One way to contribute to the Microsoft365 Storage Management project is to clean up your OneDrive.Come join us on Wednesday, October 29 from 9:00am - 10:00am ET for a live tutorial and tips on how to clean up your OneDrive storage.Please register on this Microsoft Form to attend the webinar or receive the recording. Microsoft 365 Storage Resources:These resources will help you get started on managing your Outlook and OneDrive storage.Storage Management FAQsExploring OutlookThe Inbox Cleanup Journey of an Email Hoarder by Mike HamiltonExploring OneDriveOneDrive Cleanup Companion by Mike Hamilton

Abstract: Hydrogen is an energy carrier that, if produced through decarbonized methods, can serve as a key solution for reducing emissions in hard-to-decarbonize industries such as long-haul trucking, cement and steel production, and aviation. Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) fuel cells are a class of energy conversion devices that use hydrogen as fuel. Their byproducts are water and heat. Effective water management is critical for achieving durable and reliable PEM fuel cell performance. While part of the produced water helps maintain membrane hydration, excess water must be efficiently removed from the cell. The transport phenomena associated with water removal are complex and span multiple length scales ranging from a few micrometers in the pores of the porous layers to several hundred micrometers (or even millimeters, depending on design) across the flow channels. A common feature across these scales is the dominant role of capillary effects, arising from surface tension forces, which significantly influence mass and momentum transport.This talk summarizes over a decade of research on transport phenomena in PEM fuel cells, with a primary focus on liquid water transport in different components of the cell. Particular emphasis will be placed on two-phase flow in flow channels and novel, yet simple, techniques for eliminating liquid water buildup. The presentation highlights outcomes from both experimental and theoretical investigations and briefly exemplifies how machine learning could help resolve some decades-long questions in two-phase flow pressure drop modeling.Bio: Mehdi Mortazavi is a faculty member in the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at WPI. His research focuses on thermo-fluids systems, where he combines experimental and theoretical approaches to uncover the physics of transport phenomena in multiphase flows. He deeply values the process of discovery through collaboration with students. His current projects involve droplet dynamics, bubble actuation for enhanced hydrogen production, and workforce development in hydrogen energy systems. He earned his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Michigan Technological University in 2014 and spent two years in the HVAC industry before joining Western New England University for his first academic appointment in 2016. In 2023, he joined WPI to expand his research activities through access to advanced infrastructure and graduate student mentorship.

AbstractUnderstanding plastic deformation in metals and alloys requires observing microstructural processes as they occur — something that conventional laboratory techniques often cannot capture in sufficient detail. This talk aims to highlight why and how large-scale research facilities provide unique advantages for studying deformation mechanisms in structural materials.Using the example of nitrogen’s influence on stacking fault energy (SFE) and the resulting changes in predominant deformation modes such as dislocation slip, twinning, and phase transformations, I will discuss how (in-situ) synchrotron and neutron diffraction can directly reveal the evolution of microstructure under load.Beyond presenting scientific results, the talk will emphasize practical aspects of conducting experiments at large-scale research facilities — from experimental design and data acquisition to data analysis. The overarching goal is to demonstrate how large-scale facilities can be of help to understand materials performance.BioDr. Konstantin V. WernerUniversité Grenoble Alpes (UGA), FranceKonstantin Werner is a materials scientist whose research focuses on the relationship between mechanical properties and plastic deformation mechanisms in metallic materials. He combines computational modeling and experimental approaches to understand how microstructural processes such as slip, twinning, and phase transformations govern strength and ductility.He obtained both his PhD and MSc degrees from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), where he studied deformation behavior in advanced alloys. Currently, he is a postdoctoral researcher at Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA), working on microstructural evolution in immiscible high-entropy alloy systems.Konstantin is also passionate about mentoring young scientists and promoting the use of large-scale research facilities for materials characterization, encouraging the next generation to harness cutting-edge experimental tools for fundamental and applied research. ZOOM MEETING LINK: https://wpi.zoom.us/j/93538117042

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.

Title:A Journey from Academia to Industry Abstract:How I ended up working on the Department of Defense projects. Sharing my past research experiences from academia to industry to DOD projects. I started my journey as a physicist set for academia but discovered other possibilities that changed my way of thinking. During the seminar I will share my decade and a half of research experiences and discuss not so conventional paths to research. I will discuss my work as a Materials Scientist for optics and photonics applications. Speaker:Alket MertiriPrinciple Member, Technical Staff, Draper Bio:Alket Mertiri is a Principal Member of the Technical Staff at Draper. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Physics and Mathematics from Boston University concentrating on condensed‐matter physics and applied mathematics. He then pursued graduate studies in Materials Science and Engineering at Boston University. His research focused on ultrafast infrared spectroscopy and photothermal microscopy, leveraging quantum cascade lasers (QCLs) and infrared detection to enable label‐free biochemical sensing and imaging. Beyond his research, Mertiri took an active role in science advocacy. While serving as President of the Boston University chapter of the Optical Society of America (OSA), he participated in a visit to Washington D.C. to meet members of Congress and advocate for sustained funding in science and engineering. Host: Professor Ulkuhan Guler

Employee Drop In: Benefit Enrollment Help Session: Do you need assistance entering your Open Enrollment benefit elections into Workday? Do you have a question about one of the benefit plans offered in 2026? Drop in to see a member of the Benefits Team during this session to get the support and help you need to make your benefit choices before November 5th. Please note: this is an informal drop-in session and not a formal presentation.

Employee Drop In: Benefit Enrollment Help Session: Do you need assistance entering your Open Enrollment benefit elections into Workday? Do you have a question about one of the benefit plans offered in 2026? Drop in to see a member of the Benefits Team during this session to get the support and help you need to make your benefit choices before November 5th. Please note: this is an informal drop-in session and not a formal presentation.

Neural Certificates for Safe Robotic System Planning and Control Abstract: Achieving safety, scalability, and high performance in complex systems, such as multi-agent systems (MAS) control, is a central challenge in many real-world robotic deployments due to its computational complexity as a large-scale constrained optimal control problem. To address this, we introduce a novel graph control barrier function (GCBF) as a core tool for large-scale distributed safe control, which guarantees safety for arbitrarily large MAS with only local observations. For MAS with known dynamic models, we present a self-supervised learning framework that can jointly learn GCBF and distributed control policies that consider actuation limits. For MAS with unknown dynamics, we discuss how to blend GCBF in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to achieve high-performance and safe distributed policies. Bio: Chuchu Fan is an Associate Professor (pre-tenure) in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) and Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) at MIT. Before that, she was a postdoc researcher at Caltech and got her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University. Her research group, the Realm at MIT, works on developing computational tools that integrate rigorous mathematics into machine learning and AI for the design, analysis, and verification of safe, large-scale, and complex systems. Chuchu is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, an AFOSR Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award, an ONR YIP Award, and the 2020 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.

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 Thursdays! 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. Mindful Thursdays: 2:15PM to 2:35PM Center for Well-Being, Daniels Hall 102E Zoom: https://wpi.zoom.us/j/186050714 Each Friday an email will be sent out to the group called Mindfulness Tools To-Go which will include information about meditations, poems shared during the week, and mindful resources. If you have questions or suggestions, please do not hesitate to contact Robin Benoit, rbenoit@wpi.edu

Learn more about your Medicare, Health Savings Account and long-term care benefits for today and tomorrow.

Global Asia Hub invites Dr. Andrew Erickson, Visiting Scholar Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and Prof of Strategy,China Maritime Studies Institute, US Naval War College to give a presentation discussing China's sea forces and XI seeks to use them in a time of dangerous shifting power dynamics. China under Xi Jinping has become a great maritime power, possessing the world's largest fleets numerically in every maritime category.

Join ODIME on Fridays from 12:00-2:00pm ET in OASIS House for milk and freshly baked cookies! For more information or accommodations, please contact ODIME at diversity@wpi.edu. All are welcome!

Join us on Friday, October 31, from 12:00–1:00 p.m. for a Lunch and Gather drop-in session in Innovation Studio 205. This gathering is an opportunity to connect with others who share your hobbies, interests, and likes.Don't forget to bring your lunch and a friend with you!Check out more Staff Council engagement opportunities here.

Join us for the Opening Event to kick off WPI Business School's Business Week 2025!President Grace Wang, along with Dean Kwamie Dunbar, will welcome the WPI community to the start of WPI’s third Business Week. President Wang will expand on her article, “Business Education in a Polytechnic Era” and Dean Dunbar will share his vision of how The Business School is preparing students to thrive in a rapidly changing world.Don’t miss this inspiring conversation as we set the stage for a week of exploration, networking, and business in action.We look forward to seeing you in the Odeum

Seminar Series “Levering Foot-Ground Interaction Dynamics for Sports Performance and Gait Rehabilitation” Wouter Hoogkamer, PhD Associate Professor Department of Kinesiology University of Massachusetts Amherst Abstract: Over the past 10 years innovations in running footwear have led to substantial improvements in running performance. While many credit (or blame) carbon-fiber plates for these improvements, a series of studies from our group suggests that innovations in midsole foams are the real hero (or culprit). Seeing what more compliant and resilient midsole foams are doing for running performance, we developed an adjustable surface stiffness treadmill to unilaterally expose people to a compliant surface while walking. Our recent results indicate that asymmetric surface stiffness walking leads to neuromotor adaptation in healthy control participants, which suggests this method can be leveraged to reduce weight-bearing asymmetries in neurological conditions such as people post-stroke. Bio: Wouter Hoogkamer, PhD (he/him) (pronounced “Wow-ter”) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he runs the Integrative Locomotion Laboratory (UMILL). His lab uses a comprehensive approach to study human locomotion, integrating neurophysiology, biomechanics and energetics. His work on running shoes, cooperative drafting and course features might have played a tiny role in how the 2-hour marathon barrier was broken. His lab is currently studying biomechanics and energetics of marathon shoes and track spikes, and locomotor adaptation imposed by robotic footwear, mechatronic treadmills and exoskeletons, to improve gait rehabilitation paradigms. For a zoom link please contact Kate Harrison at kharrison@wpi.edu

Join WPI Archives & Special Collections in celebration of the new 2025-2026 Gladwin Gallery exhibit, "Currents of Change: Electrical & Computer Engineering at WPI from the Dawn of the Electric Age to Present Day". This event is a casual drop-in/drop-out style gathering with a brief welcome and short program led by ECE faculty at the start. After this introduction, attendees will be welcome to explore the exhibit and some interactive elements on their own. Light refreshments provided. Students, staff, faculty, alumni, and guests are welcome. Registration preferred. Please email archives@wpi.edu with any additional questions.

Students, faculty, and staff are encouraged to sign up for vaccine appointments. Please click here to schedule a time slot.

REGISTER BY NOVEMBER 3WHO'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. 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.

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