WashU Engineers Secure Defense Grants for Advanced Energy Storage and Machine Learning Research

Washington University in St. Louis engineering faculty members Chongjie Zhang and Sang-Hoon Bae received $600,000 grants from the Defense Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research. Bae's research focuses on ultra-high energy capacitors using nanomembranes for energy storage, aiming to power quantum computing technologies.

Zhang's project on multimodal sensing seeks to improve machine learning models for detecting relevant data while filtering out noise, such as in autonomous vehicle training. Additionally, DARPA is funding other projects at WashU, including a $5.2 million grant to Fuzhong Zhang for developing a genetic switch for efficient microbial bioproduction, and a $250,000 project led by Xudong Chen on mathematical frameworks for complex systems. Other projects include a $2 million grant for enhancing radar systems and a $1 million grant for prototyping a quantum photonic-dimer laser.