WORCESTER -- WPI Athletics has recently learned that Ray Gilbert, longtime WPI Director of Physical Education and Athletics, passed away on August 20th.  Gilbert had served in that role for 15 years from 1987 until his retirement in 2002.

Amherst, MA --- Down 1-0 for most of the match, nationally-ranked Amherst leaned on a late equalizer from first-year Emma Zhang (St. Louis, MO) and an overtime goal from sophomore Caroline Busler (Greenwich, CT) to pick up a 2-1 win against visiting WPI in a non-conference field hockey match-up on Wednesday night at Hill Field.

When a group of WPI students and faculty members first set out in 2022 to interview people connected to the rare earth magnet industry, they wanted to know if an innovative magnet recycling business could succeed. After more than 130 interviews, says Adam Powell, associate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering and a member of the team, the group concluded that the answer is a qualified “yes.” Adam Powell “We learned there is demand for recycled materials, and a lot of people want a domestic recycling industry to grow,” Powell says. “Yet the reality is that only a small number of U.S. companies are building recycling capacity. The industry is still maturing as companies develop facilities, awareness of recycling grows, and a steady supply of old magnets builds.” “Rare earth” refers to a group of metallic elements such as neodymium that are abundant in the earth’s crust but difficult and environmentally damaging to mine and process. Magnets made from rare earth minerals are used in everything from hybrid and electric vehicles to wind turbines and fighter jets, and the total market for rare earth elements was valued at more than $3 billion in 2023. China supplies most of the world’s rare earth minerals and has used its hold on the market as a political tool. In early 2025, China threatened to limit rare earth exports, especially to Western defense contractors, as a response to U.S. tariffs. During its review, the WPI group found that challenges for rare earth recycling include incentivizing the recycling of materials and competing with magnets made from virgin materials. 

Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) announced the appointment of David LaMarco as associate vice president for facilities and campus planning. LaMarco, who will join WPI Oct. 6, brings more than two decades of leadership experience in facilities operations, capital planning, and strategic infrastructure management across higher education and private industry.  LaMarco joins WPI from Wheaton College, where he has served as associate vice president for facilities and auxiliary services, providing executive oversight for facilities operations, dining services, business services, and conference and event management.  At WPI, LaMarco will serve as the university’s chief facilities executive, reporting directly to Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Mike Horan. He will lead oversee specialized areas—including campus planning, design and construction, and environmental health and safety—and manage a team of approximately 110 professionals and an annual budget of more than $40 million. He will provide strategic oversight of WPI’s built environment, including implementation of the university’s comprehensive campus framework, and will lead capital planning and projects. LaMarco will provide operational management of campus services, including maintenance, custodial, utilities, and groundskeeping, with a focus on performance metrics and continuous improvement, and will advance WPI’s sustainability initiatives, including energy management, green building practices, and environmental stewardship. LaMarco’s appointment comes at a pivotal time for WPI, which recently achieved Carnegie R1 research status—placing it among the top 3% of research institutions nationwide. As WPI’s research enterprise and academic programs continue to grow, LaMarco will play a critical role in ensuring the university’s physical infrastructure supports its mission of preparing students to solve global challenges through project-based learning and interdisciplinary collaboration. “David’s deep expertise in facilities management and his proven ability to lead complex operations make him an outstanding addition to our leadership team,” said Horan. “His strategic vision and operational acumen will be essential as we continue to expand and evolve our campus to meet the needs of an R1 institution.” “I am excited to join WPI right now, as the campus is experiencing strategic growth while adapting to the rapidly changing landscape of higher education,” said LaMarco. “Now more than ever, it’s crucial for leaders within facilities operations to add value through data-driven decision-making while creating an aspirational vision for their teams.” LaMarco holds a master of science in cybersecurity policy and governance from Boston College and a bachelor of science in facilities engineering from Massachusetts Maritime Academy. He is a certified energy manager, certified professional maintenance manager, and certified data center professional.

WPI professor Sam Walcott developed a molecular model that explains and accurately predicts muscle force, offering new opportunities for medical innovation.  In honor of our upcoming Arts & Sciences Week, WPI is showcasing research that demonstrates how mathematics is advancing medical science.   A new mathematical model developed at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) could enhance our understanding and treatment of heart disease. Created by Sam Walcott, director of bioinformatics and computational biology, the model simulates how microscopic structures within muscle cells generate force, using principles from both physics and biology to describe the interaction of individual molecules. It also reveals how subtle changes at the molecular level can lead to serious cardiac conditions. The research could inform the next generation of energy-efficient prosthetics.  Walcott collaborated with Edward (Ned) Debold, professor of kinesiology at UMass Amherst, and Walter Herzog, professor of kinesiology at the University of Calgary. Using rabbit muscle tissue, Debold conducted molecular-scale experiments to study how individual muscle proteins respond under different conditions, while Herzog examined how whole muscle cells generate force. Their combined experiments provided data that Walcott then used for his model.  “We have developed a mathematical model that describes how muscle cells generate force by accounting for how the molecules in the cell interact,” Walcott explains. “This connection between the cellular and molecular scale is important because, for example, genetic heart disease often causes subtle changes in one or two types of molecules in the heart muscle, yet drastic changes in heart function.”  Walcott’s research has big potential for the future of medical science. For example, a relatively new discovery in the world of muscle contraction research is thick filament activation, which is a kind of “on/off-switch” for muscle molecules. Walcott’s mathematical models account for this process and suggest how it might affect muscle function.  When you tense your muscle and stretch it (as if you're beginning to lose an arm-wrestling contest), your muscle can produce more force than without the stretch, a phenomenon called force enhancement. Similarly, if you tense your muscle and shorten it (as if you're beginning to win an arm-wrestling contest), your muscle can generate less force, a phenomenon called force depression. These phenomena, discovered in 1952, lack a molecular explanation. Remarkably, though one might expect force depression and   enhancement to arise from the same process, there are differences between them—for example, force enhancement is not associated with an increased number of force-generating muscle molecules, while force depression is associated with a decrease in those molecules.  A leading idea for how force enhancement arises is that a molecular "spring" gets engaged as you activate your muscle. When the muscle is then stretched, the spring is also stretched, thereby generating some extra force in addition to the force-generating molecules in the muscle. Walcott and his collaborators proposed that, when the muscle is shortened, the spring contracts. This then decreases the force in the muscle. Thick filament activation proposes that the force-generating molecules switch "off" when force drops, so this drop in force decreases the number of force-generating molecules. This explains both the drop in force observed in force depression and also why the number of force-generating molecules decreases.  The model, which was originally designed to describe the Herzog lab’s cellular experiments, was also able to successfully predict the results of the Debold lab’s molecular-scale experiments. This suggests that we can, in fact, connect the behavior of molecules with the function of muscle cells.  These discoveries mark an exciting step in the world of medicine and biomechanical design, like heart disease research and prosthetics. “Designing prosthetics requires thinking about how muscles use energy, since one wants the prosthetic to be both functional and efficient,” Walcott explains. “If we understand how muscle molecules interact, we can understand how they use energy and how the muscle overall uses energy.”  Walcott’s research was supported by a $1.4 million grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), an institute of the NIH. This project also highlights the interdisciplinary focus of WPI’s Bioinformatics and Computational Biology program, where students and faculty use math and data to explore the frontiers of biological research. 

Today is the last day to submit Wellness Day events for approval! Requests received after today will not be approved. Submit your event request here.

Today is the last day to submit Wellness Day events for approval! Requests received after today will not be approved. Submit your event request here.

Jagan Srinivasan Shruti Shastry Liz DiLoreto Researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), in collaboration with researchers at Baylor College of Medicine, have developed a simple, scalable method to study how specific neuropeptides affect behavior by programming common lab bacteria to deliver peptides directly to worms.  The research also suggests a possible microbial approach for the future design of peptide therapeutics.  The study, “Harnessing microbial tools: Escherichia coli as a vehicle for neuropeptide functional analysis in Caenorhabditis elegans,” was published in GENETICS in August 2025. Neuropeptides—small protein messengers that fine-tune brain circuits—are notoriously tricky to evaluate one by one. Traditional approaches often rely on creating transgenic animals or purchasing synthetic peptides, both of which are time-consuming and expensive.  The WPI team instead engineered the bacteria Escherichia coli (E. coli) to produce single neuropeptides, then fed those bacteria to Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) worms with a neuropeptide loss-of-function genetic mutation. The researchers then measured whether native behaviors—such as mate-searching, chemotaxis, and pheromone avoidance—were restored. “Our approach turns bacteria into on-demand couriers for the nervous system,” says Jagan Srinivasan, senior author and associate professor in WPI’s Department of Biology and Biotechnology. “When a behavior snaps back only if the matching receptor is present, you get direct, in-vivo evidence for which peptide talks to which circuit—and which ones are redundant versus uniquely powerful.” Because the method delivers intact, sequence-defined peptides through engineered microbes, it suggests a new peptide therapeutic strategy: using microbial “chassis” to produce and deliver short, bioactive peptides in vivo. While this study focuses on worms, the same design principles—sequence control, receptor specificity, dosing through diet—could guide the development of next-generation microbial or probiotic therapies in more complex systems. “We see this as a proof of concept for microbial peptide therapeutics,” says first author Liz DiLoreto, PhD '25. “In true WPI fashion—hands-on and collaborative—our tiny teachers (C. elegans) let us learn the rules fast: which sequences work, how to dose them, and how receptor context shapes outcomes. Those rules can guide adapting the approach to mammalian models.” “What excites me is the accessibility,” adds second author and graduate student Shruti Shastry. “Because the method uses standard E. coli and simple feeding, it’s easy to scale and share, empowering more labs and students to test many peptides and build the design playbook for translational work.” Beyond developing a new toolkit for worm neuroscience, the method opens the door to broader discoveries. Because it cleanly separates individual peptides, it can help researchers identify new peptide-receptor pairs, examine peptide processing and uptake, and investigate how neuromodulators change circuit “states” during complex decision-making.