Noteworthy

Sachin Patil, professor of chemical engineering, and his team of student-researchers in the NanoBio Lab recently published findings to advance the future Alzheimer's disease treatment and prevention. The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Molecules, identified Isobavachin, a natural flavonoid, as a potential "structure corrector" for Apolipoprotein E4, known as ApoE4, which is the strongest genetic risk factor for the disease. The breakthrough discovery suggests that Isobavachin can stabilize the problematic ApoE4 protein, potentially reducing its harmful effects and altering the course of Alzheimer’s disease.

Through the use of a cutting-edge combination of computational modeling and lab experiments, the researchers found that Isobavachin binds to ApoE4, reshaping it into a more stable form—similar to the neutral or protective ApoE3 and ApoE2 variants. The team noted that Isobavachin is a naturally occurring compound, derived from a plant used in traditional medicine, that is also bioavailable, meaning it has the potential to cross the blood-brain barrier. Both characteristics make this discovery particularly exciting as they show promise for future drug discovery and hope for the millions of people affected by the disease worldwide.

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Dipendu Saha, associate professor and chair of chemical and materials engineering, was named the inaugural recipient of the Fred Akl Endowed Professorship in Engineering. Named in honor of former engineering dean and professor, the professorship was created to reward excellence and provide support to a talented Widener University faculty member in the School of Engineering who embodies the values of Widener as an outstanding academic citizen, teacher, and accomplished scholar. 

The endowed professor is selected based on a distinguished record of teaching, exemplary leadership and service to the school, the university, and the academic and professional communities, and scholarly accomplishment appropriate to their discipline and their primary responsibilities. 

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Vicki Brown, professor emerita of civil engineering, has been named the 2025 Engineer of the Year by the Delco Chapter of the Pennsylvania Society of Professional Engineers. The award is given each year to a candidate who resides or is employed in Delaware County or southern Chester County, and is evaluated against a rigorous criterion including professional achievement and contributions to community. This award is among the many accolades that Brown has earned throughout her career for her academic, scholarship, and community engagement work. 

Brown, who earned emerita status in December 2024 after serving more than 40 years in the civil engineering department, joins a roster of celebrated engineering professionals including many former Widener faculty and students. Former recipients include Chalmer Gatlin Kirkbride, Kirkbride Hall's namesake who was a member of the Board of Trustees of Pennsylvania Military College and was instrumental in the fundraising and design of the science and engineering laboratory building; Charles Bartholomew, former professor and chairman of civil engineering; and Fred Akl, former professor and dean of the School of Engineering. 

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Vicki Brown, professor of civil engineering, was honored by the American Concrete Institute (ACI) with the ACI Education Award at a reception in Philadelphia for her work and expertise on advancing the ACI CODE-440.11-22, which is the first comprehensive building code covering the use of nonmetallic reinforcing bars in structural concrete applications. Brown has raised awareness of this important code through the creation of a full-day seminar as well as a certificate program.

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Sachin Patil, professor of chemical engineering and director of the NanoBio Lab, and Bella Kuehn '24 '25, a chemistry and chemical engineering double major in the 4+1 engineering program, published a paper in the journal Pharmaceuticals titled, “Discovery of Small Molecule Glycolytic Stimulants for Enhanced ApoE Lipidation in Alzheimer's Disease Cell Model." 

The study established, for the first time, a possible link between two major Alzheimer’s disease (AD) causes, namely apolipoprotein E (ApoE), the most significant risk factor for AD, and abnormal glucose metabolism, which is an early and distinct feature of AD brain. The paper presented an integrated drug discovery approach leading to the identification of novel modulators of the glycolysis-ApoE nexus (Lonidamine, Phenformin, and Berberine), which may form the basis for the much-needed, disease-modifying therapies against the devastating disease like Alzheimer’s.

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Faculty in the School of Engineering have been awarded grant funding through the Manufacturing PA Innovation Program. Funded in part by the Department of Community and Economic Development, this fellowship program pairs graduate and undergraduate students with local manufacturers on research projects to develop new technologies and advance innovation statewide. 

Three Widener engineering projects have been selected to participate in the 2024 initiative:

1. Babak Eslami, associate professor, and Kamran Fouladi, associate professor and associate dean, mechanical engineering.

   Associate Professors Eslami and Fouladi are working with industrial partner American Additive Manufacturing to enhance durability and repeatability of 3D printing with Polyeth-ether ketone (PEEK) polymer. During this project, a Widener student-research team are modeling the industrial 3D printers used by American Additive Manufacturing to perform computational fluid dynamics study to have a better understanding of flows around the parts. Multi-scale material characterization will be performed on 3D printed parts in order to develop the optimum printing condition for PEEK.

2. John Suarez, associate professor, electrical engineering.

   Associate Professor John Suarez and his student-research team will develop a radio-frequency system for sensing roadway nonuniformities in front of vehicles. The system is intended to operate in vehicles moving at relatively high speeds. The nonuniformities of greatest interest are potholes or other defects in the road which can damage vehicles or create unsafe conditions. Dr. Suarez’s group will work with Dorman Products, an industry leader in aftermarket automotive products located in Colmar, Pennsylvania.

3. Xiaochao Tang, associate professor, and Vicki Brown, professor, civil engineering.

   Associate Professor Xiaochao Tang and Professor Vicki Brown along with a team of student-researchers are working to create a low-carbon sustainable alternative for concrete, the most widely used construction material. Cement, a key component of concrete, is a highly energy-intensive product that releases a large amount of carbon dioxide when produced. In collaboration with two partners, the Delaware County Reginal Water Quality Control Authority (DELCORA) in Chester, Pennsylvania and Conewago Manufacturing, LLC in Hanover, Pennsylvania, this project will utilize sewage sludge ash, a byproduct from DELCORA's wastewater treatment facility, to create an inorganic polymer binding agent, known as geopolymer, at ambient or slightly elevated temperatures. This project will potentially enable repurposing the ash, which would otherwise be disposed of in landfills, for beneficial reuse at scale. The project will also utilize Conewago's concrete mix and testing facility to characterize the geopolymer product and cast pilot scale test bed. 

The Manufacturing PA project was financed [in part] by funding from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Department of Community and Economic Development.

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Xiaochao Tang, associate professor of civil engineering, was awarded approximately $75,000 from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, as part of the Agency’s People, Prosperity, and the Planet (P3) Program.

The P3 Program supports faculty-student research designed to develop innovative solutions that address leading environmental and public health challenges. Tang's research aims to develop a process that uses industrial byproduct to create low-carbon sustainable cement product in an effort to reduce carbon emissions and solid waste that would otherwise be disposed of in landfills. This multidisciplinary project boasts educational opportunities to undergraduate students across the engineering programs and infuses sustainability into senior design projects in multiple departments.

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Ali Hamza, assistant professor of electrical engineering, has been awarded approximately $200,000 in grant funding from the prestigious Engineering Research Initiation program from the National Science Foundation, or NSF. The grant will support Hamza's research, which aims to revolutionize cognitive sensing technologies for radar and wireless communication systems. By enhancing interference mitigation, using artificial intelligence techniques, Hamza’s pioneering work promises improved signal detection with applications spanning wireless communication, aerospace, healthcare, and automotive industries. These contributions will significantly advance the radar imaging for self-driving cars, weather and military radar, radar-based human activity monitoring, fall detection, and remote vital sign estimation. With the integration of machine learning and AI algorithms, the project seeks to optimize radio frequency spectrum utilization, alleviate congestion, and expand bandwidth, ultimately enhancing quality of service and regulatory capabilities. 

The funding, which marks the first NSF grant for the electrical engineering department, will support undergraduate and graduate research.

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Robert Buckley Jr. ’81, a School of Business Administration graduate, returned to the Chester campus to give a presentation on his role leading the I-95 rebuild. Buckley is president of Buckley & Company, Inc., the primary company that oversaw the record-setting rebuild of the collapsed interstate highway in the summer of 2023. Moderated by Engineering Dean Pamela McCauley, Buckley presented alongside Archie Filshill, CEO at Aero Aggregates of North America, whose company produced the ultra-lightweight aggregates that was used to fill the rebuild. The conversation recounted the hands-on contributions of Buckley & Company and the transformative power of collaboration between local industries and city, state, and federal government partners. 

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Watch the Full Presentation Here

Professor of Chemical Engineering Sachin Patil, together with a team of international collaborators from Imperial College London in the United Kingdom and the Cancer Research Center in Marseille, France, published a paper in the Journal of Advanced Research titled, “Inactive-enriched machine-learning models exploiting patent data improve structure-based virtual screening for PDL1 dimerizers.” The paper presented novel PDL1-specific machine-learning scoring functions as a powerful drug design tool for detecting small-molecule PD1/PDL1 inhibitors, forming the basis for developing novel cancer immunotherapies with better patient outcomes and milder side effects.

Share link: https://www.widener.edu/news/noteworthy/engineering-professor-and-international-collaborators-publish-artificial-intelligence-enabled-cancer 

Mark Nicosia, vice provost for Academic Affairs and Strategy and professor of engineering, was a featured speaker during a panel discussion at the 2023 World Dysphagia Summit. The summit was hosted by the Dysphagia Research Society (DRS) in affiliation with the European Society for Swallowing Disorders, the Japanese Society for Dysphagia Rehabilitation, and the Latin America Society for Dysphagia. 

Nicosia, who also serves as president of the DRS, is an expert in dysphagia which is the medical term for difficulty swallowing. The summit was held on World Swallowing Day to increase worldwide awareness among health care professionals as well as the public to increase knowledge about normal swallowing and swallowing disorders, their causes, early detection, complications and management.

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Vicki L. Brown, distinguished university professor, was honored by the American Concrete Institute (ACI) for her scholarly contributions to the organization and the overall civil engineering community. Brown, who has served on School of Engineering's faculty for more than four decades, received the 2023 Delmar L. Bloem Distinguished Service Award which celebrates noteworthy work on ACI technical committees. The award was given at the 2023 ACI Concrete Convention in California and recognized Brown “for outstanding leadership of ACI Subcommittee 440-H, FRP-Reinforced Concrete.”

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Biomedical engineering students Marina Walsh, Benjamin Aon, Hatice Emanet, Cheyenne Miller and Chiamaka Oduah attended the SB3C 2023 Summer Bioengineering, Biomechanics and Biotransport Conference in Vail, Colorado to showcase their research focused on developing a pulse oximeter for nursing simulation mannequins to be used by Widener nursing students. The team, along with faculty advisor Ria Mazumder, interim chair of biomedical engineering and associate teaching professor, were one of six teams chosen to present their research at the conference's Undergraduate Design Project Competition in Rehabilitation and Assistive Devices. Their work earned third place in the national competition. 

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John Suarez, associate professor of electrical engineering, received a grant from the Manufacturing PA Innovation program funded by the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development. The project, titled “Capacitive and Infrared Sensing for Precision Chemical Analysis of Polar Compounds,” will build upon preliminary work completed by Probes Unlimited, Inc. (PUI) to design, prototype, rigorously test, and manufacture a precision sensor for monitoring the quality of cooking oil. Suarez will lead a research team to conduct the necessary research and development to assist PUI in developing the capacitive sensor with the required characteristics as well as investigate the viability of infrared sensing technology in this application.

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Sachin Patil, professor of chemical engineering, was invited to serve as the guest editor for a special issue in the peer-reviewed journal Pharmaceuticals. Titled “Alzheimer’s Disease: Small-Molecule Modulators of Novel Therapeutic Pathways,” this special issue is dedicated to gathering novel Alzheimer’s disease mechanisms, with a particular emphasis on targeting these mechanisms using small-molecule drugs. 

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Amanda DiAlessandro '22 '23, a two-time graduate of Widener's mechanical engineering program, presented research at the 2023 National Conference on Undergraduate Research in Wisconsin in April. The poster, "HVAC Design of a Performing Arts Center to be Located in Sidney, Australia," was co-authored by DiAlessandro and teammates Jacqueline Loeliger, Jamal Badamassi, Tristan Fish, Michael Hutchinson, and Madeline Reynolds and showcased findings collected during the team's senior project. 

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Pamela McCauley, a renowned scholar, educator, university administer and entrepreneur, has been named dean of the School of Engineering. McCauley will assume the role on July 1 following the retirement of Fred Akl, who led the program for more than two decades. 

McCauley comes to Widener after serving as associate dean for Academic Programs, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the Wilson College of Textiles at North Carolina State University since 2020. She is an internationally-recognized industrial engineer whose research accomplishments include the development of fuzzy set theory-based mathematical models, human engineering, ergonomics and biomechanics as well as engineering leadership and women’s leadership in STEM. In her role as associate dean, McCauley has overseen the college’s academic programs, promoted innovation and entrepreneurship within the college and the university, and led and implemented diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives across the college. 

“We are thrilled to have Dr. McCauley join the Widener community and lead our esteemed engineering program,” said Provost Andrew Workman. “Throughout her extensive career she has demonstrated herself as an innovator, entrepreneur, researcher, educator, and advocate for diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging both in the engineering field and the greater academic community. She will be a tremendous asset in enhancing the Widener student experience by bringing extensive research and entrepreneurial experiences to her role and championing student-faculty research opportunities. Her remarkable record of service to the professional and global scientific community will position the engineering program and the university to continue expanding its commitment to experiential service learning and community engagement.”

“I am honored and excited to join Widener’s vibrant community,” said McCauley. “The university’s engineering program has a remarkable legacy of innovation. Engineering changes the world, and Widener students and faculty are cultivating bold ideas in a space where students from diverse backgrounds know they belong and contribute unique perspectives. I am excited to lead the program and build on this success, guided by my years as an industry professional, engineering scholar, and university leader.”

McCauley has developed an impressive catalog of research backed by funding from some of the nation’s most prestigious institutions including NASA, the U.S. State Department, and The National Science Foundation. In 2012, McCauley was selected as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar and presented her funded research on human factors and ergonomics in disaster management. In additional to scholarly accomplishments, McCauley is the author of more than 100 technical papers, book chapters, conference proceedings and the best-selling ergonomics textbook, “Ergonomics: Foundational Principles, Applications, and Technologies.” 

McCauley brings more than 25 years of entrepreneurial experience to Widener and has led numerous small businesses. Throughout her career McCauley has been a tireless advocate for diversity and inclusion in engineering and higher education, particularly for females and students from groups who are under-represented in STEM. 

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Professor of Chemical Engineering Sachin Patil and a team of student-researchers published a paper in the journal Computational Biology and Chemistry titled, “Discovery of small-molecule PD-1/PD-L1 antagonists through combined virtual screening and experimental validation.” The paper presented an integrated drug discovery approach leading to identification of a novel PD-1/PD-L1 antagonist that may serve as a starting point for further optimization into potent, small-molecule cancer immunotherapies. The team included students from Widener's chemical engineering and computer science program, as well as Computer Science Professor Jeffrey Rufinus and technician John Stoddart. Michelle DiFrancesco '18, a chemical engineering graduate, served as the student team leader and study first author. She is currently continuing her cancer immunotherapy work at Bristol-Myers Squibb, a leading global biopharmaceutical company. 

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Sachin Patil, professor of chemical engineering, attended and presented findings at the Heart Development and Disease: From Genes to Cures conference hosted by Keystone Symposia in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The conference gathered researchers from around the world to advance knowledge and understanding of heart formation and homeostatic function and how derangement in these processes lead to diseases and organ dysfunction.

In his presentation, “Small-molecule stabilizers (and inhibitors) of immune checkpoint PD1-PDL1 for heart disease and beyond,” Patil highlighted his novel findings on the role of immunotherapy in the heart disease treatment. Patil’s research is supported by a funding grant from the W. W. Smith Charitable Trust.  

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By: Riya Sembhi '25 secondary education, English

Chemical engineering student Brian Hoffman ‘23 recently presented his research at the Middle States Commission on Higher Education 2022 Annual Conference in Philadelphia where higher education faculty, administrators, and educators observed a wide array of student research projects.

Conducting this research as part of Widener’s Summer Undergraduate Research & Creative Activities (SURCA) program, his work entitled, “Porous Carbon from Non-Recyclable Plastic Wastes,” aims to reduce Styrofoam waste through burning and converting Styrofoam into carbon-based materials that can then be repurposed for water and air filters, catalysts, and more. Brian appreciated the chance to share his research with a receptive audience that had a diverse range of occupational backgrounds. 

Having been engaged in this research since Junior year, Brian aims to continue this work as his Senior project. Now in the 4+1 Program at Widener, he hopes to maintain the research with similar projects. He thanks Dr. Dipendu Saha for his guidance and mentorship, for the opportunity to be involved with the research, and his continuous support today. 

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