Shreyas Mandre wins HFSP grant

Shreyas Mandre, assistant professor of engineering, is part of an international research team awarded a Young Investigator Grant by the Human Frontier Science Program. The team will receive $350,000 in each of three years to study the mechanics of the human foot.

“Understanding the fundamental mechanics of the foot informs the fields of biotechnology, robotics and
human evolutionary biology,” Mandre said. “Our research in this field considers the interaction of the foot with uneven ground to investigate how humans maintain a stable running gait. The interdisciplinary and international nature of this research falls squarely within HFSP purview.”

The research is led by Madhusudhan Venkadesan, a biomechanician from the National Center for Biological Sciences in India, and in collaboration with Mahesh Bandi, a physicist at Japan’s Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. The researchers hope to shed light on evolution of bipedalism, a task possible only by combining the capabilities of the three team members.

“The goal of my lab is to develop simple but quantitatively accurate descriptions of phenomena with applications to energy, environment and biology,” Mandre said. “We welcome interdisciplinary collaboration with other groups and actively seek talented undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral researchers.”

“The interdisciplinary and international nature of this research overlaps perfectly with the research mission of the School of Engineering and Brown University,” said Larry Larson, dean of the School of Engineering.

Based in Strasbourg, France, the Human Frontier Science Program aims to promote basic research in the life sciences by funding researchers all over the world. This year, the organization awarded $34 million to 33 research teams that include scientists from 26 countries.

ARPA-E funds hydrokinetic work

Shreyas Mandre

A team of Brown University researchers has received a $750,000 grant to design an oscillating underwater wing that can capture energy from flowing water in rivers and tidal basins. The funding comes from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E), which funds breakthrough technologies that show fundamental technical promise but are too early for private-sector investment. “Marine and hydrokinetic energy is a vast renewable energy source,” said Shreyas Mandre, professor of engineering who will lead Brown’s effort with colleagues Kenneth Breuer in engineering and Heather Leslie in ecology and evolutionary biology. “The main advantage of hydrokinetic energy, unlike solar or wind power, is that the availability is predictable.” The wing would capture forces exerted on it by flowing water in much the same way airplane wings capture lift force from wind. “This lift force causes the hydrofoil to heave up and down periodically, and this motion can be used to generate electricity,” Mandre said. The award supports developing proof-of-concept for this potential technology, and complements current efforts to investigate the fundamental hydrodynamic mechanisms of energy conversion funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

Brown researchers honored with Seed Funds, Salomon Awards

Twelve individual faculty researchers, including the School of Engineering's Shreyas Mandre and four interdisciplinary research teams were honored with University grants. Competition for Seed Funds and Salomon Awards, administered by the Office of the Vice President for Research, allows researchers to develop promising projects for possible external funding.

Four interdisciplinary teams at Brown University have been awarded a total of $307,000 to pursue novel research projects, and a dozen faculty received individual research awards of up to $15,000.

The winning individuals and teams were recognized at a ceremony today (Monday, March 14, 2011) at the Stephen Robert Campus Center. The competitive grants come courtesy of the Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Awards and the Seed Funds administered by the Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR).

“The Seed Funds and Salomon Awards that are given each year are among the most important ways we have at Brown to let faculty start new research areas and build new research programs,” said Clyde Briant, vice president for research. “They cover all areas of research at Brown and thus affect the entire campus. Building new research programs is key to the constant revitalization of Brown’s research programs, which in turn makes us a highly attractive university for faculty and students.”

One of the twelve Salomon Award winners was Shreyas Mandre, an assistant professor in the School of Engineering who is working on the development of a research program in thermoacoustics. Thermoacoustic devices exploit the temperature changes associated with acoustic waves to convert between mechanical and thermal energy. Due to the thermodynamically reversible nature of sound, the energy conversion is efficient. The potential for innovation is far-reaching, with applications in matters of global interest such as water desalination, waste energy harvesting, and spot cooling of electronic circuits. Mandre’s research program, predominantly for undergraduate researchers, proposes scaling down these devices to the centimeter scale and using them to develop new thermoelectric materials, which would open doors to a new field of mechanics in thermoacoustic materials.

The Seed Funds program has been run by OVPR since 2003. It is designed to help faculty compete more successfully for large-scale, interdisciplinary, multi-investigator grants. Investigators may propose projects with budgets up to $100,000. To date, about $3.5 million in Seed Funds has been given to research projects. From that investment, the researchers have obtained, on average, 10 times more funding from outside sources, according to OVPR.

The Salomon Awards were established to support excellence in scholarly work by providing funding for selected faculty research projects of exceptional merit. Recipients receive as much as $15,000. The Salomon Awards have been administered by OVPR since 2003, and a total of about $1.8 million has been awarded to 117 faculty.

This year’s Seed Fund winners will explore whether particular bacteria can produce biodiesel fuels, the impact of agriculture on air quality and global warming in New England, urban governance in India, and new treatments for sudden cardiac death.

One of this year’s Seed Fund recipients is Meredith Hastings, assistant professor of geological sciences at the Environmental Change Initiative. She is teaming with Jianwu Tang, a scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory, to measure in real time the flow of nitrogen gases in the soil from agricultural practices in New England, in order to better understand agriculture’s effects on the region’s air quality and acid rain formation, as well as its role in producing greenhouse gases such as nitrous oxide.

“This funding is allowing Jim and me to start a collaboration and get some initial data that would make it possible for us to do external fundraising,” said Hastings, who joined the Brown faculty in 2008. “It’s a jumpstart to our collaboration and a way to seek even more funding later.”

At the ceremony, three former Seed Fund winners — Katherine Smith in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Mark Johnson in the Department of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry, and Gabriel Taubin in the School of Engineering — said financial support from the University was critical to advancing their research to the point where they had enough results to seek external funding.

The 12 Salomon Award winners:

• Laurel Bestock, assistant professor or archaeology;
• Linford Fisher, assistant professor of history;
• Rodrigo Fonseca, assistant professor of computer science;
• Sherine Hamdy, assistant professor of anthropology;
• Laura Kertz, assistant professor of cognitive, linguistic, and psychological sciences;
• Erica Larschan, assistant professor of biology, Department of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry;
• Shreyas Mandre, assistant professor of engineering;
• Susan Moffitt, assistant professor of political science;
• Sriniketh Nagavarapu, assistant professor of economics;
• Marc Perlman, associate professor of music;
• Joo-Hyun Song, assistant professor of cognitive, linguistic, and psychological sciences; and
• Kristi Wharton, associate professor of medical science, Department of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology, and Biochemistry.

Additional information on the Salomon Award recipients is available atresearch.brown.edu/ovpr/awards_salomon_11.php.

The 2011 Seed Award winners:

• The Impact of Agricultural Practices on Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Air Quality: A Case Study in New England
  Principal investigators: Meredith Hastings, assistant professor of geological sciences, and Jianwu Tang, assistant scientist, Marine Biological Laboratory
• Governance and Inequality in Indian Cities
  Principal investigators: Patrick Heller, professor of sociology and international studies, and Ashutosh Varshney, professor of political science
• Novel Micropatterned Culture Model for Developing New Therapeutic Strategies for Sudden Cardiac Death
  Principal investigators: Diane Hoffman-Kim, associate professor of medical science in the Department of Molecular Pharmacology, Physiology and Biotechnology; Bum-Rak Choi, assistant professor of medicine; Gideon Koren, professor of medicine; Ulrike Mende, associate professor of medicine
• Genetic, Biochemical, and Bioinformatic Approaches to Understanding Microbial Degradation of Plant Biomass
  Principal investigators: Jason Sello, associate professor of chemistry; Rebecca Page, assistant professor of biology, Department of Molecular Biology, cell Biology and Biochemistry; Charles Lawrence, professor of applied mathematics

Additional information on the Seed Fund recipients is available at research.brown.edu/ovpr/awards_seed_11.php.

New Faculty Profile: Shreyas Mandre

Shreyas Mandre
Assistant Professor of Engineering

Shreyas Mandre

Assistant Professor of Engineering

Credit: Mike Cohea/Brown University

By Richard C. Lewis 

It seems as if Shreyas Mandre has a fascination with the familiar. Take, for instance, the splash made by a falling droplet of water, or consider the basso notes that come from blowing across the rim of an empty bottle.

Not only does Mandre, assistant professor of engineering, take note of such ordinary happenings, he has sought to explain them.

“I don’t know at what point we lose that [ability to be] surprised,” he said.

It’s a good thing, because what appears to be a simple act in nature is not so elementary after all. Such is the case with the splash generated by a liquid striking a surface. Mandre, in a paper published last year, explained through a model that a thin layer of air is compressed by the falling droplet a few microseconds before it hits the surface. This creates an air cushion that causes the raindrop to flatten and spread out, Mandre discovered.

Mandre’s study of the noise that comes from blowing on an empty bottle has more personal roots. Growing up in Mumbai, Mandre recalls his childhood frustration with playing the flute.

“I could make a sound from it now and then, but I never learned it properly,” he said, “so it was natural for me” to figure out what caused the sound to be created.

He substituted a bottle for the flute and found that the sound production revolves around acoustic and elastic vibrations interacting with fluid flows. The fluid flow in this case is the blown air, while the vibrations come from the sound bouncing off the narrow cylindrical walls of the bottle. The mathematical models he presented as part of his doctoral thesis show precisely how that all occurs.

Our voices operate on the same principle: The fluid (air) is traveling through an elastic body (our vocal folds). The applications are many, from helping geologists to understand the flow of molten material below the Earth’s surface and thus perhaps predict volcanic eruptions to building airplane wings that are less prone to vibration.

“All of these things have in common a body that is capable of oscillating or resonating and a flow, which is responsible for exciting the oscillations,” Mandre said.

Mandre, 31, comes to Brown from Harvard University, where he taught applied mathematics. He received his undergraduate degree at the Indian Institute of Technology, his master’s in mechanical engineering at Northwestern University, and his Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

He and his wife, Radhika, are living in Providence.

Device Replicates Complex Bird Songs

A team of researchers, including Shreyas Mandre, have developed a simple rubber device that is able to replicate many different bird songs. The device may provide insight into how young birds learn songs from adults. Mandre is also working on a mathematical model to see if it is possible to identify some of the key principles in producing complex birdsong.

Full report online: www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12093906

Simple rubber device mimics complex bird-song

By Mark KinverScience and environment reporter, BBC News

A simple rubber device that replicates complex bird songs has been developed by a team of US researchers.Continue reading the main story

The song is produced by blowing air through the device, which mimics a bird's vocal tract, the team explained.

The findings appear to challenge the idea that birds had to learn complicated neurological controls in order to produce distinctive calls.

The project's "holy grail" was replicating
the complex song of the zebra finch

The team plans to share its data with biologists to see if it sheds new light on how birds produce complex songs.

"I definitely did not think that I would be able to produce a whole bird song when we started," explained Aryesh Mukherjee, a member of the project team from Harvard University.

"We were just playing around and I probed the device in a certain way and it started playing a bird song - that was very exciting."

He added that the design of the device was very rudimentary: "It is made out of two pieces of rubber, which are stuck together but leaving a little area in the middle that forms the 'vocal tract'."

As well as the air source, the device is pressed together by a motor that replicates the action of a contracting muscle.

"In the terms of physics, the tract is just an elastic membrane of springs. If you tense it correctly, and probe it in a certain way, it starts vibrating," Mr Mukherjee told BBC News.

"Our project was to control the frequency of those vibrations."

The team were able to replicate a number of bird-songs, such as Bengalese finches and vireos, and were able to closely model the song of zebra finches.

"Making it sound like a zebra finch is the holy grail of the project," Mr Mukherjee said.

"We have been able to come pretty close to it, but we have been able to replicate other bird species much better."

He suggested that the song of the zebra finch was a little bit more complex, therefore it required a little fine tuning.

"But we are getting close," he added.

Good vibrations

The team's discovery was made during a project to learn more about the physical behaviour of vocal tracts.

"It was considered a very complicated process, and we tried to uncover some of the mysteries with physics.""We were working with neuroscientists who were trying to understand how a bird learns to sing.

Bird-song, a complex sound full of intricate patterns and rich harmonies, has been the subject of many studies. Neuroscientists, over the years, have provided insights into how young birds learn their songs from adult birds, requiring a series of complex neurological changes in order for them to control their voices.

But Mr Mukherjee said the project's results showed that it was possible to replicate bird-song without high degrees of control inputs.

"By just having one muscle (motor pressing the device) in the equation, you can get a lot of sounds," he explained.

The surprisingly simple design was able to replicate
complex birdsong of a range of species

"Translating that back into the idea of neurological control... it suggests that the control needed to produce seemingly complex songs is not as challenging as previously thought."

However, Mr Mukherjee said that whether this challenges current thinking on how birds produce their song was outside their area of expertise.

"We are in no position to make a claim about what this has to do with bio-physics or neurological control within birds. All we can say is what we have learned from our experiments, and share that information with biologists.

Another member of the team Shreyas Madre - now an assistant professor at Brown University, Rhode Island - is developing a mathematical model to see if it is possible to identify some of the key principles in producing complex birdsong.

The team plans to publish its findings in a paper in the near future.