Trask Innovation Fund, Proof of Concept Fund finance projects to improve food packaging, antibacterial therapeutics, machine learning and battery technology.

Xiaoping Bao, assistant professor from the Davidson School of Chemical Engineering, has improved upon traditional methods to produce off-the-shelf human immune cells that show strong antitumor activity, according to a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Cell Reports.

Davidson School of Chemical Engineering Professor Vilas Pol has been awarded $50,000 from the Trask Innovation Fund for the continued development of his novel research in developing solid-state, lithium-ion batteries.

Ethan Adams, a third-year Ph.D student in the Davidson School of Chemical Engineering, has received the Department of Defense (DOD) Science, Mathematics, and Research for Transformation (SMART) scholarship for his research on low-temperature batteries. This highly prestigious award will provide Ethan with full tuition, a stipend, summer internships, and a full-time position with the DOD Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) in Philadelphia where he also completed a summer internship in 2021.

Tianfan Jin, a graduate student working with ChE’s Brett Savoie, uses Purdue Research Computing’s new Bell GPU nodes with machine learning tools to predict and automatically interpret chemical reactions.