor Kagan Tumer used “intelligent systems” to create an adaptive cruise control that improves fuel efficiency.

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THE OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY ADVANTAGE delivers bottom-line benefits for business through access to career-ready graduates and world-class research. To discover what the Venture Accelerator and the Industry Partnership Program can do for your business, contact Ron Adams, Executive Associate Vice President for Research, Oregon State University, A312 Kerr Administration Building, Corvallis, OR 97331, 541-737-7722.

Officials expect the vessels to be positioned on the East Coast, the West Coast and the Gulf Coast, depending on research needs and available funds. The 175-foot vessels will be “floating, multi-use laboratories” that are “more seaworthy and environmentally green” than previous research vessels, says Mark Abbott, dean of the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. The first ship will hit the water in 2019 or 2020.

Illustration by Leslie Herman

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), sometimes referred to as “drones,” have been the focus of recent international attention because of their military use. However, these systems also have many domestic uses that are practical and benign and should be embraced for their potential to save money and lives.

UAVs are an emerging industry that Oregon can help lead, and the state would be wise to support it.  Oregon State University has formed a consortium with industry, government and others to develop the use of these aerial systems, a potential multi-billion dollar job growth engine that will also provide significant benefits to society.

Under a mandate from Congress, the Federal Aviation Administration will establish several test sites for UAVs by 2015, and one of those sites could be in Oregon. Our state offers a unique combination of research excellence, varied terrain, relevant industry and local applications in agriculture and forestry.

There’s not much that UAVs can do that a pilot in a small plane couldn’t do, but they can do it more safely and at much lower cost. UAVs can monitor and help manage wildfires or support a search and rescue mission. They can help forest-product industries plant trees to avoid wind or heat damage. They can monitor wildlife, improve irrigation, detect crop-disease outbreaks and gauge environmental health.

Decades of experience in remote sensing have drawn OSU to this venture. Our oceanographers use NASA satellites to monitor global phytoplankton productivity and identify harmful algal blooms. We use optical remote sensing to detect earthquake faults, assess wildfire impacts on forests and measure tsunami inundation patterns. We have instruments on the International Space Station to study shoals and ocean shores.

Natural Extension

We have already formed the OSU Unmanned Vehicle System Research Consortium to bring a national UAV test center to Oregon. The business and job potential is high. With more than 300 companies and nearly 7,000 employees, Oregon’s aviation sector sees UAV technology as a natural extension of industry within our state that already is building helicopters, small aircraft and aviation components. OSU and industry partners n-Link and Prioria have conducted the state’s first FAA-sanctioned mission – a UAV flight over McDonald Forest near Corvallis that provided live video of the research forest.

We recognize that the transition toward the civilian benefits of UAVs has raised privacy concerns. Protection from prying cameras where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy is a legitimate concern, legally protected by current law and the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Every new technology raises some kind of social concern, and society figures out reasonable solutions. We urge that these solutions be pursued in parallel with the needed technical research as the FAA develops a comprehensive privacy policy.

This technology will be developed somewhere in the United States. Because of Oregon’s comprehensive scientific and industry experience, and our state’s ideal geography, we can choose to be a leader in this exciting venture. That choice would be good for Oregon business, industry, researchers, workers and our environment.

A new teaching building will bring the latest designs in active, engaged learning at Oregon State University. (Boora Architects)

• A 600-seat arena classroom in the round

• A parliamentary-style room where students face each other across an aisle

• Lecture halls in which teachers can easily reach every seat

• Flexible seating arrangements that allow students to work in groups

• Space for three programs that develop and support new learning strategies — the Center for Teaching and Learning, Technology Across the Curriculum and Media Services — and room to demonstrate new concepts for student engagement

John Miedema of BioLogical Carbon Inc., Philomath, Ore., makes biochar at a wood processing plant and explains his process in this video.

Perry Morrow, student in the Oregon State University Water Resources Graduate Program, produced this video on biochar, the carbonized remains of plants. Turning low-value wood and other biomass into biochar sequesters carbon from the atmosphere for hundreds of years. The resulting material may also benefit water quality by absorbing pollutants such as copper, lead, zinc and other metals.

With a wave of the hand and click of the fingers, Jason Muhlestein controls a computer in the College of Engineering. (Photo: Jeff Basinger)

Tired of doing the scroll, click and drag with a mouse? A team of Oregon State University student engineers has developed a more natural way to use computers. Their “wireless hand sensor” may not only help reduce hand and wrist injuries associated with repetitive motion but may have applications in robotics, medicine and computer gaming.

Mushfiqur Sarker, Jason Muhlestein and Anton Bilbaeno attached their sensor to a glove equipped with communications capability and conductive fabric. By moving the hand left and right or up and down, users can move objects on a computer screen. Moreover, by touching the glove’s thumb to a spot on one of the fingers, they can perform operations such as opening or closing files or navigating through a digital map.

The students won the Industry Award at the annual Oregon State engineering expo last spring. In July, they took second place (and a $7,500 award) in a national analog design contest sponsored by Texas Instruments, one of the world’s largest microprocessor manufacturers. They estimate the cost of the wireless glove at just under $50.

“It allows you to control a computer from a distance,” says Muhlestein. “It could be fit to other devices, such as a ‘smart’ TV, an air conditioner equipped with wireless capability or sundry devices in the home.”

Remote control is familiar to gamers (Nintendo’s popular Wii computer game uses a “Wiimote”), and new devices such as Leap Motion (leapmotion.com) recognize hand gestures. The students saw room for improvement. “We didn’t like the fact that you have to hold it (the Wiimote),” says Muhlestein. “Our device eliminates all of that. We also don’t need any extra hardware. Everything is on your hand.”

The heart of the invention consists of two components: an accelerometer to measure the velocity of hand movements and a gyroscope to track rotation. They comprise an “inertial measurement unit” that is attached to the back of the glove, leaving the thumb and fingers free.

In manufacturing, the glove could give technicians a natural way to control robotic arms. It could also assist surgeons in performing operations remotely.

“The wireless hand sensor project was exceptional because it approached the project from a real usability standpoint,” says Donald Heer, who taught the capstone design course in which the students were enrolled. “They thought about the user, the technology and marketability. This very broad approach really let them shine as one of the best examples of Electrical and Computer Engineering senior design.”

For the time being, further development has taken a back seat to other priorities. Sarker is now pursuing a Ph.D. in “smart grid” technologies at the University of Washington. Muhlestein has entered the master’s program at Oregon State, working in analog-to-digital signal conversion with professor Un-Ku Moon. Bilbaeno is employed by Allion Engineering Services in Portland.

If it were commercialized, their invention could compete with another innovation that traces its roots to Oregon State. Alumnus Douglas Englebart invented the computer mouse in 1964.

“Oregon State University Advantage should foster increased bottom-line success for business,” said Rick Spinrad, OSU vice president for research.

Meena (left) and Jaana Rajachidambaram, masters students at OSU, worked in collaboration with Sharp Laboratories of America to improve the performance of thin-film transistors used in liquid crystal displays. Such research will expand with the new Oregon State University Advantage program. (Photo: Jim Carroll))

“It will dramatically increase private industry access to talented OSU faculty and researchers, take better advantage of OSU’s unique capabilities, increase the number of spin-out companies, and expand education and job opportunities for students and other Oregonians,” Spinrad said.

Within the next five years, the program also is expected to increase industry investment in OSU research by 50 percent and lead to the creation of 20 new businesses. Hundreds more OSU students will work not only with existing companies, but become involved in every stage from fundamental science to business plans and running start-up companies.

Two key parts of Oregon State University Advantage will be the OSU Venture Accelerator and the Industry Partnering Program.

The Venture Accelerator will begin immediately with $380,000 in support from the OSU College of Business, Office for Commercialization and Corporate Development, and the University Venture Development Fund. It’s designed to identify innovation or research findings that might form the basis for profitable companies, and streamline their development with the legal, marketing, financial and mentoring needs that turn good ideas into real-world businesses.

The Industry Partnering Program will be co-directed by the OSU Foundation and the OSU Research Office. Officials say it will become a “one-stop shop” to help industry access talent; do research and development to aid business success; bring in millions of dollars in private investment in research; and ultimately produce the type of experienced graduates wanted by global industry.

“Many programs and people will be involved in all of these initiatives, but the broad theme is to increase the societal and economic impact of OSU,” said OSU President Ed Ray.

Richard Oleksak, a doctoral student at OSU, developed a continuous-flow microwave reactor to synthesize nanoparticles for low-cost solar cell manufacturing. His research was sponsored by Voxtel, Inc., and is the type of work that will increase at the university with launching of Oregon State University Advantage. (Photo: Jim Carroll)

“This is a mission that’s critical to the future of Oregon and the nation,” Ray said. “Producing high-achieving graduates ready to work and create new businesses and jobs is the most important part. But we also see more that can be done in meeting the needs of existing industry, expanding existing business, creating new businesses and jobs, and getting students much more involved in their real working careers while they are still undergraduates.”

To serve as a base for the program, it’s anticipated that a 2,000-square-foot facility will be identified and occupied between OSU and downtown Corvallis later this year.

Various features of Oregon State University Advantage, the Venture Accelerator and the Industry Partnering Program include:

• Expanded university research will be directed toward industry business needs, while providing opportunities for students, economic growth, patenting and licensing of new discoveries and inventions, and new companies.
• Outside entrepreneurs and executives will work with faculty and students to evaluate new ideas, and the best ideas will be considered for proof-of-concept grants and equity investments.
• At least 300 OSU students each year will work with Venture Accelerator projects, and more in the Industry Partnering Program, doing research, identifying markets, and creating business plans.
• The end result should be improved educational programs and a major increase in the societal and economic impact of OSU’s research, already the largest in the state at $281 million a year.

“It’s a massive job to translate research into a profitable company,” said Ron Adams, executive associate vice president for research. “Students can help us analyze ideas, study market potential and do the legwork on so many tasks. There’s plenty of work to go around.”

Work of this type will greatly enhance educational opportunities, officials said.

“The students will have the opportunity to get practical experience working with the business community while helping drive the economy,” ” said Ilene Kleinsorge, dean of the OSU College of Business. “This experiential learning will prepare them to have an immediate impact to their employers when they graduate from the College of Business.”

OSU has been working in initiatives related to this for a decade or more, and has many success stories in commercialization, industry investment in research, and student internship programs. About 1,200 students are already involved in its entrepreneurship programs and more than two dozen companies have evolved from OSU research.

The Oregon State Venture Accelerator Program is a component of the South Willamette Valley Technology Business Accelerator, featured by the governor’s South Willamette Valley Solutions Group at the Oregon Business Plan Summit last December. The South Willamette Valley Regional Solutions Center will seek funding for the regional accelerator initiative during the 2013 Legislative session. At this stage, details remain to be determined.

More information is available at Oregon State University Advantage.

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For other stories about Oregon State partnerships with business:

1. Behind the Screens, new materials for a sustainable economy
2. Value-Added Scientist, go-to assistance for seafood producers
3. New Corvallis microtechnology firm, new product for chemical manufacturers from the Microproducts Breakthrough Institute
4. Running Clear, technology for real-time water-quality monitoring
5. New OSU Spinoff company, biosurfactants for cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and other industries
6. Testing our Metal, process testing and product development for Oregon’s metal products industry
7. The Science of Design, research for product development in the outdoor apparel industry
8. Biotech Partnership, gene technology for plant development
9. Cradle of Innovation, Oregon State’s Office of Commercialization and Corporate Development
10. Spinoffs Boost Oregon’s Economy, new companies emerge from Oregon State research labs
11. From Problem to Profit, seeds for new products in the proliferation of western juniper
12. Trading on Trust, business development, face-to-face
13. Product Lines, 12 companies, 300 jobs, $100 million in investment

Jonathan Hurst, right, was recognized by Popular Mechanics magazine with one of ten Breakthrough Innovator awards for 2012.

An era of walking robots that can help people with physical disabilities, take on dangerous missions or aid in disaster response is about to begin. One of the leaders in this emerging field, Oregon State University engineer Jonathan Hurst, was recognized in October by Popular Mechanics with one of its “Breakthrough Innovator” awards of 2012.

The science in this field is rapidly expanding, said Hurst, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Oregon State, who received the award along with his colleague, Jessy Grizzle, at the University of Michigan. Ten awards were made to scientists and engineers around the nation.

The researchers have built two walking robots, MABEL and the next generation model, ATRIAS. In each case, the technology is based on a fundamental understanding of how animals walk and run, using minimal energy to accomplish a maximum of locomotion and sensory response.

Hurst said walking robots are about where the automotive industry was 150 years ago, full of promise, with a number of new inventions and about ready to take off.

“In the next 20 years you are going to see legged robots all over the place, doing all kinds of jobs,” Hurst said. “The sky is the limit.”

Beginning with funding from the National Science Foundation for MABEL, and continuing with $4.7 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Oregon State and Michigan experts worked from principles of animal locomotion. The mechanical system closely interacts with the software control system, such as fiberglass springs working together with computer control to create efficient and stable walking and running gaits.

“So far much of what we’ve done has been with computer simulations, as we spent the past three years designing and building ATRIAS,” Hurst said. “The simulations are working, and our robot was walking three days after it was built. Now we’re going to demonstrate the control ideas on the real machines.”

Robots that ultimately can walk and maneuver over uneven terrain have a range of possibilities, Hurst added. One would be helping to power prosthetic limbs for people, or use an exo-skeleton to assist people with muscular weakness. But there could also be applications in the military, in disaster response, or any type of dangerous situation.

For something that humans usually learn to do by the time they are a year old, walking is still a mystery to most scientists. The complexity of sensory and mechanical input from nerves, vision, muscles and tendons has challenged the most sophisticated concepts in robotics.

MABEL, however, is able to run a nine-minute mile and step off a ledge. ATRIAS is even lighter, faster, and has three-dimensional motion capabilities. Some of these advances have been possible, Hurst said, because the Oregon State and Michigan researchers took a step back to better understand the fundamental forces at work before even trying to build something.

Most robots today work in a very static or highly controlled environment, but humans live in a mobile, unpredictable world, and with further advances robots may soon be able to join it.

FUNDING
National Science Foundation
Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute (ONAMI)
Hewlett Packard
Corning

RESEARCH PARTNERS
Federal labs and agencies
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Argonne National Laboratory
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
National Institute of Standards and Technology

Universities
Oregon State University
University of Oregon
Eastern Oregon University
University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Davis
Washington University
Rutgers
Clemson
Central Washington University

Business and Industry
Hewlett Packard
Corning
Intel
Boeing
Sigma-Aldrich
IBM
General Electric
Inpria
Amorphyx

“Your TV-picture screen in 1964 may be so thin that it can be hung like a painting on the wall or mounted like a vanity mirror in a table model.” Popular Mechanics, January 1954

Popular Mechanics’ prediction took considerably more than 10 years to come true, but today’s flat-panel screens have gone well beyond that early vision. Some of them are nearly as big as a living room wall. They bring us unimaginably sharp detail, from the spots on butterfly wings to the grimace on a linebacker’s face.

This technology — whether hooked up to your cable feed, DVD player, wi-fi or computer — is also becoming integral to daily life. It increasingly provides the platforms on which we shop, share photos, read books, keep up with friends, play games, manage finances and work. In 2011, the global flat-panel screen industry shipped more than $120 billion worth of products, enough to cover nearly 16,000 football fields.

Doug Keszler, center, works with graduate students Deok-Hie Park and Shawn Decker on a pulsed electron deposition chamber on the Oregon State campus. (Photo: Jeff Basinger)

However, our love of flashy high-res has a dark side. Manufacturing the semiconductors behind these electronic systems produces waste, lots of it. “The electronics and solar industries build devices where the materials input is very high relative to what ends up in the product. There’s tremendous amounts of waste and very high energy input,” says Doug Keszler, Oregon State University chemist.

Keszler and a team of scientists and engineers at Oregon State and the University of Oregon are leading a national consortium bent on greening the flat-panel display industry. In their future, windows, mirrors, walls and counters could display messages and harvest solar energy. “We’re trying to turn this industry into a truly zero-waste proposition while improving performance,” says Keszler, a principal scientist in the Center for Sustainable Materials Chemistry (CSMC). “We’d like to do electronics the size of a wall. The question is: How do you do that efficiently without producing even more waste?”

Startups Provide Jobs

Scientists use a spectroscopic ellipsometer to analyze atomic structure in thin films. (Photo: Jeff Basinger)

The CSMC has already produced significant results: a metal-insulator-metal diode (a kind of electronic switch) that outperforms the fastest silicon-based semiconductors; water-based manufacturing techniques that reduce waste and improve productivity; high-resolution fabrication processes that forge thinner electronic components. With research roots going back more than a decade at OSU and UO, the center has spun off two startup companies, generated more than a dozen U.S. patents and developed an educational partnership to inspire more Oregon high school students to attend college. It also helps graduates to create their own careers. In cooperation with the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance, CSMC students join business leaders in the chemical and electronics industries to identify commercial opportunities stemming from research.

“About two-thirds of all Ph.D. graduates in the physical sciences now find their first job in a startup company,” says Keszler. “There is very little education to prepare students for that career path. We train them to recognize market value in their research, so they can work effectively with entrepreneurs and business development people.”

Two startups have already hired the center’s graduates. Amorphyx (www.amorphyx.com) is commercializing a new electronics manufacturing process that limits the production of unwanted industrial byproducts. Moreover, it trims a six-part process to two steps, offering the possibility of tripling production capacity in an existing facility.

In collaboration with another spinoff, Inpria (www.inpria.com), the center has broken a barrier in high-resolution circuitry, going below the 20-nanometer scale and enabling computer chips to accommodate more functions at higher speeds.

New materials and water-based manufacturing process may be key to reducing waste in the semiconductor industry, says Doug Keszler. (Photo: Jeff Basinger)

These achievements reflect gains reported by Oregon State engineer John Wager, physicist Janet Tate, graduate student Randy Hoffman and other researchers as early as 2003. They noted that transparent thin-film transistors made of zinc oxide could lead to new kinds of liquid-crystal displays, the dominant type of flat-panel screen. In 2006, HP licensed the technology and has been developing applications in collaboration with OSU.

At UO in 2003, researchers in Darren Johnson’s chemistry lab discovered a solution-based process for making nanoclusters, leading to the possibility that new semiconductors could be made without hazardous chemicals. Jason Gatlin, the UO graduate student who discovered the process, instigated a new UO-OSU collaboration when he shared his findings at a conference sponsored by the Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute.

“We’re pushing the boundaries of science and seeing things no one has ever seen before,” says Keszler. “There’s a lot of joy in the intellectual exchanges in such a diverse group.”

To attract more young scientists to their journey, CSMC students will begin working with Hermiston High School teacher Lisa Frye and her chemistry classes this fall. They will provide support, advanced instruction and resources to inspire high-school students to consider careers in science.

“What we’re after over the next 10 years,” says Keszler, “is to put the (industrial) ecosystem together that allows you to print electronics on flexible glass. They will be high performance, durable, and include applications such as solar collectors.”

We’ve come a long way from the futuristic idea of hanging TV screens like paintings on the walls of our homes.

Don Pettit prepared for departure from the ISS on July 1. (Photo courtesy of NASA)

When he’s on Earth, Don Pettit dreams about space. But when he’s in space, he dreams about walking on Earth.  “Dreams may have something to do with humans never being satisfied, which is why we go exploring in the first place,” he says.

If there’s a gene for the urge to explore new worlds, Pettit has it. The Oregon State University alum (chemical engineering, ’78) has launched into orbit three times. He’s logged 370 days in space, placing him fourth among NASA astronauts.

Pettit has conducted experiments, spent more than 13 hours in a spacesuit outside the ISS and created a series of science videos to show how water, static electricity and other things we take for granted on Earth behave in a weightless environment.

After six months aboard the International Space Station (ISS), the native of Silverton, Ore., returned to Earth on July 1. He’d go back, as he says, in a nanosecond. Moreover, he’d gladly load up his family to colonize the moon or Mars — as long as they could return home safely.

In previous trips to the International Space Station, Pettit rode aboard the space shuttle, shown here when it was docked with the ISS. (Photo: Don Pettit)

He knows all too well that getting back can be harrowing. During his latest trip, Pettit landed in the Kazakhstan desert in what he calls “a series of explosions followed by a car crash.” After that, it took several weeks to adjust to living in Earth’s gravity again.

On July 20, he talked with reporters about the commercialization of space flight, why space flight is important and why he decided to grow a zucchini in the corner.

In case you were wondering, he says a space station smells like a cross between a machine shop and a science lab, although the odors of roast beef may drift in at dinner time. See the video above on the right or click here.

Mark Whitham

Mark Whitham’s know-how is a sought-after commodity for small canners hoping to kick-start or upgrade their facilities. Coos Bay entrepreneur Mike Babcock isn’t the only one singing Whitham’s praises. Here’s what others are saying.

Fish to Soup

“When Mark came to the area, I sort of enlisted him to help with our processing records and update our cook times and scheduling,” says fisherman Mark Kujala, who runs his family’s cannery, Oregon Ocean Seafoods, in Warrenton. The family has canned salmon, tuna, and sturgeon under their brand, Skipanon, for nearly two decades. With Whitham’s input, Kujala soon will be releasing a new line of soups — old family recipes he’s keeping hush-hush for now. Whitham is also helping the company develop its own line of pouch-packed fish. “He’s very accessible,” says Kujala. “When I have questions in the middle of the day, I can call him up. Sometimes he’s out on the road, and he’ll pull over and take the time to listen and bounce off ideas.”

100 Diners

“Having Mark available has just been such an asset,” says Stan Eggas, owner of the Berry Patch Restaurant in Westport. “He has helped us come up with recipes and to start a processing and canning facility, which I frankly knew nothing about. It was just amazing.” Starting out as a tiny stand selling homemade jams, the business expanded to a restaurant that holds 100 diners. He also has been working with Whitham to develop a line of all-natural soups for high-end grocery stores. Eggas says Whitham helped him refine his recipes — chowders of salmon and razor clams, soups of tomato and chanterelle — to minimize preservatives and sodium and develop his canning process. “That OSU and Sea Grant have made this program and Mark available is really outstanding.”

Traditional Tribal Edibles

Jobs are sorely needed by the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. “The unemployment rate on the reservation is really bad,” says Warm Springs elder Ron Supah. “The tribes need to seek opportunities to develop work for our tribal members.” Supah hopes to do that with a facility on the tribe’s reservation that will use retort pouches to preserve traditional foods such as elk, venison, berries and roots. Supah says the tribe is also considering packaging its sought-after Chinook salmon for sale in stores off the reservation.

Supah says the decision to use retort packaging came after he and other Warm Springs members visited Whitham at his Astoria lab. “We were pretty impressed by what we saw there,” remembers Supah. So far, Whitham has helped the tribe apply for a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant that will fund a feasibility study for the proposed facility.

Mike Babcock left a thriving lumber mill and set himself a new challenge: create a seafood business. (Photo: Pat Kight)

Still, in this one-time boomtown of lumber mills and commercial fishing, the entrepreneurial spirit lives. One man, Mike Babcock, is helping to kick-start Coos Bay’s renewal with an unlikely innovation: packing fish in pouches instead cans. Besides being flat and lightweight for cheaper, easier shipping, the laminated plastic-and-metal foil pouches are superior to cans in the No. 1 consumer yardstick: taste.

“Most store-bought tuna is twice cooked,” explains Babcock’s fish-packing guru, Mark Whitham, a food scientist with Oregon Sea Grant. “That means they cook all the nutrients and flavor out. Mike Babcock’s product is cooked only once, and it retains all the good fats, juices, and nutrients, and it tastes much better.”

It all began in 2010 when Babcock, a successful-but-restless sawmill owner, was looking for a new challenge. He heard about the packing pouches — called retortable or “retort” pouches in the industry — from coastal residents who had worked with Whitham on other projects. “I wonder if pouches would work for albacore?” he thought. To find out, he tracked down the food scientist, and together they investigated the pouch potential for Coos Bay. Within the year, Babcock had launched Oregon Seafoods.

The other "Bay Area." (Photo: Pat Kight)

Since October 2011 when he started shipping sustainably caught tuna and salmon under his label, Sea Fare Pacific, Babcock’s products have landed on the shelves of all eight Market of Choice grocery stores, as well as those of Portland’s trendy New Seasons Market for health-conscious shoppers. He also has created a line of smoked salmon for outdoor recreation giant REI, and his four flavors — sea salt, salt-free, smoked and jalapeno — have made their way to several other states.

From Freezer to Pouch

Just blocks from Coos Bay’s historic harbor, Babcock’s Oregon Seafoods plant is no bigger than a medium-sized classroom, but it’s packed to the gills with canning machinery. It’s cold inside. Workers wear hats and jackets under large, turquoise-colored aprons, latex gloves and hairnets as they pack fish for Sea Fare Pacific and several other brands.

“Of course, we would like to have more space,” says the 50-year-old businessman, a hairnet snugged over his red ball cap. “But we can do a lot with a small footprint.”

From the deep-freeze at Oregon Seafoods, workers carry salmon and albacore to the filleting room, where they slice up the fish and plop the chunks, red and raw, into small plastic cups. Two machines imported from Japan stand ready to package the fish into pouches. As the machine spins, another worker transfers chunks from the cups into 8-ounce pouches, which look like UPS envelopes, only silver.

The technical know-how behind Oregon Seafood’s processing, as well as the four specialty flavors developed for Sea Fare Pacific, came from Whitham. It was he who steered Babcock through his transition from mill owner to seafood processor. A soft-spoken, laid-back 57-year-old, Whitham is an unlikely revolutionary. Yet from his food lab at OSU Extension in Astoria, the Sea Grant scientist has been in the vanguard of Oregon’s canning coup.

If there’s such a thing as a food-preservation geek, Whitham is it. And if there’s one thing he “geeks out” about, it’s the flexible, lightweight retort pouches.

Oregon Seafoods workers load individual portions of cleaned and flavored albacore into pouches for sealing and cooking (Photo: Pat Kight)

“Retort pouches aren’t new,” says Whitham. “They’ve been around about 50 years, and, from what I’ve seen, they are really big in Europe and Asia. In general, they tend to be ahead of us as far as packaging is concerned.”

Coos Bay is just starting to catch up. The pouches’ advantages are many: lightweight and compact, they take less energy to ship than conventional steel cans. For the consumer or commercial chef, there’s no can to recycle. And their flat shape makes cooking more uniform. Again, it all comes down to flavor in the end.

Whitham’s larger mission — adding value to the region’s natural seafood bounty — underpins his 30-year career working with small producers up and down the coast. “Here in Oregon, seafood has really been a stand-alone product, and there’s just tremendous opportunity for adding value,” he says. With the right price point, package and recipe, processed fish can command double, triple, or even quadruple what it sells for raw. That in turn injects money and jobs into the community.

Injecting jobs and money into Coos Bay is exactly what Babcock is doing. A self-described “pedal-to-the-metal, get-it-done” type, the entrepreneur’s steely blue eyes are now focused on fine-tuning the process that took elbow grease and determination, along with Whitham’s expertise, to get moving. In Coos County where unemployment hovers around 10.5 percent — above average for both Oregon and the nation — the eight new jobs Babcock has created are a welcome boost.

From Cannery to Shopping Cart

On the cannery’s floor, the Japanese packing machines suck the air out of each pouch and seal it. Then comes the cooking. The oven — six feet around and15 feet tall with a massive metal door — looks more like a missile silo turned on its side than something from a commercial kitchen. It can hold a lot of product — more than 2,500 eight-ounce pouches, or nearly 475 pounds of fish. The pouches cook for 75 minutes at 240 degrees. Then they’re flash cooled to retain flavor.

In the cannery’s entryway, boxes full of packed tuna, ready to be shipped, testify that things are moving smoothly. But plenty of stumbling blocks stood in the way, Babcock attests. Whitham helped the entrepreneur persevere. “Whenever I have a problem,” he says, “I call him up and he’s there.”

Babcock isn’t sure why he left his successful business to start a new one in a field in which he had little experience. When urged to pin down a reason, he cites boredom. “The day-to-day operation of the sawmill was fine,” he recalls. “But we had been building the mill for a number of years, and once we got it built and we got to the monotonous day-to-day stuff, the challenge wasn’t there.”

The cannery lets him do what he loves best: build a business. These days, his schedule is full of food tradeshows. At first, he was skeptical about pitching his fish at the crowded tradeshow scene. But his first show was a total success, generating hundreds of sales leads.

That tradeshow, incidentally, was in San Francisco — the other “bay area.” Driving home, Babcock was elated — so elated, in fact, he just couldn’t wait to make another sale. So he stopped at a small health-food store in Eureka, California, and won yet another customer.

“Everywhere I go, people who try our product, they just fall all over it, they just love the quality, like they never tasted fish like this before,” he says. For that, and for the jobs he created in Coos Bay, Babcock credits Mark Whitham and Oregon Sea Grant. “This product has Mark’s name all over it. I want to keep this relationship going.”

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Editor’s note: In March 2013, Oregon Seafoods announced that with help from Mark Whitham, the company launched a new line of soups and sauces (Seafood Bisque, Smoked Salmon Chowder, three albacore curries and a West Coast Ciopinno). Improved labeling also noted sustainability qualities such as Dolphin Safe and Line Caught. The company’s products are in more than 500 retail outlets.

Gary Klinkhammer (Photo: Susan Klinkhammer)

“The Arctic in a lot of ways is more like a big lake than an ocean. It’s more isolated,” says Klinkhammer, a professor in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University. “Following carbon in the Arctic turns out to be a very powerful thing,” he adds, because it can reveal details about the chemical and geological processes that drive ocean life.

But Klinkhammer felt hampered by his equipment. His analytical tools could produce a lump-sum measurement of carbon, not a detailed picture of the dissolved and particulate forms that emanate from sources such as forests or farms, peat bogs or cities.

Following his Arctic expedition, he got to work on a better way to analyze water quality. What he learned about tracking carbon and other materials led him to create a Corvallis-based technology company that is advancing water-quality protection in the United States and abroad.

Today, in addition to his role as director of the W. M. Keck Collaboratory for Plasma Spectrometry at OSU, Klinkhammer is founder and chief scientific officer of ZAPS Technologies, which designs and sells an analytical system, LiquID™, based on his research. Through optical analysis of flowing water, the system can rapidly monitor over 100 constituents in water-supply and wastewater systems and the environment.

“If you’re looking at the Santiam River or something like that, you don’t really know where that carbon is coming from,” he says. “Some of it’s coming from groundwater. Some of it’s coming from a reservoir. There are multiple sources that it can come from.”

Illustration by Teresa Hall

Pinpointing the identity and source of organic matter and other constituents is a critical step in protecting public health. For example, storms and floodwaters can pollute drinking-water supplies with sediment and disease-causing microbes. One of the most famous cases occurred in 1993 when the microbe cryptosporidium contaminated the drinking-water supply of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that more than 400,000 people got sick and 69 died.

Klinkhammer’s analytical innovation provides both rapid optical analysis and online display of data. It monitors chlorophyll, algae, E. coli and other materials 24/7 in real-time. It can even track inorganic materials such as nitrate, chlorine and ammonia.

Currently, ZAPS employs more than 20 people and has installed monitoring systems in Corvallis, Albany, Seattle and Lafayette, Indiana. Others are scheduled for San Diego and Australia.

Klinkhammer started working with sensors as a graduate student at the University of Rhode Island. His goal then was to locate hydrothermal vents on the vast mid-Atlantic ridge. In his research, he has used water-quality analysis to locate hydrothermal vents in the Antarctic and to understand chemical processes in the oceans, including the Columbia River plume off the Oregon coast.

Illustration by Teresa Hall

It’s one of life’s little ironies. The proteins in our bodies fight infection, carry messages, ferry oxygen and build tissue. But then, like double agents in a spy novel, they can betray us. They overreact to a virus and attack our own organs. They promote cancer, help clog arteries or set up roadblocks in the brain. We may never know until symptoms appear — a lump, chest pain, severe memory lapses — and irreversible damage is done.

Who wouldn’t like to get ahead of these heart-stopping scenarios? By detecting proteins gone awry or elevated in the earliest stages of disease, scientists are opening up the possibility of effective therapy before health is compromised. The standard checklist on the annual physical — temperature, blood pressure, reflexes, lung function, skin condition — is already backed up by blood tests for molecular markers such as cholesterol and other proteins. What researchers envision is an inexpensive (some aim for a “penny per protein”), accurate and rapid test that can be performed in a doctor’s office and provide unprecedented views of our biochemistry on the fly.

In medical research labs across the country, a race is on to identify new biomarkers and to develop highly sensitive technologies that can measure them. Talk about a needle in a haystack. A single blood sample can contain roughly 9,000 types of proteins, although different analytical techniques produce widely varying estimates. And on top of the sheer flood of proteins is the fact that they are shape shifters. Once released into the bloodstream, they may be altered before they reach their intended destination.

Oregon State University chemist Vince Remcho likens the search for proteins to fishing. “Ultimately you are searching for one particular protein or other molecule in a vast soup of molecules, so you have to choose the right bait. My group is in the bait business, bait and hook,” he says.

In Remcho’s lab in OSU’s new Linus Pauling Science Center, some of that bait consists of short relatives of DNA known as aptamers. If the team of students and other researchers has prepared their devices properly, they will attract big fish, proteins and other molecules that fit into the nooks and crannies of a particular aptamer and no other. Remcho and his international team (hailing from Indonesia, China, Nigeria, Thailand and the United States) develop new tools — lab-on-a-chip technologies, microfluidics and nanosensors — for scientific, medical and precision manufacturing purposes. But their goals can’t be achieved by chemistry alone, so at OSU, they rely on the expertise of physicists, engineers and molecular biologists to advance sensing science.

Marked Molecules

Knowing how to catch proteins is one thing. Knowing which proteins to catch is another. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration now recognizes nine biomarkers for use in clinical diagnosis of cancer, and researchers have identified others that serve as markers for kidney and liver disease, Alzheimer’s, rheumatoid arthritis, tuberculosis and other illnesses. “There are new markers coming out everyday from different labs,” says Arup Indra in the OSU College of Pharmacy.

The Indra lab is one of them. In 2009, he, Gitali Indra and collaborators at OSU and in France reported a new biomarker for head and neck cancers. With funding from the National Institutes of Health, they conclusively linked a protein known as CTIP2 to squamous cell carcinoma. Squamous cells are flat, plate-like cells in the skin and the lining of internal organs. When it occurs in the head and neck, squamous cell carcinoma is the sixth most common form of cancer worldwide — promoted by exposure to tobacco, alcohol and human papillomavirus.

It is aggressive and hard to treat. Despite advances in chemotherapy and surgery, five-year survival rates have not improved over the past 20 years. And until the CTIP2 discovery, researchers had had limited success in identifying biomarkers for use in clinical oncology.

In December 2011, the Indras and their colleagues Mark Leid of OSU and French biochemist Joseph Abecassis received a United States patent for the use of CTIP2 in cancer diagnostic tests. “Cells that are dividing rapidly express more CTIP2,” says Arup Indra. “It is a marker of cell proliferation. We don’t know for sure if it is a cause of cancer, but we suspect strongly that it is.” The protein has also been called a “master regulator” because it influences cell development in skin, teeth, the brain and immune system.

In storage tanks cooled by liquid nitrogen, the Indras maintain some human oral-cancer cell lines that overproduce CTIP2. With partners at OSU and the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, Gitali Indra leads studies on its role in the development of normal tissues as well as cancer. “CTIP2 is expressed in normal cells but at much lower levels,” she says.

Personal Proteomics

“A higher-than-normal level (of CTIP2) indicates that an individual could be at risk,” adds Arup. “If you are getting more than a normal detectable level, you could determine that she requires monitoring.”

The Indras’ work with cell lines is just the beginning. Before CTIP2 becomes useful in the doctor’s office, its function needs to be studied in animals and then human subjects. “We need to understand how disease progresses in animal models, how levels of a given biomarker are changing,” says Arup.

Moreover, no protein acts alone. Each operates in a network. So the ideal biosensor will be capable of monitoring many proteins at once. The hope is that such devices will enable every person to have a composite protein profile, a biochemical fingerprint, for evaluating health as we age.

Researchers will need better technology to reach that goal. While the Indras can analyze CTIP2 and other proteins through existing laboratory techniques, their efforts bump up against detection limits. A better way to fish for proteins would enable them to pick out one molecule among thousands and to see small but possibly significant trends. Just as the Indras identify biomarkers and the Remcho lab develops ways to catch them, Ethan Minot is working on a new type of fishing line for CTIP2 — a more sensitive detection system made of carbon nanotubes.

Planting Nanotubes

These slender threads of pure carbon are hollow and so tiny that they are invisible to the naked eye, even under the most powerful light microscope. And they bring a valuable benefit to protein detection: They conduct electricity with such sensitivity that physicists can measure the tiny change in electric current that occurs when a single molecule lands on their surface. That makes them good candidates for the kind of detection system needed by the Indras and other molecular biologists. However, despite their size, making and developing a nanotube-based detection system is no small matter.

Ethan Minot and his team use light to analyze the structure of carbon nanotubes grown in the lab. (Photo: Jan Sonnenmair)

With support from the Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute (ONAMI) and OSU start-up funds, Minot has established a lab in the OSU Department of Physics for studying nanotubes and graphene (one-atom thick carbon sheets). He and his team sow nanotube “seeds” — catalysts that sequester carbon atoms from gases such as methane and ethylene — onto a silicon chip. At about 900 degrees Centigrade, carbon nanotubes grow in only a few minutes.

But it can take hours of painstaking work to determine exactly what kind of tubes the researchers have made. “When you bind carbon atoms together into the nanotube structure, there are at least 100 different ways to do it. So the diameter can be different and every one has slightly different properties,” says Minot. Carbon bonds also take a variety of angles as they grow. These so-called chiral angles affect the way a nanotube conducts electricity and binds to other molecules.

Fortunately, physicists have more than a few tricks up their sleeves. After they remove the chip from the furnace, they load it into a machine that has become standard in labs that manipulate matter at this scale: the atomic force microscope. The device can “see” structures smaller than the wavelength of visible light. Its fine-tipped needle creeps slowly across a surface and deflects ever so slightly when it comes close to a nanotube. The resulting map — mountains, valleys and objects on the molecular landscape — reveals the location and length of every nanotube on the surface.

But researchers aren’t done. It takes another step — analysis of each nanotube by lasers tuned to precise frequencies — to determine the angle of the carbon bonds, which is key to the nanotube’s electrical properties. Working with the Remcho and Indra labs, Minot and his team are developing ways to bind small molecules — the bait — to nanotubes and then detect biomarkers such as CTIP2 — the fish — in a simple saline solution.

Something that has so far eluded the Minot lab’s grasp is the successful detection of a protein in a blood sample. “If you have a mixture that you’re sensing, like real blood, there are thousands of different types of proteins. Most of them you want to bounce right off the sensor. One out of a thousand (proteins) has the right chemical structure to stick to it. That’s the ideal situation,” he adds. “Sensors will pick up anything unless you treat the surface correctly.”

Out of the Lab

Members of Minot’s and Remcho’s labs and a colleague at UC Santa Barbara reported in January 2012 that they had succeeded in nearly tripling the speed of a prototype detection system. Their advance stemmed from preventing proteins from sticking to other surfaces in the system.

“To increase detection speed, we relied a lot on surface treatments that can stop proteins from sticking where they shouldn’t,” says Minot. “Our next step is to make specific proteins stick to the nanotube. There’s an element on the nanotube that will click onto an element on the aptamers (the bait for catching proteins). We prepare the nanotube in a reactive state and the aptamers with reactive ‘handles’ and wait for them to find each other.”

While refining biosensor chemistry is hard enough, the electronics present another major hurdle. “If anything stops this from being commercialized from the electronics point of view,” Minot adds, “it’s the fact that if you wait a half hour, there are slow changes in baseline resistance. When we do an experiment, it might last five minutes, and we bind proteins onto the surface in that amount of time. We see a very clear signal over that period of time.

“But commercial devices don’t have the same luxury as a research experiment. They don’t have a grad student, who knows exactly what’s going on, watching over it. Can this thing be automated, take the human interpretation out of it? That’s a big challenge.”

Meanwhile, Oregon businesses are expressing interest in OSU’s developing technologies. Minot is working with Voxtel in Beaverton on methods for controlling nanotube properties in manufacturing. And a company known as mAbDx Inc., a spinoff from the University of Oregon, has taken an option on an antibody to CTIP2 based on work by the Indras and Leid.

Not Just Nanotubes

Nanotubes are just one of the technologies in development. Other approaches at OSU include magnetized “nanobeads,” the focus in Pallavi Dhagat’s lab in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Working with Remcho’s group, Dhagat has developed a way to turn ferromagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles, extraordinarily tiny pieces of rust, into sensors. Such particles not only can detect chemicals with sensitivity and selectivity, but they can be incorporated into a system of integrated circuits to instantly display the findings. The applications could extend to homeland security and environmental monitoring as well as to medical diagnostics.

Meanwhile, the search for faster, affordable, sensitive and accurate diagnostic tools is ongoing. At Caltech researchers have proposed a multi-protein testing method in which a blood sample is washed across a chip. They generate a mosaic of colors, each one associated with a different protein. A Boston University group is measuring changes in light waves propagating across a metallic surface designed to bind proteins.

“It doesn’t have to be nanotubes,” says Minot. “Maybe somebody else is going to get it. But there’s a lot of excitement that we’re moving this way. Someone is going to nail it.” And when they do, the proteins that betray us will have nowhere to hide.

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Feb. 22, 2013, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania report a nanotube-based technique for early detection of prostate cancer.

Illustration by Mary Susan Weldon

One sunny spring afternoon, friends sat together in the backyard of a Corvallis home sipping wine, bemoaning the recent hike in gas prices to $3.50 per gallon. Among them were a former product-development specialist for Hewlett-Packard and an Oregon State University chemist. Perhaps inspired by the bioethanol in their glasses, what might happen, they wondered, if they could turn local agricultural by-products — grass and wheat straw, fruit and vegetable processing wastes — into fuel? Thus was born the idea for a new company, Trillium FiberFuels.

They didn’t intend to compete against the rapidly expanding corn-ethanol industry. As of 2010, more than 200 facilities, mostly in the Midwest, were churning out about 13.5 billion gallons of corn ethanol a year. The Trillium co-founders’ hope was that they would develop a more environmentally sustainable product (lower greenhouse-gas emissions, less water pollution), provide another revenue source for rural Oregon land-owners and contribute to the national energy goal of producing 36 billion gallons of biofuel annually by 2022. Trillium had entered the cellulosic-ethanol business.

Priority No. 1 for any new company is to stay alive. So Trillium succeeded in competing for federal and state grants and spun off another small business along the way (Cascade Analytical Reagents and Biochemicals). In a small wood-frame building just off Highway 99 north of Corvallis, the company has developed a method (known as xylose isomerization) to ferment the 20 percent to 40 percent of plant biomass that resists being turned into ethanol by yeast. Trillium president Chris Beatty credits research by OSU Distinguished Professor Stephen Giovannoni, who isolated and sequenced the genome of a microorganism used in the company’s experiments.

The goal is to produce cellulosic ethanol at a competitive price and ramp up production quickly. “If you’re going to make a dent in this business, it’s either grow big or stay home,” says Vince Remcho, Trillium co-founder, OSU professor of chemistry and affiliate scientist with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Other co-founders include Beatty, Steve Potochnik and Grant Pease, all with former or current ties to HP.

Priming the Pump

Trillium isn’t the only business collaborating with OSU to have grand ambitions. Spun directly out of research or boosted by patented OSU technology, others are aiming to grab significant shares of business and consumer markets. Some of their products are already coming off farm fields and manufacturing lines.

Through their relationships with OSU, these and other companies create jobs, diversify the Oregon economy and respond to market demands for more sustainable, consumer-driven technologies. And in turn, OSU benefits. Students gain experience through internships. Faculty stay up-to-date on industry practice. And licensing revenues provide new research funds. “The purpose of our efforts is impact,” says Ron Adams, executive associate vice president for research. “It relates to our land grant mission, so we’re furthering economic development and social progress. We’re partnering in R&D that will result in new products and business opportunities.”

Still, working with businesses isn’t like serving students or competing for research grants. Adams and others are mindful that entrepreneurs and business managers face rapidly changing risks and protect their interests accordingly. “The people who are investing their lives and money in those enterprises are not depending totally on us to get it done,” Adams says. “If you’re an entrepreneur running one of these companies, you want 100 percent control.”

While companies do look to universities for innovation and skilled, well-educated employees, “we’re not an economic development organization,” adds Brian Wall, director of the Office of Commercialization and Corporate Development. “We are an economic driver through our graduates, research partnerships and licensing. We’re always on the lookout for discoveries that offer opportunities for commercialization and new business investment. This is an important area of growth and impact.”

The rules that define that process — agreements on copyright, licensing, royalties and other steps — are based on policies created by the Oregon State Board of Higher Education.

Show Me the Money

Private-sector partnerships show up as support for problem-oriented research. Nationally, according to the National Science Foundation, industry funded nearly 6 percent of the roughly $55 billion in research performed in institutions of higher education in 2009. At Oregon State in 2011, studies funded directly by industry totaled about $5.4 million, or 2 percent of the university’s $261.7 million in grants and contracts. However, that doesn’t include contributions from research gifts, agricultural commodity groups, the forest-products industry and testing services, which bring the total close to $13 million, or about 5 percent.

What about return on investment? Perhaps the most dramatic comes from the agricultural sciences, which helped Oregon farmers and ranchers to earn a record $5.2 billion in farm-gate sales in 2011. Oregon beef topped the list as the state’s most valuable agricultural commodity. Ranchers have a long history of working with OSU researchers through Agricultural Experiment Stations in animal and rangeland science on feed, herd health and cattle management.

Impact also comes from fledgling startup companies like Trillium. Over the past eight years, new OSU-assisted companies have raised $160 million in private investment and created 350 jobs, says Rick Spinrad, vice president for research. New businesses proceed through stages, he adds, from research-inspired startup to venture-funded, revenue-producing and growth-focused.

At every step is a major hurdle: money to pay for product development, market analysis and management expertise. Among the sources of funding that help young companies transition from one stage to another are the Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute (ONAMI), the Oregon Built Environment and Sustainable Technologies Center (BEST) and the OSU University Venture Development Fund. The latter leverages tax-deductible contributions from private citizens. The OSU Foundation conducts fundraising, and the OSU Research Office manages investments. Recent examples include:

• Ultra-high-temperature water pasteurization for another startup, Home Dialysis Plus ($182,700)
• Market analysis of a landmark new LCD display by Inpria Corporation ($100,000)
• Development of a thermal energy storage system by a new company, Applied Exergy ($148,514)
• Proof-of-concept display for a new type of diode that could replace silicon and reduce energy, leading to a new company, Amorphyx ($150,000)

Trillium FiberFuels, meanwhile, announced in April 2012 that it received a $150,000 Small Business Technology Transfer grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to develop a commercial-scale enzyme production process for the cellulosic biofuels industry. Based on manganese peroxidase, which is found naturally in white-rot fungi, the new process emerged from the lab of OSU researchers Christine Kelly and Curtis Lajoie. The company has also received funding from sources such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Agriculture, ONAMI and Oregon BEST.

“There is a reason to invest in research in biofuels,” says Remcho. “It will play a role in U.S. and worldwide energy needs in the future. So it’s coming. We just need to do it intelligently.”

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The Oregon State College of Engineering partners with businesses from HP to Azuray Technologies to deliver solutions for product development.

Xihou Yin, president, AGAE Technologies (Photo: Karl Maasdam)

AGAE Technologies

Surfactants enhance cleaning, dispersion and emulsification in paints, household cleaners and other products. However, many are known to be toxic. Based on research in the Oregon State College of Pharmacy, AGAE Technologies has developed a biological method for producing surfactants that are environmentally benign and biodegradable. Based on licensed OSU technology, the new product is known as a “rhamnolipid” and is produced by a strain of the common bacterium, Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

Scott Gilbert, left, chief technology officer, and Todd Miller, president of Microflow CVO (Photo: Karl Maasdam)

Microflow CVO

The problem seems simple: mix two liquids with consistently uniform results. Manufacturers usually perform this step in vats where batches of liquids are stirred and then processed. Through research in OSU’s Microproducts Breakthrough Institute, Microflow CVO has developed stainless-steel micromixers that achieve high-quality mixtures by pushing liquids through channels slightly larger than a human hair. The dime-sized devices can be scaled and adapted to manufacturing needs in the pharmaceutical, petrochemical and personal-care product industries.

Applied Exergy
Renewable energy sources tend to be intermittent: They produce power when the sun shines or the wind blows. Based on research in the OSU College of Engineering and the Microproducts Breakthrough Institute, Applied Exergy is developing methods for storing energy as “low-grade heat,” temperatures from 40 to 80 degrees Centigrade. The technology has multiple applications: energy recovery from steam plumes, integration with carbon capture systems and energy storage for use during peak demand.