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Photo courtesy of Trevor Dameika for The Stute

Stevens Professors awarded National Science Foundation award

This year, Dr. Weina Meng, Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Ocean Engineering, and Dr. Hang Liu, Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, were awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) award. Created by Congress in the 1950s, the award is “to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense,” and to drive exceptional scientific research and provide adequate funding for it.

Dr. Meng is currently focusing on a cheaper waterproof alternative for commercial cementitious materials often used in construction in her project “Consecutive Assembly-and-Mineralization Processed Calcium-Silicate-Hydrate Nacre with High Specific Flexural Strength and Fracture Toughness.” Dr. Liu is focusing on more efficient graphing analytics in his project, “An Algorithm and System Co-Designed Framework for Graph Sampling and Random Walk on GPUs.” His research can provide researchers and academics with an upper hand at providing graphs with a “trillion edge-scale.”

The Stute reached out to both Dr. Meng and Dr. Liu via email for a question and answer interview; responses are provided below.

Dr. Meng

Q: What prompted you to start your research on the properties of cementitious materials? When did this all begin? 

“After 7 years BS and MS study of civil engineering, I realized the concrete material is the key to realize the sustainable and resilient civil engineering infrastructure. So, I came to U.S. and started my PhD study and conducted research on cementitious materials since September 2012.”

Q: Did you test out any other waterproof materials before you started working with the Calcium-Silicate-Hydrate Nacre? How did you conclude that the combination of these elements would turn out to be perfectly waterproof? 

“I have intensively been working on ultra-high-performance concrete (UHPC) for 8 years. The UHPC is a waterproof material. The calcium-silicate-hydrate (CSH) nacre is the material using cementitious materials and polymers to mimic the architecture of natural nacre. The resulting CSH nacre has similar properties of natural nacre (e.g., high toughness, high cracking resistance, lightweight, and perfectly waterproof).”

Q: What was the hardest step you and your team had to overcome while developing the CSH nacre? How many trials and errors have you all encountered during this project? 

“All steps are hard. To develop a new material, at least 1000 trials are needed.”

Q: How long have you and your team been working on this CSH nacre? 

“Two years.”

Q: Do you see your CSH nacre replacing current commercial precast elements in the future?

“Yes. The success of this research will enable cement-based materials to achieve a crack resistance as high as that of natural nacre, which will tremendously enhance the resilience, sustainability, and durability of civil structural elements such as (i) prefabricated walls and panels of buildings (or reactors), (ii) lining of tunnels (or pipelines), (iii) permanent formwork of bridges, (iv) solar panels, and (v) offshore wind farms, and other structures while minimizing the need for reinforcement with steel bars.”

Dr. Liu

Q: How long has your research in developing efficient graph analytics been going on?

“Around ten years.”

Q: Can you explain in more detail what you mean by “graph sampling and random walk methods” and how it makes graph analysis easier for those in the research/academic fields?

“Graph sampling means using Monte Carlo Sampling methods to select a subset of edges or vertices from the original graph. Random walk is more self-explanatory. It starts from a source vertex, and randomly walks on the graph. ‘Graph sampling and random walk’ makes the graph smaller – thus the graph analytics easier.”

Q: Can you envision companies adopting your research methods in the near future?

“This research can help high-performance graph analytics that can be used to address the grand challenges of our time such as understanding the spread of pandemics, designing extremely large-scale integrated circuits and uncovering software vulnerabilities among many others. Therefore, I believe the national labs, EAD and security companies could benefit from this research.”

Given their responses, Dr. Meng and Dr. Liu have spent a tremendous amount of time, study, and research into their projects. They are hoping their efforts may change the current methods being practiced in their respective fields. Dr. Meng is confident her research will cause building/transportation companies to switch over using her cost efficient, waterproof resilient nacre. Likewise, Dr. Liu is confident in companies adopting his research of optimizing graph analytics. His project can greatly help researchers understand, for example, the spread of a pandemic if presented on a smaller scale, making it easier to analyze its trends over time. Both of their projects are expected to be in progress through 2026.

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