Funding the Future
Through competitive research funding and industry partnerships, Embry-Riddle’s Department of Aerospace Engineering is driving breakthroughs in aerospace systems, advanced air mobility, autonomy and space technologies. s DOE ARPA-E: Dr. Saman Farhangdoust ($500K) Dr. Saman Farhangdoust has been awarded a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency- Energy (ARPA-E) to develop innovative structural battery technology for electric aircraft. Farhangdoust’s research addresses one of the most significant challenges in advanced air mobility: energy storage. Current battery technologies limit the range and efficiency of electric aircraft, including emerging platforms such as electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicles and air taxis. His work proposes a transformative solution by integrating energy storage directly into aircraft structures, such as wing ribs, creating multifunctional components that both bear loads and store energy. This approach introduces a new class of smart multifunctional structural battery systems designed to improve system-level energy capacity. The project also incorporates advanced 4D printing techniques, enabling materials to adapt to environmental conditions such as pressure, further enhancing safety and performance.
s NIH Award: Bone Age Determination for the 21st Century: Dr. Anouck Girard (Embry-Riddle Share: $1.05M) Adequate growth is a crucial health indicator in children; however, one of the biggest challenges in assessing its adequacy is the wide subject-to-subject variability in growth trajectories. The estimation of the bone age (BA) with a radiological image of the left hand and wrist describes the degree of maturation of a child’s skeleton. For the past 60 years, the assessment of a child’s BA has been the result of a visual match with one of the standards compiled in the Greulich and Pyle (G&P) Atlas (1959), a gold standard clinical practice that provides a set of radiographic data sampled from children at different ages. This clinical tool has several limitations that affect the accuracy of the BA assessment. Over the last century, the U.S. population has been reshaped by a larger number of children of international ancestry and the nutritional environment has fostered an obesity epidemic with a profound impact on children’s growth and rate of physical maturation. A reliance on subjective evaluation, large standard deviations for each standard and the significant variability between clinicians’ assessment of BAs make the G&P Atlas-based interpretation susceptible to poor prediction performance and a good candidate for AI-assisted reading. The project is a collaboration with a clinical team at the University of Michigan. Embry-Riddle will devise an AI- assisted BA determination system that will refine the G&P precision by narrowing intervals between standards and overcoming reader biases.
12 | AERONEWS 2025 - 2026
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