REGISTER BY NOVEMBER 3 TO ATTEND IN PERSONORJOIN VIA ZOOM WEBINAR (details below) VIEW WHO'S COMING The American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) Student Steel Bridge Competition competes annually, challenging universities to design, fabricate and build a scale model of a steel bridge. What's the 2026 challenge? Communities north of El Paso need a new, aesthetically pleasing pedestrian bridge over the Rio Grande, and they���re counting on student teams to make it happen. WPI Voyagers invites the WPI community, age 55+, to the undergraduate student and faculty-led Steel Bridge Team presentation highlighting their endeavors, priorities and needs, including their academic learning, skills, design and construction process for an annual scale model steel bridge competition. The team will also discuss how you can support their efforts, and you will learn about WPI's Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Department priorities.Meet the PresentersDr. Leonard Albano is faculty advisor for the Steel Bridge Team, and Associate Professor for Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering for WPI. Dr. Albano enjoys teaching engineering fundamentals as well as upper level and graduate courses presenting advance topics and fostering deeper learning. He works to align his approach to MQPs with classroom philosophy, guiding students to build from their background learning experiences and to integrate new knowledge and skills.Student Teammates:Freddie Smith IV ’26, Civil EngineeringSteven Tran ’26, Civil EngineeringMena Youssif ’26, Civil EngineeringAidan Flanagan ’26, Civil Engineering Matt Santos ’27, Civil Engineering Kyler Ma '27, Civil EngineeringDavid Nichols ’28, Civil EngineeringFollow the team on Instagram (@wpisteelbridge)!DetailsWednesday, November 5, 2025The Alumni Center at Higgins House10:00 AM Check-In and Guest Social10:30 AM Welcome Remarks, WPI Voyagers10:45 AM Steel Bridge Team Presentation/Q&A11:30 AM Closing Remarks and Guest Social12:00 PM Program ConcludesRegister by November 3 to receive your parking pass. Unable to attend in person? Join us via Zoom webinar from 10:30-11:30 am. Email alumni-office@wpi.edu by November 4 to request the Zoom link. WPI Voyagers has been a campus staple since 1958 and welcomes all members of the WPI community, age 55+. Learn more about this social organization, and upcoming programs here.

Chemistry & Biochemistry Seminar SeriesDr. James Reuther, Associate Professor, UMASS LowellAdvanced Materials Research in the Reuther Group: From Chiral Nanomaterials to Polyurethane Vitrimers Research in the Reuther group lies on the interface of polymer chemistry, supramolecular chemistry, materials science and nanoscience with projects ranging from basic science to applied materials research. This seminar will touch on two, unrelated projects that currently dominate the research in the lab: 1) synthesis and application of polyurethane vitrimers for footwear and 2) synthesis of chiral nanomaterials with unique light-matter interactions. Polyurethane (PU) thermosets are essential in numerous commercial applications but present significant environmental challenges due to their limited recyclability and biodegradability. In the first project, we detail the use of drop-in diols that can be integrated into commercial PU formulations without any changes to industrial processing protocols to impart catalyst-free melt-processability and chemically-triggered thermoset deconstruction for mechanical and chemical recycling of PU, respectively. A series of three dynamic conjugate acceptor (DCA) diols were synthesized and introduced into PU resin formulations providing tunable properties based on dynamic exchange kinetics and thermodynamics. Controlling chirality at the nanoscale can provide access to unique, emerging properties such as chiral plasmonics, photonics, spin-photon and spin-orbit coupling, negative indices of refraction, and circularly-polarized luminescence (CPL).The second project we will discuss the recent combinations of PI-CDSA with chiral, helical rod-coil poly(aryl isocyanide) triblock copolymers to afford polymer nanoparticles with engineered sizes, dimensionality (transitioning from 1D to 2D to 3D nanostructures), nanostructured chirality, and intense optical activity. Recent work in our group has focused on incorporation of functional isocyanide monomers containing modular pentafluorophenylester (PFP) and pyridyl side-chains enabling the direct size tuning of 2D hexagonal platelets via self-limiting CDSA controlled by functional monomer incorporation. Reduction of gold(I) salts bound to chiral soft-templates via pyridyl side chains allows for uniform gold nanoseed formation. The high concentration and local confinement of gold seeds on chiral nanosheets provides a platform for enhanced symmetry breaking during laser-assisted gold overgrowth yielding chiral plasmonic nanocomposites.

According to recent WPI data, transgender and nonbinary students are more likely to report experiencing discrimination due to their identity (47% of transgender and nonbinary students compared to 20% of cisgender students) and are less likely to report having a faculty or staff member who definitely cares about them (30% of transgender and nonbinary students compared to 38% of cisgender students).With a growing population of ~10% transgender and nonbinary students, we will use this workshop to share some experiences of transgender and nonbinary students on campus and in the classroom environment. We will report data from the Wellbeing Improvement Survey for Higher Education Settings (WISHES) survey, Enrolled Student Survey (2023), and additional follow-up focus groups and conversations.We will discuss and help you identify creative pedagogical tools to support this population and all students to thrive in your classroom, from lecture to lab and projects to seminars. All are welcome to attend this workshop!Please register by Thursday, October 30th, so we can finalize the headcount for lunch.

The Materials Science Behind Sustainable Steel ProductionAbstractIron- and steelmaking stand for about 8% of all global greenhouse gas emissions, which qualifies this sector as the biggest single cause of global warming [1,2]. This originates from the use of fossil carbon carriers as precursors for the reduction of iron oxides. Carbon is turned in blast furnaces into CO and – through the redox processes reducing iron oxide – into CO2, producing about 2 tons CO2 for each ton of steel produced.Mitigation strategies pursue the replacement of fossil carbon carriers by sustainably produced hydrogen and / or electrons as alternative reductants, to massively cut these CO2 emissions, thereby lying the foundations for transforming a 3000 years old industry within a few years [1,2].As the sustainable production of hydrogen using renewable energy is a bottleneck in green steel making, at least during the next decade (transforming this industry would need about 300 Million tons of green hydrogen each year, i.e. about 5 orders of magnitude more than produced around the globe today), the gigantic annual steel production of 1.85 billion tons requires strategies to use hydrogen and / or electrons very efficiently and to yield high metallization at fast reduction kinetic.This presentation presents progress in understanding the governing mechanisms of hydrogen-based direct reduction and plasma reduction of iron oxides and also shows how these methods work for other transition metal reduction processes [2-5]. The metallization degree, reduction kinetics and their dependence on the underlying redox reactions in hydrogen-containing direct and plasma reduction strongly depend on mass transport kinetics, Kirkendall effects, nucleation phenomena during the multiple phase transformations, chemical and stress partitioning, the oxide's chemistry and microstructure, the acquired (from sintering) and evolving (from oxygen loss) porosity, crystal plasticity, damage and fracture effects associated with the phase transformation phenomena occurring during reduction [5-8]. Understanding these effects, together with external boundary conditions such as other reductant gas mixtures (including also ammonia [8]), oxide feedstock composition [9], pressure and temperature, is key to produce hydrogen-based green steel and design corresponding direct reduction shaft or fluidized bed reactors (with and without plasma support), enabling the required massive C02 reductions at affordable costs. Possible simulation approaches that are capable of capturing some of these phenomena and their interplay are also discussed [3-8].BiographyDr. Dierk RaabeProf. Dr. habil. Dr. h.c.Managing Director, Max Planck Institute for Sustainable MaterialsMax-Planck-Str. 1, 40237 Duesseldorf, GermanyEmail: d.raabe@mpi-susmat.dehttps://www.mpi-susmat.dehttps://www.mpie.de/2763408/microstructure_physics_and_alloy_designDierk Raabe studied music, metallurgy and metal physics (summa cum laude) at RWTH Aachen (Germany). After his doctorate 1992 (summa cum laude) and habilitation 1997 at RWTH Aachen he received a Heisenberg fellowship and worked at Carnegie Mellon University and at the High Magnetic Field Lab in Tallahassee. He joined Max Planck Society as a director in Düsseldorf at the Max Planck Institute for Iron Research (now: Max Planck Institute for Sustainable Materials) in 1999. His main research interest is Sustainable Metallurgy, i.e. to make industrial production, use and recycling of materials more sustainable, focusing on basic research with high leverage for CO2 emission mitigation and lower energy consumption. His specific interests are in sustainable metals (specifically ���green’ steel, Nickel, Aluminium, Titanium etc.), recycling-oriented material design, metal physics, interfaces, phase transformation, atom probe tomography, materials theory, hydrogen, and artificial intelligence methods in materials science. He received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Award (Highest German Science Awards) and two ERC Advanced Grants (Highest European Research Grant). He is professor at RWTH Aachen (Germany) and at KU Leuven (Belgium). He is a Doctor Honoris Causa at the Norwegian Technical University Trondheim. He is a member and Senator of the German National Science Academy Leopoldina and of the US National Academy of Engineering. ZOOM MEETING LINK: https://wpi.zoom.us/j/93538117042

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Looking for a way to make your day less stressful and more mindful...take some much-needed time for yourself and join us for Mindful Wednesdays! Drop-in meditation sessions are open to the entire WPI community, and no experience is necessary. A certified meditation teacher will offer guided meditations appropriate for both beginners as well as experienced meditators. People can join in person or via zoom.