Harrisburg faculty awarded seed grants for international research collaboration

MIDDLETOWN, Pa. - Penn State Harrisburg's Office of Global Engagement has awarded seed grants to faculty members to establish interdisciplinary research projects with partner institutions around the globe.

The seed grant program aims to foster collaboration and synergy among researchers from diverse disciplines across Penn State Harrisburg and its international partners. 

"This seed funding program plays to one of Penn State Harrisburg's real strengths: building serious, sustained research collaborations with great partners around the world," said Juliette Tolay, assistant dean for global engagement. "We're excited not just about the individual projects, but about deepening these institutional relationships and seeing what new, unexpected developments come out of them - whether it is new programs, new knowledge or new friendships."

The seed grants, between $2,700 and $3,000 each, will fund travel to partner institutions where faculty will explore innovative research opportunities that address issues of global importance in fields such as health, engineering, humanities and teacher education. The projects also support Penn State Harrisburg's commitment to advancing research with real-world impacts. The college's Office of Research and Outreach assisted with the grant application process.

The seed grant recipients are:

• Issam Abu-Mahfouz, professor of mechanical engineering, partnering with Polytechnic University of Madrid, Spain, for a project to research acoustic field measurements and signal processing for turbulent flow characterization of subsonic jets and for machine condition monitoring. The project aims to address the industrial need for quieter, more efficient air blowers while establishing methodologies applicable to broader turbomachinery design challenges, as well as enhance the ability to reliably and efficiently predict potential machinery faults at early stages to prevent catastrophic failures.

• Reuben Asempapa, associate professor of mathematics education, partnering with University of Ghana, Ghana, for a project to explore the effective integration of modeling practices to enhance learning in science, engineering, technology and mathematics (STEM) courses.

• Amit Banerjee, associate professor of mechanical engineering, partnering with Polytechnic University of Madrid, Spain, for a project that aims to create a suite of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) - referring to AI that can explain the reasoning underpinning its actions - models for manufacturing applications, with an emphasis on increasing confidence, understanding causality and enhancing interpretability of the models.

• Nashwa Elaraby, teaching professor of electrical engineering, partnering with Cairo University, Egypt, for a project to integrate XAI into field-programmable gate array - integrated circuits that can be programmed multiple times - designs and to demonstrate application in Cognitive Radio, referring to the idea of a radio dynamically aware of and able to make rational decisions about channel use and programming.

• Beatrice Epwene, associate teaching professor of communications, partnering with OWL Campus, Germany, for a project examining the issues of news bias, misinformation and disinformation and how technologies including artificial intelligence may be used in addressing lack of news trust.

• Zhezhen Fu, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, partnering with University of Genoa, Italy, to establish a materials-centric international collaboration focused on developing transferable understanding of how composition, processing pathways and microstructure govern material performance in ceramic and inorganic systems.

• Siyu Liu, associate professor of criminal justice, partnering with University of Vale do Itajaí, Brazil, for a comparative study of judicial perception of police witnesses and their credibility in cases with factual disputes.

• James Mutunga, assistant professor of biology, partnering with the University of Lagos, Nigeria, for a project evaluating the physiological and molecular responses of mosquitos to piperonyl butoxide, used with other insecticides and in mosquito vector control programs.

• Ola Rashwan, associate professor of mechanical engineering, partnering with Alexandria University, Egypt, for advanced materials processing in polymer filaments and multi-scale texturing of tooling surfaces. The work aims to address critical needs in industries such as biomedical technology, aerospace and advanced manufacturing by enabling the production of lightweight, durable, tailored and magnetically responsive components.

• Md Habib Ullah, assistant professor of electrical engineering, partnering with Polytechnic University of Madrid, Spain, for a project that aims to develop a distributed energy management framework for smart home communities, integrating hierarchical control, multi-agent systems and blockchain technology.

The faculty members will travel mostly this summer. Projects in Africa fall under the college's Africa Initiative, a special focus the Global Engagement office provides to research connecting with Africa and African partners, and are co-funded with Penn State Global.