AI speeds the hunt for better rechargeable batteries

Two men stand outside a glove box. The one on the right is holding a sample with the gloves that is on the inside of the box, while the other looks on.

Rechargeable batteries power everything from electric vehicles to laptop computers. They are in-demand, but far from perfect. Improving them means finding the ideal mix of elements from the periodic table, each with unique properties alone and in combination.

Like drug discovery, the search can be overwhelming: thousands of possible materials, only a few with the right traits.

In a battery, the electrodes at each end and the electrolyte in the middle drive the electrochemical reactions that store and release energy.

Making Waves of Impact
With all the past research in the data pool, AI can help find the chemical ‘needle in the haystack’ for next-gen batteries.
Two men operate a piece of equipment in the lab. The one on the right is sitting.
Professor Junjie Niu, industrial & manufacturing engineering (left), and Osman Shovon, PhD student in materials science & engineering, work with a tap density tester, which measures how tightly a powder, like a cathode or anode material, can be packed.

The challenge is to identify materials that boost energy density and electron flow so batteries last longer and charge faster.

“If you had to choose materials armed with only the periodic table, it would probably take you 100 years,” said Professor Junjie Niu, industrial & manufacturing engineering, whose lab researches improvements for energy storage.

“AI is good for the selection of new materials to use in these parts of the batteries,” Niu said. “It helps us narrow the field to the top five or ten possibilities to meet the performance requirements and then my students focus on only the most promising.”

Different applications – say, a car battery versus a phone battery – require different qualities. So AI also scans and compiles data from past studies, accelerating the screening process and pointing to new directions.

Success lies in asking informed questions, he said.

“We’re not asking AI for the answers. We’re using what we know to ask for specific clues within certain parameters. Then we validate through our experiments.”

Record attendance at IPIT and WisDOT’s annual Southeast Wisconsin Transportation Symposium

A group of eight people - two women and six men -stand in a line looking at the camera. Behind them is a bright yellow wall.

Tall vehicles – those that have a higher ground clearance than sedans – have larger-than-usual blind spots, and it poses a particular risk for pedestrians, according to a study by master’s student Joely Overstreet and her advisor, Professor Xiao Qin, both in civil & environmental engineering at UWM. The two are investigating solutions.

The presentation was among the UWM research in the breakout sessions at the annual Southeastern Wisconsin Transportation Symposium at UWM on Oct. 10.

UWM’s Institute for Physical Infrastructure and Transportation (IPIT) and WisDOT co-hosted the symposium, now in its fifth year, to bring together researchers, students and transportation professionals to showcase related research and share innovative practices.

A man with glasses on speaks at a podium with a poster behind him.
Xiao Qin, professor and director of UWM’s Institute of Physical Infrastructure and Transportation, opens the symposium.
A large room full of people sitting at tables with a podium in the back.
Now in its fourth year, the symposium attracted record attendance with 220 registrants.
a young women with dark brown hair
Joely Overstreet, master’s student, civil & environmental engineering, presents her work on pedestrian visibility in tall vehicles.
a man with a beard speaks to a group from the podium. A screen displays information next to him.
Bryan Porter, dean of the UWM Graduate School, joined the symposium to present on traffic psychology and behavior.
Two men look at the camera with a poster bathed in blue light between them.
Tom Shi, assistant professor, civil & environmental engineering (left), and PhD student Muhammad Fahad are studying whether illuminating crosswalks with blue light rather and white light affects pedestrian safety. The hypothesis is that blue light at around 7000 Kelvin does a better job of capturing the attention of drivers approaching crosswalks. It’s a data intensive study that also involved Xiao Qin, professor, civil & environmental engineering, and Tian Zhao, associate professor, computer science.

Attendance topped last year’s with over 230 registrants from across the state and multiple disciplines, said Xiao Qin, who also is IPIT director.

IPIT currently has 34 affiliated faculty members across five colleges at UWM. There are 31 active projects addressing issues such as traffic safety, urban mobility, infrastructure preservation.

Symposium breakout sessions covered a wide range of other topics, such as:

  • Artificial Intelligence in Transportation (Xiao Qin, UWM)
  • From Behavior to Breakthroughs: How Technology is Shaping Safer Driving Habits (Bryan Porter, Dean, UWM Graduate School)
  • Transportation Demand Management Opportunities in the Region (Dana Shinners, Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission)
  • Advancing AV/CV Readiness in Wisconsin: Panel discussion and demonstration (Xiaopeng Li, UW-Madison, and Tom Shi, UWM)


Speakers included WisDOT Secretary Kristina Boardman and Victoria Sheehan, executive director of the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. 

Download the symposium presentations here.

From pixels to predictions: Students can uncover AI uses in the lab

Mahsa Dabagh, professor of biomedical engineering, helps a male student as he sits in front of a computer looking at medical scans.

Cancer research often demands patience – hours of labeling 3D images, tracing tumor boundaries pixel by pixel before the real work can even begin. 

In Associate Professor Mahsa Dabagh’s lab, artificial intelligence is reshaping how researchers predict and treat disease. Dabagh, a biomedical engineering faculty member, studies how blood flows through and feeds tumors and how subtle biological and environmental cues can signal cancer’s next move. 

“AI helps us spend less time exploring the data and more time using it to design solutions,” Dabagh said. 

Making Waves of Impact
A newcomer to AI seizes the opportunity to fast-track the time-consuming task of segmentation.
a young man with blonde hair sitting behind a computer screen looks at the camera.
Biomedical engineering student Miles Smith started by manually labeling medical scans of tumors. Now he’s training AI to do the time-consuming job faster and smarter. ‘Learning these methods will be useful no matter where I end up,’ he said.

Her team is creating a deep-learning system that doesn’t just scan for tumors – it builds a virtual model of them. By analyzing MRI and biopsy images alongside detailed patient data such as protein activity, family medical history, and lifestyle factors, the tool can recognize not only what a tumor looks like, but how it might behave. 

“Research in the last decade shows that one data source is rarely enough for accurate prediction,” Dabagh said. “AI’s strength is in pulling together all those layers of information to create a more complete picture.” 

Undergraduate contributions 

Biomedical engineering senior Miles Wehner’s summer role in Dabagh’s lab was to work on the first step of the project, labeling tumors in MRI scans, a process that can take an hour per patient. Going slice by slice through hundreds of 3D images, Wehner had to carefully trace and label the tumor areas pixel by pixel.  

He soon saw the potential for AI to speed things up. Now he’s building a platform that uses both his own segmented scans and publicly available datasets to automate the entire process, bringing AI into the process earlier than the final predictions. 

“It’s still a lot of work to train our models,” Dabagh said, “but it’s worth it. It can improve clinicians’ predictions and give them personalized guidance for each patient’s treatment. That means saving more lives.” 

For Wehner, who only started coding through a summer program at UWM that introduces students to AI and programming, the research opened new doors. The program, Cyberinfrastructure Comprehensive, Applied and Tangible Summer School, or CIberCATSS, is funded by the National Science Foundation through 2026 and students with a faculty mentor can be admitted. 

“They say AI is the future. Learning these methods will be useful no matter where I end up,” he said. “Doing this research helped me see what’s possible.”

Researchers’ new coating turns metals into solar panels, potentially cutting costs

a young woman in a while lab coat showing off a piece of equipment

What if you could turn common metals, like steel or copper, into mini-solar panels by applying a coating? Professors Nikolai Kouklin, computer science, and Konstantin Sobolev, civil & environmental engineering, stumbled onto a way to do just that.

The coating they developed with Yuting Spiegelhoff, a doctoral student in electrical engineering, is easier to use and cheaper than materials used in traditional solar panels.

The discovery came about by accident.

The research team was originally testing hopeite, a zinc-based mineral used for corrosion protection, when they found it had a photovoltaic effect—producing electricity from light, especially when a particular plant dye was used.

Two probes are attached to a sample material smeared between two small glass slides held together with binder clips.
A voltage is applied to a sample of a new metal coating to measure its electric capacity under a light source.

“We didn’t know that the zinc-phosphate would have this photovoltaic effect,” Kouklin said.  

The researchers found that layers of hopeite reacts quickly to changing light conditions. Unlike traditional solar cells, it doesn’t require semiconductors or an external power source.

That simplicity matters. Traditional solar cells need semiconductors to convert sunlight into an electrical current. Manufacturing those semiconductors is costly, resource-intensive, and requires ultra-pure water.

The team has filed for a patent through the UWM Research Foundation.

The effect of blackberry juice

The coating’s effect is amplified when the coating is combined with anthocyanin, a natural dye found in blackberries. The pigment alters how the mineral interacts with light, boosting voltage output.

“This opens the door to affordable and widely deployable solar cells,” Kouklin said. “Just think – embedded energy generation on metal roofs, infrastructure, or industrial surfaces.”

The Research Foundation helped kickstart this project with early-stage Catalyst Grant funding that allowed the team to demonstrate key properties and build a prototype. See the publication in Applied Physics Letters.

WUWM’s ‘Chancellor’s Report’ features Dean Peters and an engineering student

Three men with headphones on around a round table look at the camera. They are in a radio studio.

UWM Chancellor Thomas Gibson and WUWM general manager David Lee delve into what UWM’s College of Engineering & Applied Science has to offer in a recent on-air interview with Dean Brett Peters and Kayla Knudtson, an undergraduate in electrical engineering. Peters and Knudtson share their views on the student experience, curriculum, and job opportunities.

Listen on WUWM.

CEAS students and faculty help Sen. Baldwin learn about AI innovation during CSI visit

Two men and a woman in discussion. The man on the left is shaking hands with the woman on the right with the second man in the middle.

Students and faculty from the college were well-represented at a welcome event for U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin when she visited UWM’s Connected Systems Institute (CSI) Sept. 24.

Baldwin explored the cutting-edge artificial intelligence research at the Microsoft AI Co-Innovation Lab to learn how the facility and the whole CSI and its industry partners are contributing to advanced manufacturing.

Students and an alumnus presenting included:

  • Peyton Anderson, undergraduate, mechanical engineering
  • Isaac Gerner, undergraduate, computer science
  • Calvin Irvine, undergraduate, electrical engineering
  • Abe Benelmadjat, PhD student, mechanical engineering
  • Faria Hoque Bhuiya, MS student, mechanical engineering
  • Sammie Omranian, PhD student, computer science
  • Isaac Wolf, ’24 BS mechanical engineering

In addition to Associate Dean Andy Graettinger, CEAS faculty on hand were:

  • Ali Abedi, UWM Vice Provost for Research and professor, electrical engineering
  • Alex Yasha Yi, CSI Director of Research and professor, electrical engineering

See all the photos.

Four NMDSI Student Research Scholars from the college named

Congratulations to the four engineering & computer science students who were awarded research funding this semester from the Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute.

A partnership among UWM, Marquette University and Northwestern Mutual, NMDSI aims to establish Wisconsin as a national hub for data science and technology. 

Since its inception, NMDSI has awarded more than $300,000 to support over 100 semester-long projects through the Student Research Scholars initiative. The selected projects focus on five areas: artificial intelligence; AI and data bias and ethics; behavioral economics; financial literacy; and health and wealth inequities.

This semester’s student scholars from the college and their faculty advisors include:

Xavier Sebastian Adettu, “Partial Evaluation for Optimizing Data Science Library”
Tian Zhao, associate professor, computer science

Sajede Farahani, “Use of AI in Leveraging Alternative Data in Mortgage Industry.”
Wilkistar Otieno, associate professor, industrial & manufacturing engineering

Mohammad Shalmani, “Leveraging Large Language Models and User-Centered Design to Enhance Older Patients’ Engagement with Patient Portals.”
Jake Lu, associate professor of health informatics, affiliate professor of computer science, graduate program director of biomedical health informatics

Divakar Yadav, “LLMFlux: Cold-Start-Aware Inference Server for Modern Transformers.”
Tian Zhao, associate professor, computer science

Thomas and Zhang awarded campus DIG grants for research in VR and batteries

Two men testing computer science VR equipment. The one on the right is wearing the VR goggles.

Two research projects – one focusing on virtual reality exposure and the other on a pretreatment for battery parts – have received funding by the UWM Graduate School’s Discovery and Innovation Grant (DIG) program. This yearlong, internal seed funding prioritizes new lines of research that have high external funding potential.

The grants from engineering and computer science were among a dozen awards given for this academic year.

Studying how walking in VR changes what we see in real life
Jerald Thomas, assistant professor, computer science

Members of Thomas’ lab are studying how real-world movements translate to virtual reality – and what happens when the two don’t align. The most natural way to navigate VR is by walking, with steps mirrored in the virtual world. This helps users build a mental map, just like in real life.

But virtual spaces are often much larger than the physical space available. Designers of VR use a strategy called “translation gain” to mark changes in how far you appear to move in VR compared to real life.

For instance, one meter of physical walking might equal 1.5 meters virtually. Small adjustments usually go unnoticed by the user, though sensitivity varies by person.

Thomas will test a question no one else has: Does VR alter how people judge distances once the headset is off—and how long those effects last. It’s important because altered depth perception after using VR could pose a safety hazard for users, Thomas said.

Scaling up a patented process to cut lithium loss in batteries
Xiaoxiao Zhang, scientist, mechanical engineering
Deyang Qu, professor, mechanical engineering (co-investigator)

Zhang and Qu are demonstrating a new way to enhance battery performance by pre-treating electrodes through their patented process at a pilot scale.

“One of the key challenges with lithium-ion batteries is that they lose a portion of active lithium during the very first charge, which reduces performance right from the start,” Zhang said. “Our patent addresses this issue by pre-treating the electrode with li-organic complex solution to compensate for that initial loss.”

This pretreatment can be directly integrated into existing production lines and is compatible with both lithium-ion and sodium-ion batteries. It also is adaptable to multiple anode types – from hard carbon to silicon – and can be precisely tuned to add the right amount of lithium or sodium. 

The grant will allow them to test the process at the semi-industrial scale.

If successful, this work could lead to longer-lasting, more affordable batteries for technologies like electric cars. Also, by wasting less lithium in production, it also helps conserve a valuable resource and reduce environmental impact.

Rohatgi group awarded a patent for innovative pretreatment of steel

Three men looking at the camera. One has his arms crossed.

Five members of the UWM Foundry research group, led by and including Distinguished Professor Pradeep Rohatgi, materials science & engineering, have been granted a U.S. patent for their innovative work on surface alloying of sand-cast steel components.

Current doctoral students Kaustubh Kishore Rane, Swaroop Kumer Behera, and Michael Beining are named on the patent, as well as Amir Kordijazi, an alum who is now an assistant professor at the University of Southern Maine.

This breakthrough technology involves applying a specially designed metal slurry to sand molds, resulting in metal castings with a durable, corrosion-resistant surface layer, which reduces corrosion, oxidation, and wear. This process gives mild steel a similar surface to stainless steel, at a much lower cost.

It also will reduce dependence on scarce alloying elements, like nickel and chromium, which are getting more expensive and difficult to import.

The work was funded by the Water Equipment and Policy Center, an NSF-backed I/UCRC at UWM. The patent is available for licensing through the UWM Research Foundation.

Fall Welcome Fest delivered on its promise of fun and community building

a group of three young men posing with a Panther mascot

Engineering and computer science students got a chance to mingle, meet faculty and enjoy lunch at the annual Fall Welcome Fest held on the EMS plaza Sept. 18.

Thank you to all the faculty and staff who showed up to greet students and represent their departments. The event is an invigorating way to start a new semester and introduce students to the college.

A young woman and a Panther mascot show their "claws."
Pounce is showing this student how to show their Panther Pride!
A mechanical engineering bachelor's student with a helmet on is sitting in the drivers seat of a Baja car.
A member of the student chapter of Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) demonstrates the cozy driver’s seat in the group’s Baja car.
Electrical Engineering faculty demonstrate a Tesla coil display at the college's Fall Welcome Fest.
Teaching faculty Bill Dussault, electrical engineering, explains how the Tesla coil works.
Two women, one sitting and one standng face each other across a table, have a discussion.
Professor Susan McRoy, computer science (seated), discusses the field with an interested student.
A young woman works on a large 3D printer.
A member of the Prototyping Club shows off the group’s portable 3D printer.
A man with glasses talks with two female students. We see his face but not theirs.
Associate Professor Jaejin Jang, industrial & manufacturing engineering, explains the course options in his department to two students.
Six men at a foundry demonstration, all looking at the camera.
Members of the American Foundry Society, student chapter, man the Foundry-in-a-Box activity. The two on the right are Associate Professor Ben Church and Professor Pradeep Rohatgi, both materials science & engineering.
A group shot of about 30 people in celebratory mode, looking at the camera
The whole group of Milwaukee Engineers and Computer Scientists celebrates the new school year.
An African American man with dreadlocks speaks to a students whose back is facing the camera.
A student talks to another about joining the National Society of Black Engineers, student chapter.
A civil engineering student shakes hands with a faculty member as a third, standing between and behind them, looks on.
Professor Hani Titi, civil & environmental engineering (right), meets new students attending the festivities.

The highlights include attendance by Pounce and campus police’s comfort dog, Ezmae, giveaways, and a free lunch! Many student organizations and individual departments hosted demonstrations of work or equipment.

Engineering topics were on display, including a Tesla coil demonstration.

Student organizations hosted their own show-and-tell. To name a few: The foundry group showed what you can do with molten tin; the Prototyping Club brought its portable 3D printer, the Biomedical Engineering Society chapter exhibited some of its creations, and, of course, American Society of Mechanical Engineers chapter brought its current Baja car.