WINTER 2025
ON THE COVER Floating offshore wind turbines spanning more than 250 meters in height may one day tap into the more than 4,200 gigawatts of wind power capacity that exists off the coast of the United States – equivalent to three times the amount of electricity consumed in the U.S. each year (see story on page 4). ABOVE Members of Oregon State’s Robotic Decision-Making Laboratory. Back row left to right: Colin Mitchell (PhD student), Rakesh Vivekanandan (PhD student), Evan Palmer (PhD student), Robin Singh (MS student), Grey Brady (MS student), Ian Rankin (PhD student). Front row left to right: Akshaya Agrawal (PhD student), Emily Scheide (PhD student), Geoff Hollinger (professor of robotics), Scott Chow (PhD student), Parker Meyer (undergraduate) (see story on page 10). COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING Oregon State University 101 Covell Hall Corvallis, OR 97331 541-737-3101 engineering.oregonstate.edu OREGON STATE ENGINEERING is published by the College of Engineering at Oregon State University. Comments and questions about this publication can be sent to the editor at editor@engr.oregonstate.edu EDITOR Chris Palmer CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Steve Frandzel, Keith Hautala, Steve Lundeberg, Rachel Robertson GRAPHIC DESIGNER Johanna Carson COPY EDITOR Keith Hautala PHOTOGRAPHERS Ellie Lafferty, Karl Maasdam Contents PAGES 2–3 EXPLORING WASTEWATER’S ROLE IN ANTIMICROBIAL RESISTANCE PAGES 4–7 BOUNDLESS OFFSHORE WIND ENERGY FLOATING INTO THE COUNTRY’S FUTURE PAGES 8–9 MAKING AI SMARTER ABOUT ENERGY USE PAGES 10–11 ROBOT SWARMS TO EXPLORE MELTING ICE SHELVES PAGE 12 FIRST NEW PLANT HARDINESS MAP IN MORE THAN A DECADE PAGE 13 AI-POWERED SELF-TEST TO LET EPILEPSY PATIENTS SKIP BLOOD DRAWS, LONG WAITS
At the Oregon State University College of Engineering, we don’t just study and create to keep things locked in a lab. We work hard so that our research and innovations have real-world applications. That effort is why the university’s focus on big discoveries for big solutions aligns perfectly with what we do and who we are. The new Oregon State strategic plan, Prosperity Widely Shared, homes in on five specific research areas, each featuring the work of Oregon State Engineers. We are collaborating across disciplines and across campus to make big things happen for widespread and lasting solutions: • In robotics, we are leading a national team to create an underwater robotic swarm capable of exploring the cavities under ice shelves to measure glacial melt. • In integrated health and biotechnology, artificial intelligence fuels a new device to test whether the 3.4 million people with epilepsy in the U.S. are taking the optimal dose of their essential medications. Our researchers are also tracking antibiotics, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and their genes after they reach wastewater systems throughout the United States. • In climate science and related solutions, our PRISM climate group supported the most detailed and accurate update ever of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Plant Hardiness Zone map — a resource used by over 80 million gardeners nationwide. • In clean energy, floating offshore wind energy generation becomes more attainable on the West Coast when we study and test platform prototypes at 1/50 scale — especially when we have the O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory at hand to test them in a variety of sea conditions. But the cleanest energy is the energy you save, and Oregon State Engineers are working on incorporating just the right electronic materials and devices into computer chips to reduce the overall energy needed to run data centers and to power artificial intelligence. This has a huge impact, considering that the world’s data centers use more energy than some countries. I love it when science leaves our facilities and impacts real lives for the better. I’m excited to see if energy-efficient computer chips, an epilepsy dosage device, and floating wind energy devices can become widely used products, much like the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone map. Oregon State innovations and discoveries will help the world sustainably greet a bright, thriving future. Go Beavs! Scott A. Ashford, Ph.D., P.E. (California) Kearney Dean of Engineering Oregon State University College of Engineering EMBRACING OREGON STATE’S NEW STRATEGIC PLAN, PROSPERITY WIDELY SHARED
WINTER 2025 OREGON STATE ENGINEERING 2 An Oregon State University researcher will receive $2.35 million from the Environmental Protection Agency to explore what happens to antibiotics, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and their genes after they reach wastewater systems throughout the United States. The work by Tala Navab-Daneshmand, associate professor of environmental engineering, is part of a $9 million federal effort to learn more about the resistance that pathogens develop to the drugs used to combat them. EXPLORING WASTEWATER’S ROLE IN ANTIMICROBIAL RESISTANCE The EPA describes antimicrobial resistance in the environment as a growing health concern, especially as bacteria and their antibiotic-resistance genes spread into surface water. The microbes and genes can travel freely among people, animals, and the environment, and the result is that certain infections become less responsive to medicine. Wastewater treatment facilities are a major receptor and source for antibiotic-resistant bacteria and antibiotic-resistance genes, the EPA says. The facilities collect a blend of pathogens, resistance genes, and antimicrobial drug residues from a
3 OREGON STATE ENGINEERING WINTER 2025 range of sources including industry wastewater, households, and hospitals, all of which play a role in the high density of pathogens that reach a wastewater utility. Treated wastewater is typically discharged into aquatic environments, making those environments potential mechanisms for transmitting resistant pathogens and their determinant genes to people and animals through irrigation, recreation, or drinking water. Treatment processes for drinking water are generally effective in eliminating antibiotic-resistant bacteria and their determinant genes, but both have been detected in treated drinking water, the EPA notes. Because the bacteria and genes evolve quickly and move around easily, it is hard to predict where and when resistance occurs. Over two years, the research team, which includes Tyler Radniecki, professor of environmental engineering, Gerrad Jones, assistant professor of biological and ecological engineering, and Manuel Garcia-Jaramillo of the College of Agricultural Sciences, will study 40 wastewater treatment utilities serving areas with varied geographic conditions, population demographics, and wastewater sources. Researchers will collect samples from throughout the wastewater and biosolids treatment trains. The group will also conduct a systematic review of literature on U.S.-based wastewater metagenomic data, create a comprehensive library for the data, and perform analyses to understand the impacts of seasonal and regional variations and treatment processes on antimicrobial resistance in wastewater. “Our work will contribute to a better understanding of how wastewater treatment processes affect the proliferation and removal of antimicrobial resistance markers in a national-scale project,” NavabDaneshmand said. Tala Nava-Daneshmand (right) with former graduate student Genevieve Schutzius.
WINTER 2025 OREGON STATE ENGINEERING 4 BOUNDLESS OFFSHORE WIND ENERGY FLOATING INTO THE COUNTRY’S FUTURE In 2023, wind turbines generated upwards of 425,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity in the United States, enough to run more than 39 million average American homes. Wind is the country’s largest renewable energy source, representing about 10% of all electricity production. Most of it comes from landbased wind turbines; the remainder, a negligible amount, comes from offshore turbines along the East Coast. Yet our offshore wind energy has barely been tapped, according to the Wind Energy Technologies Office, which estimates that potential U.S. offshore wind power capacity exceeds 4,200 gigawatts, or 13,500 terawatthours annually. That’s three times the amount of electricity consumed every year in the United States. “Wind over land can be disrupted by terrain, buildings, trees, and other irregularities that slow it down and diminish its quality as an energy source,” said Bryson Robertson, professor of coastal and ocean engineering and director of the Pacific Marine Energy Center. “These aren’t factors with offshore wind.” There is a catch: Two-thirds of those unimpeded offshore winds blow over West Coast waters ranging from 500 to 1,500 meters deep. Fixed-bottom wind turbines are limited to depths of about 60 meters. Anything deeper and they must be mounted on floating platforms moored to the seabed — a more technically challenging and more costly solution. A handful of floating wind turbines have been operating in European waters for several years, most prominently in the North Sea. Their combined power output is modest (though it’s on the rise), and they operate in water depths ranging from 60 to 300 meters, but which skew toward the shallower end. “The water is much deeper off the West Coast; the waves are larger, longer, and more energetic,” said Pedro Lomonaco, director of Oregon State’s O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Lab and a research team member. “Those factors have to be considered when designing and testing floating platforms. The designs used in the North Sea may be suitable for those locations, but they may not be optimal for our area.” But designing, building, deploying, and testing operating prototypes is prohibitively expensive, logistically difficult, and time-consuming. Scaleddown simulations offer a “Wind over land can be disrupted by terrain, buildings, trees, and other irregularities that slow it down and diminish its quality as an energy source — these aren’t factors with offshore wind.” Bryson Robertson, professor of coastal and ocean engineering and director of the Pacific Marine Energy Center
5 OREGON STATE ENGINEERING more flexible and affordable alternative, Robertson explains. “We want to be able to test the technology quickly, accurately, and inexpensively without the need to build multimilliondollar machines and test them in the ocean,” he said. Robertson is the co-principal investigator of a study to explore the effectiveness of coupling physical experiments with numerical modeling. The resulting hybrid simulation was used to evaluate the performance of a floating wind turbine model at the Hinsdale wave lab. “There’s no reason researchers can’t come here to test a variety of different floating platform configurations to understand their performance characteristics.” In the study, Robertson and his colleagues built a 1/50 scale model of a floating wind platform. The model includes the turbine mast but not the blades. They subjected the tripodal, semi-submersible design to a range of sea conditions in the wave lab’s multidirectional wave tank. Results of the open-source study, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, will be made available to anyone. “We first needed to determine what hydrodynamic tests to run in the wave tank. Then we had to figure out the best ways to measure and characterize the model’s responses so that the results could be used to predict how a full-scale floating platform would behave in the open ocean,” Lomonaco said. But something different was needed to determine the impact of wind. Because aerodynamic and hydrodynamic forces are measured using different scales that cannot be reconciled in physical models, wind forces had to be generated numerically. To accomplish that, the researchers employed a robotic arm to manipulate the mast of the scaled-down wind turbine that arises from the floating platform, explained Ted Brekken, a professor of electrical and computer engineering who focused on internal control systems for the study. “The water is much deeper off the West Coast; the waves are larger, longer, and more energetic — those factors have to be considered when designing and testing floating platforms. The designs used in the North Sea may be suitable for those locations, but they may not be optimal for our area.” Pedro Lomonaco, director of Oregon State’s O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Lab and research team member
WINTER 2025 OREGON STATE ENGINEERING 6 “The robotic arm, which is controlled by a computer running a wind turbine simulation, pushes and pulls the top of the tower and produces the same forces that a spinning turbine would,” Brekken said. “The rest of the system doesn’t ‘know’ that there isn’t a spinning turbine up there.” “The hybrid capability of combining physical testing with numerical computation will greatly benefit research for floating offshore wind, because it can drive down the cost of testing the structures,” Robertson said. During tests, however, the robotic arm was not able to adjust to the quickly changing motions of the system. Once funding for the next phase of the study becomes available, a more responsive robotic arm will be installed to improve the accuracy of the wave-wind-structure interactions. “We were able to show that it’s possible to accurately replicate the motion of the platforms — aerodynamic forces included — in what we would call operational sea and wind states, with predictable winds and predictable waves,” Robertson said. “But what we really need to determine is what happens in heavy seas, strong winds, or catastrophic failures, like if a mooring line breaks or a turbine blade snaps. That’s the kind of information that will drive the actual structural design of full-size platforms.” The floating turbines envisioned for the West Coast will be enormous. The platforms are likely to span 100 meters or more and weigh thousands of tons. Their masts will reach 150 meters tall, and each turbine blade will be longer than a football field. The structures will reside 20 to 30 miles offshore in tracts leased by the federal government; even at those grand heights, they will not be overtly visible from the mainland. Big and tall are desirable attributes for offshore wind turbines. The wind becomes more consistent as altitude increases, and the higher the blades reach, the more wind will hit them, which translates “The robotic arm, which is controlled by a computer running a wind turbine simulation, pushes and pulls the top of the tower and produces the same forces that a spinning turbine would. The rest of the system doesn’t ‘know’ that there isn’t a spinning turbine up there.” Ted Brekken, professor of electrical and computer engineering
7 OREGON STATE ENGINEERING into lower costs per megawatt-hour, Robertson noted. The DOE estimates that the cost of building and installing commercial-scale floating wind farms will be about 50% more than the cost of comparable fixed-bottom arrays, but that they will eventually become economically viable. And because larger turbines produce more energy than smaller ones, fewer units will be needed to generate more electricity, creating economies of scale and further suppressing costs. The energy industry expects that a single floating turbine off the West Coast will generate about 15 megawatts. Currently, the largest fixed-bottom offshore turbines produce about 6 MW, while typical onshore turbines produce 2-3 MW. “Among the challenges for offshore wind is that the platforms are incredibly large, they’re incredibly expensive, and they require a significant amount of port infrastructure that just doesn’t exist yet on the West Coast,” Robertson said. He calls the dilemma a technology option without an infrastructure solution, but there may be ways to change that. “Right now, floating offshore wind platforms are a version of oil and gas platforms with some version of a terrestrial wind turbine bolted on top,” Robertson said. “I think there are huge opportunities to look at new ways to design and build them as a single device from top to bottom that doesn’t require massive port infrastructure.” Robertson and Lomonaco are quick to acknowledge that there is an ongoing discussion about the scale, timing, and applicability of offshore wind deployment in Oregon. Even with the most aggressive timelines, they anticipate that the first full-scale floating turbines won’t start operating off the West Coast for at least 10 years. In addition to the technological barriers that must be surmounted, other factors, such as social, environmental, and community concerns, also must be addressed. “One of my goals as the director of PMEC is to broaden the engagement in our activities across the university so we aren’t perceived as just an engineering center, but as a place where we do a lot of work on ecological, social, and environmental fronts and on the business aspects of developing this technology,” Roberston said. “Floating offshore wind power on the West Coast is going to happen with or without us at Oregon State,” Lomonaco said. “The difference is that by doing the work we’re doing here, we will be part of the process and contribute to solutions, taking into consideration technical, economic, and social aspects, so that wind power can become an even more important source of renewable energy.” OPPOSITE Oregon State researchers delivered simulated wind movements to a wave energy device by programming a robotic arm to push and pull the mast of a 1/50 scale device. BELOW Former graduate student Akiri Seki monitors the operation of the robotic arm supported by scaffolding in the multidirectional wave tank of the O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Lab.
8 WINTER 2025 OREGON STATE ENGINEERING of electrical and computer engineering, this research aims to shrink the electricity footprint of AI technologies. Chae’s work centers on chips built on a novel material platform that integrates computation and data storage, mimicking the way biological neural networks handle information. By employing components known as memristors — short for memory resistors — these chips are designed to compute tasks in memory. This minimizes the energy-intensive process of moving data between memory and processors, resulting in a more energy-efficient operation. “With the emergence of AI, computers are forced to rapidly process and store large amounts of data. AI chips designed to compute tasks in memory can already account for about 2% of all electricity use in the United States. Projections indicate that AI technology alone could account for 0.5% of global energy consumption by 2027, using as much energy annually as the entire country of the Netherlands. As the demand for AI continues to soar, the need for energy-efficient solutions is becoming increasingly urgent. MEMRISTORS INCREASE EFFICIENCY One of the groundbreaking projects focuses on developing an innovative AI chip that could enhance energy efficiency up to six times over the current industry standard. Led by Sieun Chae, assistant professor In a world increasingly driven by artificial intelligence and data centers, the demand for energyefficient technologies has never been more critical. Researchers at Oregon State University are at the forefront of research to find solutions, developing groundbreaking computer chips that significantly reduce energy consumption. Data centers, which house critical IT infrastructure for processing and applications, can consume up to 50 times more energy per square foot than typical office buildings. According to the International Energy Agency, data centers currently account for about 1-2% of global electricity demand, a figure that is expected to grow. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that data centers MAKING AI SMARTER ABOUT ENERGY USE
9 OREGON STATE ENGINEERING WINTER 2025 various nonlinear functions, materials with wider-range memory effect, and strategies for integration with existing silicon technology,” Chae said. BREAKTHROUGH IN PHOTONICS Another significant research initiative addresses energy usage in data centers and supercomputers through advancements in photonic chips. This collaboration with Baylor University researchers focuses on a new method that compensates for temperature variations that can degrade the performance of photonic chips, which utilize light particles instead of electrons for data transmission. John Conley, a professor of electrical and computer engineering whose research specializes in electronic materials and devices, worked with colleagues to develop prototypes that control gate voltage, potentially reducing the energy required for temperature control by a factor of one million. This breakthrough addresses a primary shortcoming of photonic chips, which previously required substantial energy to maintain optimal temperatures for performance. “Our method is much more acceptable for the planet. It will perform AI tasks more energy efficiently,” Chae said. This research, funded by the National Science Foundation, used memristors based on a new material system known as entropy-stabilized oxides, which allow for finely tuned memory capabilities by incorporating multiple elements. This optimization not only improves energy efficiency but also enables artificial neural networks to process time-dependent information, such as audio and video data. Chae’s findings were recently published in Nature Electronics, highlighting the significant potential for these advanced chips to reshape the landscape of AI technology. Chae also published a “Perspective” article touting the memristors’ potential for efficient data processing in machine learning tasks in the Aug. 12 issue of Applied Physics Letters. Chae’s research on memristors began while she was working toward her doctorate in materials science and engineering at the University of Michigan, which she completed in 2022. She joined the faculty at Oregon State in December 2023, where she will continue to create solutions for AI and other intensive computing applications. “For the future, I plan to develop new materials that can mimic one day allow data centers to keep getting faster and more powerful while using less energy, enabling applications driven by machine learning — such as ChatGPT — without feeling guilty,” Conley said. The implications of these projects extend far beyond the lab. Creating more efficient computer chips and improving thermal management not only lowers operational costs but also decreases the environmental footprint of these technologies. The success of these initiatives relies heavily on collaboration between academia, industry, and government. Oregon State University is actively seeking partnerships with tech companies and governmental agencies to translate research findings into practical applications. “Working together with industry leaders, we can accelerate the adoption of energy-efficient technologies and make a real impact on global energy consumption,” Conley said. OPPOSITE Sieun Chae (left) and graduate student Dipannita Ghosh. “Our method is much more acceptable for the planet. It will one day allow data centers to keep getting faster and more powerful while using less energy, enabling applications driven by machine learning — such as ChatGPT — without feeling guilty.” John Conley, professor of electrical and computer engineering
WINTER 2025 OREGON STATE ENGINEERING 10 Oregon State University researchers are leading a national team of scientists and engineers on a threeyear, $1.5 million project to develop and test a team of robots that could travel under ice shelves and collect critical measurements about the extent of ice cavities and surrounding ocean properties. The effort, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs, is designed to help advance underwater exploration in confined and hard-to-reach environments such as cavities under ice shelves. Warming ocean conditions are causing polar ice sheets and ice shelves, which are floating extensions of ice sheets, to melt rapidly and contribute to global sea level rise, but studying the impact of this phenomenon poses a significant challenge for researchers who have limited tools to physically reach dangerous and deep, distant cavities beneath ice using existing tools. “We need robots that can travel into these areas and also travel back out,” said Jessica Garwood, assistant professor of oceanography in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and the project’s co-principal investigator. ROBOT SWARMS TO EXPLORE MELTING ICE SHELVES Marine robotics is thriving at Oregon State, boosted by the university’s top-ranked oceanography program, facilities like the O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory, organizations like the Pacific Marine Energy Center and the PacWave facility under construction off the coast of Newport, Oregon, and the new Gaulke Center for Marine Innovation and Technology. But it’s not easy, says the project’s other co-principal investigator, Geoff Hollinger, professor of robotics and the Ron and Judy Adams Faculty Scholar. Land-based solutions for communication and perception don’t work very well underwater. Wi-Fi, cellphones, and GPS are useless in the ocean, and cameras operate only in clear conditions. The research team’s goal is to develop a system with a large “mothership” robot that will carry and deploy a swarm of smaller passenger robots that could spread out and explore the waters under a melting ice shelf or other hard-to-access locations. The robots would operate autonomously and be programmed with decision-making ability based on conditions. The “proof-of-concept” project includes building the deployment and recovery system for the parent robot and the swarm of passenger robots; developing hardware and protocols for Graduate students (left to right) Robin Singh, Collin Mitchell, and Emily Scheide test one of the many robots designed and built in the Robotic Decision-Making Laboratory.
11 OREGON STATE ENGINEERING WINTER 2025 communication and localization underwater; and navigation and decision-making algorithms that would allow the robots to adapt their behavior and data collection efforts based on the conditions they encounter. “Once the robots are deployed, they are on their own out there. They won’t be able to surface to send information, they will only be able to communicate with each other,” said Garwood, whose past work has involved putting robots in the ocean to investigate how ocean currents move small marine organisms. “So, the robots might be programmed to identify a freshwater signal coming from a melting glacier and follow that signal, for example.” As part of the project, the researchers plan to conduct a series of tests in freshwater, including a frozen lake in Oregon. “The immediate goal is to develop these tools and systems,” Garwood said. “The end goal is to get under ice shelves so we can investigate ice-ocean dynamics and monitor changes in ocean conditions. Such a system may also be effective in other environments, such as in the coastal ocean, where teams of resident robots could monitor ocean conditions and adapt their sampling behaviors to respond to specific subsurface signals, such as low oxygen waters.” Multi-robot systems already exist for aerial and ground environments, says Hollinger, who as director of Oregon State’s Robotic DecisionMaking Laboratory, leads several other projects focused on underwater robotic systems, including a system to autonomously perform inspection and maintenance operations for marine energy arrays, such as PacWave. “Existing systems cannot overcome the communication, sensing, and coordination challenges imposed by the under-ice environment,” Hollinger said. “Solving these problems and deploying in new environments has enormous potential to teach us about glaciers and the ocean.” The research team also includes Phil Lundrigan of Brigham Young University; Atsuhiro Muto of Temple University; Nicholas Rypkema of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; Yu She of Purdue University; and Xi Yu of West Virginia University. The project originated from a National Science Foundation-sponsored Ideas Lab workshop that brought together scientists from several disciplines, including robotics, polar science, oceanography, and engineering, to brainstorm innovative solutions to advance underwater science. Geoff Hollinger, professor of robotics and the Ron and Judy Adams Faculty Scholar “Existing systems cannot overcome the communication, sensing, and coordination challengs imposed by the ice environment. Solving these problems and deploying in new environments has enormous potential to teach us about glaciers and the ocean.” ABOVE One of Hollinger and team’s underwater vehicles, called Blue ROV2, will be re-designed to develop the mothership system for exploring confined, hard-to-reach environments such as cavities under ice shelves.
WINTER 2025 OREGON STATE ENGINEERING 12 In late 2023, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released its new Plant Hardiness Zone Map, the national standard by which gardeners can determine which plants are most likely to survive the coldest winter temperatures at a certain location. The USDA describes the latest map, jointly developed by Oregon State University’s PRISM Climate Group and the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, as the most accurate and detailed it has ever released. PRISM, part of the College of Engineering, stands for Parameter-elevation Regressions on Independent Slopes Model. The previous version of the plant hardiness map, also based on PRISM data, was released in January 2012. The new plant hardiness map incorporates data from 13,412 weather stations, compared to the 7,983 that were used for the 2012 edition. Viewable in a Geographic Information System-based interactive format, the map is based on 30-year averages (1991 to 2020) for the lowest annual winter temperatures within specified locations. The 2012 edition was based on averages from 1976 to 2005. Low temperature during the winter is a crucial factor in the survival of plants at specific locations. “The addition of many new stations and more sophisticated mapping techniques using the latest PRISM technology led to a more accurate and detailed Plant Hardiness Zone Map but also produced localized changes that are not climate related,” said Christopher Daly, professor of geospatial climatology and the founding director of the PRISM Climate Group. The plant hardiness map is divided into a total of 13 zones, each zone representing a 10-degreesFahrenheit range of temperatures. Each zone is further divided into two half zones, with each of those representing a 5-degree range. “Overall, the 2023 map is about 2.5 degrees warmer than the 2012 map across the conterminous United States,” Daly said. “This translated into about half of the country shifting to a warmer 5-degree half zone, and half remaining in the same half zone. The central plains and Midwest generally warmed the most, with the southwestern U.S. warming very little.” Accompanying the new map is a “Tips for Growers” feature that provides information about Agricultural Research Service programs likely to be of interest to gardeners and others who grow and breed plants. The approximately 80 million American gardeners and growers are the most frequent map users, according to the USDA. In addition, the USDA Risk Management Agency uses the map in setting certain crop insurance standards, and scientists incorporate the plant hardiness zones into research models, such as those looking at the spread of exotic weeds and insects. Average annual extreme minimum winter temperatures. FIRST NEW PLANT HARDINESS MAP IN MORE THAN A DECADE
13 OREGON STATE ENGINEERING WINTER 2025 Researchers at Oregon State University are poised to use saliva to make a personalized-medicine breakthrough for people with epilepsy thanks to a four-year, $1.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. The research team had already demonstrated a sensor system, based on microfluidics, for quickly analyzing the level of anti-seizure medicine in saliva and now will extend its work to create a device, powered by artificial intelligence, that’s designed to optimize dosing. Roughly 3.4 million people in the United States have epilepsy, including nearly half a million children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Epilepsy is a neurological disorder characterized by muscle spasms, convulsions, and loss of consciousness in addition to seizures. Anti-epileptic drugs, or AEDs, have been available for more than a century, but their optimal dose — high enough to control seizures and low enough not to create other problems — is typically within a narrow range that varies widely from patient to patient. Above that range they can become toxic to the point of causing poor muscle control, disorientation, hallucinations, and even coma. For a significant percentage of epilepsy patients, determining the right drug and the correct dose can be a long-term challenge, the researchers note. The standard way of measuring how much of a drug is in a patient’s system is with a blood test conducted in a laboratory, but the lag — it can be as much as several days from the time blood is drawn until the results are in — greatly limits the test’s usefulness for people on AEDs. Aiming to drastically shorten the turnaround time, College of Engineering researchers Stephen Ramsey, Elain Fu, and Matthew Johnston looked instead to saliva. “Saliva, which is easily and non-invasively accessed, has terrific potential for health monitoring,” said Fu, associate professor of chemical engineering and the Warwick Family Faculty Scholar. “But saliva also presents a challenge for the electrochemical detection of the drug because saliva has a complex composition that can result in signal interference.” That’s where artificial intelligence and machine learning come in, said Ramsey, associate professor of computer science with dual appointments in the College of Engineering and the Carlson College of Veterinary Medicine. AI will sort through the interference and help figure out the right dose on a person-by-person basis, he said. “We aim for patients to use this device at home,” Ramsey said. “The doctor would have access to an app that would show the patient’s medication levels over time, with information about when side effects and breakthrough seizures occurred. We envision that this will help identify the patient’s optimal dose.” Johnston, the other co-principal investigator, is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. SELF-TEST TO LET EPILEPSY PATIENTS SKIP BLOOD DRAWS, LONG WAITS AI-POWERED Left to right: Elain Fu and graduate students Khadijeh Khederlou and Noel Lefevre.
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