The Academic Minute

On Wichita State University Week: Reducing lift-off weight can be crucial for spaceflight.

Waruna Seneviratne, director of the Advanced Technologies Lab for Aerospace Systems (ATLAS) at the National Institute for Aviation Research, explores one way to do so.

Faculty Bio:

Waruna Seneviratne is the Director of the Advanced Technologies Lab for Aerospace Systems (ATLAS) at the National Institute for Aviation Research (NIAR), Wichita State University. With over 25 years at NIAR, he leads a diverse research portfolio in advanced manufacturing, inspection, durability, damage tolerance, certification, and aging of composite aircraft structures—supported by agencies including the FAA, DoD, DHS, NASA, and major aerospace manufacturers.

In 2019, he founded the NIAR ATLAS Manufacturing Innovation Center to create a makerspace-style environment for accelerating advanced manufacturing research and prototyping. He also leads the Manufacturing for Affordable Sustainable Composites (MASC) initiative, sponsored by the Air Force Research Lab, which focuses on integrating in-process inspection technologies into manufacturing. His team’s automated fiber placement (AFP) inspection system received the 2023 JEC Composites Innovation Award for Digital, AI & Data. In 2024, his work on thermoplastic injection overmolded aircraft window plugs—adapting automotive technologies for high-rate aerospace production—earned both the Best Technical Paper Award at SAMPE and the CAMX Innovation Award.

Waruna serves on the Technical Oversight Committee for NASA’s Advanced Composites Consortium (HiCAM) and the Executive Steering Committee for the Office of Naval Research’s Composites Manufacturing Technology Center through The Composites Consortium. He is a recipient of NASA’s Group Achievement Award (2022) for his contributions to the Advanced Composites Project, and the “Turning Goals into Reality” Honor Award (2002) for his work with the AGATE Alliance.

Before joining NIAR, Waruna worked as a stress analyst on the Airbus A380 program, ensuring compliance with FAA and EASA certification standards. He holds BS, MS, and PhD degrees in Aerospace Engineering from Wichita State University and has lived in Wichita for over 30 years.

Transcript:

Today’s space structures are built to survive one of the most violent environments imaginable—launch. As a result, they are often overdesigned, carrying extra mass, cost, and complexity just to endure those few critical minutes. At the same time, everything we send to space must fit within the space of a payload bay. This constraint forces engineers to fold structures into compact, origami-like forms—packed with joints, motors, and deployment mechanisms that add weight, introduce risk, and create potential points of failure.

But what if we didn’t have to build everything on Earth?

What if we could build them in space instead?

To meet this challenge, a new approach is emerging: Automated Tool-less Manufacturing, or AToM. This system uses two coordinated robotic arms to fabricate high-performance thermoplastic composite structures directly in space. Working together, they place continuous fibers with precision, creating strong, lightweight, three-dimensional parts—without molds, without ovens or autocalves, and without the constraints of traditional manufacturing.

Think of it as additive manufacturing—but engineered for structural strength with continuous fiber composites.

The impact is transformative. By eliminating tooling and reducing dependence on multiple launches, AToM removes traditional limits on size, weight, and complexity. Structures no longer need to fold or deploy—they can be built exactly as designed, with fewer joints and far less mechanical complexity and weight.

And this isn’t theoretical. At the NIAR ATLAS Manufacturing Innovation Center, this technology has already demonstrated the ability to rapidly produce aerospace-quality composite structures on-site.

Even more, the thermoplastic materials used are recyclable—opening the door to a circular manufacturing economy in space, where every resource matters.

From orbit to the Moon, to Mars and beyond, this technology redefines not just how we build—but where we build.

Read More:

Advanced Technologies Lab for Aerospace Systems - ATLAS

New Technology Can Create Composite Structures in Space

In-Situ Consolidation Thermoplastic Process Development for Toolless Automated Fiber Placement Manufacturing in Space

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On Wichita State University Week: Should we change the way we think about using generative AI for learning?

JaeHwan Byun, associate professor in the College of Education, explores this question.

Faculty Bio:

Dr. JaeHwan Byun is an Associate Professor in the School of Education, College of Applied Studies at Wichita State University. He joined WSU in 2015 and currently serves as Program Chair for the Master of Education in Learning and Instructional Design and Director of the Applied AI in Education Research Lab. Dr. Byun’s work focuses on how educators and learners can engage in learning experiences that are engaging, infused with meaning, and experienced as coherent and complete. Building on longstanding work in educational technology, his current scholarship foregrounds generative AI (GenAI) in education, including studies of teacher adoption and needs, design-based approaches to educator preparation, and how GenAI can function as “design material” that reshapes instructional activity and learning paradigms.

Transcript:

Today, many see GenAI as a quick tool to get answers. A shortcut. This view misses its real potential and leads to widespread concerns about cheating and shallow learning.My research, conducted with my colleague Dr. Mara Alagić, proposes a new paradigm called Generativism. We argue that real learning with GenAI isn’t about the answer it gives you. It’s about the cognitive work you do with that answer.We define this deep learning in a cycle: You prompt. The GenAI generates. And then, the most important part begins: the critique.That critique then becomes a new prompt to ask GenAI. This process iterates, until you and the AI build a refined learning outcome. This is a moment of critical reflection followed by action.The GenAI acts as a partner that challenges your thinking. Your job isn’t to simply accept its answer. Your job is to question it, validate it, and refine it. That reflective, iterative process is the learning in the era of GenAI.This process creates a dynamic learning space. The AI provides a “scaffold” that pushes you just beyond what you already know. In this model, the GenAI isn’t a simple tool. It’s a semi-autonomous partner and collaborator. Therefore, the learner cannot be a passive receiver. They must become the orchestrator of this complex process.The “ah-ha” moment is this: The true goal of GenAI in education is not to deliver information. It is to provoke the critical reflection and deep engagement needed to build real, lasting understanding.For the younger generations who will inevitably live with this technology, this means teaching them how to think critically is more important than ever.

Read More:

College of Education

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On Wichita State University Week: Your tongue matters more than you might think.

Heidi VanRavenhorst-Bell, chair and associate professor in the Department of Human Performance Studies, explores why.

Faculty Bio:

Dr. Heidi VanRavenhorst-Bell has an established interdisciplinary line of research in clinical exercise physiology and orofacial myology. Her work in promoting healthy tongue muscle performance through physical activity has been internationally recognized and showcased on NPR’s Science Friday with Ira Flatow. Her research also includes R&D and product validation in the health & fitness industry. Dr. Bell has developed a systematic network purposed toward bridging the gap between healthcare and fitness. Her entrepreneurial background has further led to three start-up companies, secured intellectual property and established a platform to mentor students aspiring to be the next leaders in the field. Besides serving as Chair and Associate Professor of the Department of Human Performance Studies at Wichita State, Bell is the undergraduate coordinator for Exercise Science, manager of the Human Performance Laboratory, a Faculty Fellow for the Dorothy and Bill Cohen Honors College, and an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Transcript:

Eight muscles. One tongue. And it might be the hardest-working muscle group you never think about. That is, unless you bite it. The tongue helps us speak, chew, swallow, and even keep the airway open during sleep. But for more than one in three people, tongue and facial movement patterns don’t work as efficiently as they should—what clinicians call orofacial myofunctional disorders, or OMD.

Here’s the tricky part: in clinic, tongue performance measures are often recorded with tools that capture only a slice of what the tongue does. One challenge is slippage of the oral device within the mouth. The tongue’s anterior and posterior have different muscle fiber composition and functional roles, so even small shifts can change what’s actually measured. We tested and patented an oral-safe anti-slip patch, and participants reported better stability without meaningful changes in the pressure values, which is clinically important. Another area of consideration during assessments is head posture. Research shows even the simplest change in position may shift lingual measures.

Measuring tongue motion and force in real life—not just during brief clinical visits—presents challenges, too. PARROT, a patented research prototype, could address this. Fitting like a palatal mouthpiece, it wirelessly captures spatial positioning of the tongue within the oral cavity, while also mapping how hard and for how long the tongue is pressing against various structures. The scientific goal? Attain objective, repeatable data that can improve screening, guide therapy, and support telepractice.

A deeper physiology question involves fascia, which links human body structures from the tip of the tongue down the tips of the toes. Manipulating fascia and other physiological factors through physical activity and targeted stretching are shown to favor tongue strength or endurance.

So, the next time you swallow, yawn, talk or even exercise… remember: your tongue is doing a quiet biomechanical ballet.

Read More:

Department of Public Health Sciences

[Science Friday] - When Your Tongue Needs A Tuneup

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On Wichita State University Week: Technology can only help if people are willing to use it.

Nikki Keene Woods, professor and chair of Public Health Sciences, reveals why some may not trust devices that could help them.

Faculty Bio:

Dr. Nikki Keene Woods is an applied behavioral scientist and public health professor. She joined WSU in 2012. She has master’s degrees in behavioral science and public health in addition to a PhD in Behavioral Psychology from the University of Kansas. She is a member of the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE) and the local chapter the Kansas ACHE. Her research centers on maternal/child health, with an emphasis on advancing health outcomes for women and underserved populations through applied interdisciplinary research. She has led or co-led numerous federally and state-funded projects, including a National Institutes of Health grant on wearable devices for fetal heart rate monitoring, a PCORI grant to improve women’s health, and authored more than 40 peer-reviewed publications. Dr. Keene Woods’ scholarship integrates community-engaged methods and applied data analytics to improve population health outcomes in Kansas and beyond.

Transcript:

When we think about new health technology, we often assume that better tools automatically lead to better care. But when it comes to care during pregnancy, that is not always the case. In my research, my team and I studied how women feel about using wearable devices that allow health care providers to remotely monitor a baby’s heart rate. These tools have great potential, especially for women in rural areas or communities with limited access to prenatal services. We surveyed women of reproductive age to understand what would make them willing or hesitant to use a remote fetal heart monitoring device. What we found was both practical and revealing. First, acceptance depended heavily on whether the technology fits into everyday life. Women were not opposed to technology, but they were clear about their expectations. Comfort and size mattered. Most women said the device would need to be small and fit easily into their daily routines. Second, age mattered in unexpected ways. Women in their thirties and forties were more accepting of the technology than younger women. We often assume that being younger automatically means being more comfortable or accepting of health technology, but pregnancy has a way of rewriting those assumptions. During pregnancy, trust, experience, and perceived risk may matter more than comfort with technology. Finally, privacy and accuracy were concerns as some women worried about who would have access to their data, and whether inconsistent readings might increase anxiety instead of providing reassurance. The takeaway is simple but important. If we want technology to improve care during pregnancy and reduce disparities, we have to design it with women. It’s about adding technology thoughtfully, in ways that make care feel more supportive, more human, and improve quality. Listening to women’s experiences and concerns is not a barrier to innovation. It is how innovation succeeds.

Read More:

Public Health Sciences at Wichita State University

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Making a decision about an activity for a group of friends can be stressful.

Sharaya Jones, Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Costello College of Business at George Mason University, examines why emotions play a huge part in the process.

Faculty Bio:

Sharaya M. Jones is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Costello College of Business. Sharaya received her PhD in Marketing from the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder, and her bachelor's degree from the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on questions about how consumer perceptions shape consumer responses. In one stream of research, she examines how perceptions of congruity influence consumer responses such as donation behavior and new product appeal. In a second stream of research, she uncovers how consumers experience and make decisions for shared consumption, which are both heavily influenced by perceptions of group members’ preferences.

Transcript:

Picture this: you’re picking a restaurant for date night, snacks for a movie night with friends, or a group activity for a trip. Why does it feel like a struggle to choose something that will work for everyone?

Seven experiments with over 2000 people revealed something surprising: these decisions aren’t actually harder than choosing for yourself – they’re more emotional. You feel a heightened sense of responsibility to avoid getting it wrong, and the less you know about others’ preferences, the less confident you feel that you’ll be able to make everyone, including yourself, happy. The anxiety is real and it shapes your choices.

It’s why people gravitate toward “most popular” labels and choose variety packs: those options are a safer bet when satisfying everyone – including yourself.

Here’s what’s exciting for brands right now: With AI and social media, we now have real-time signals about who a decision is for. Someone asking an AI “what book should I choose for my book club?” or commenting on a TikTok, asking their tagged friend “should we go to this?” are signals that smart brands can act on. Brands can create bundles or promote “crowd pleasers” for group decisions, as opposed to personalized picks for solo shoppers. These strategies not only help consumers but may also lead to higher conversion.

For consumers: ask people what they want and if that fails, give them some options to help them reveal their preferences. And if someone else is choosing for a shared experience, don’t shy away from stating your preferences. It will reduce their anxiety and make the whole experience better for everyone.

Read More:

[George Mason] - Why choosing stuff to share is an ordeal

[Sage Journals] - The Decision-Making Process and Impact of Individual Decisions for Joint Consumption

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An old Medicare rule is keeping older adults in hospitals longer than necessary, so what can be done?

Zoey Chen, PhD candidate in health services research at Brown University, looks into this.

Faculty Bio:

Zihan Chen is a PhD candidate in Health Services Research at Brown University. She studies Medicare policy, with a focus on post-acute and long-term care.

Transcript:

Imagine this: an older adult falls at home and is hospitalized with a hip fracture. After two days, their doctor says they’re medically stable and ready to leave the hospital—to continue recovery in a nursing home with physical therapy and monitoring.But they can’t leave.Not because of their health—but because of a rule.Medicare requires a minimum three-day hospital stay before it will cover care in a skilled nursing facility. This is known as the “three-day rule,” and it dates back to 1965.More than half a century later, this rule still shapes care for millions of older adults. Many argue that the three-day threshold is arbitrary, rigid, and inefficient. However, we didn’t have strong evidence on how the rule actually affects care.That changed in May 2023, when the rule was reinstated after being waived during the COVID-19 pandemic. This created a rare natural experiment.What we found was surprising. After this rule was reinstated, more patients stayed in hospitals just over three days. And the increase was larger among patients with dementia or hip fracture, who were mostly likely to need post-hospital care in nursing homes. Patients didn’t use nursing homes any less, they were just staying in hospitals longer than medically necessary to qualify.The result? Thousands of extra hospital days, higher costs for hospitals, and no clear savings for Medicare.This highlights a bigger issue: healthcare is full of eligibility rules like this. They might be valuable, but if we don’t evaluate these rules carefully, they can end up creating bottlenecks—delaying care, increasing costs, and potentially harming patients.

Read More:

[National Library of Medicine] - Changes in Inpatient and Skilled Nursing Facility Care After the Medicare 3-Day Rule Reinstatement

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How do children learn to talk about themselves and other people?

Erin M. Kenney, assistant professor of psychology at Hartwick College, looks into this using preschool-aged children.

Faculty Bio:

Erin M. Kenney is an assistant professor of psychology at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York. Dr. Kenney’s interdisciplinary work includes time as an early childhood teacher, administrator, professor, and researcher. Her areas of expertise include developmental psychology, early childhood education, parent-child conversation.Kenney’s dedication to bridging the gap between developmental science and developmentally appropriate practice includes a commitment to research practices that center participants as knowledge producers and values community engagement. She and the members of the Family and Developmental Studies Research Lab study a variety of topics including parent-child conversation, neurodiversity, and personal intelligence.She earned her B.S. from the University of New England and her M.Ed. from the University of Hartford. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the University of New Hampshire.

Transcript:

We live in a world in which people are constantly judging other people. My research seeks to understand how kids learn to talk about others by investigating parent-and-child conversations. I am interested in the influence that a parent’s own personal intelligence has on a child’s development of personal intelligence, often described as the capacity to reason about personalities, both one’s own and those with whom we come into contact.Parent/child conversation research has existed for decades, but the act of including personal intelligence is brand new. It is all about understanding how children truly understand or interact with people, situations and other things that are different or similar to themselves. Our work is aimed at better understanding how kids develop the ability to describe other people using personality trait terms. They’re asked to have a conversation with their parent describing recent positive and negative interactions with a peer or friend. How do they build that skill set to make those determinations of what a good or bad friend is? The reason I went with three and four-year-olds is I used to be a preschool teacher. I understand that three- and four-year-old kids are very concerned with who’s doing the right thing, who’s doing the wrong thing. They’re also very much learning how to describe themselves and how to talk about other people--and my big question is: What are the mechanisms that underlie that? It appears that parents have a huge role in terms of how children learn to talk about the world around them and our interviews reveal that most parents seem to be trying to do the best they can. Through this research, we can gain insights that may be able to help society understand how to better shape future generations to be less divisive and better able to label and understand personality related behavior.

Read More:

Psychology | Hartwick College

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We are redefining our view of human intelligence.

Aron Barbey, the Andrew J. McKenna Family Professor of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame, looks at how our brain organizes information to do so.

Faculty Bio:

Aron Barbey is also the director of the University of Notre Dame Human Neuroimaging Center and the Decision Neuroscience Laboratory.Barbey’s research investigates how intelligence emerges from the network organization and dynamics of the human connectome, applying methods from cognitive neuroscience, experimental psychology and computer science. His work aims to achieve a deeper understanding of the neural foundations of intelligence and to enable scientific innovation in cognitive enhancement, neurorehabilitation and biologically inspired artificial intelligence.Over the course of his career, Barbey’s research group has won more than $26 million in research funding, with support from organizations including the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Defense, the White House BRAIN Initiative, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and private industry sponsors such as Abbott Nutrition, Google Brain and PepsiCo.

Transcript:

General intelligence is our ability to solve problems across many areas of life, helping us go beyond what we’ve experienced, make sense of the unfamiliar, and adapt to new challenges. What’s remarkable is not just this capacity, but its source: a finite, fragile system, the human brain, a three-pound organ powered by less energy than a lightbulb. The question is how the brain’s finite architecture makes such flexible intelligence possible.

The answer may lie in how knowledge is organized in the brain. Rather than stored in one location, information is distributed across regions. The brain coordinates activity across these regions to construct mental models of the world. These models are built from reusable components of knowledge — information about people, objects, actions and events. Because these components can be combined in different ways across contexts, the brain can generate a variety of thoughts from a finite set of building blocks.

But if knowledge is distributed and its components can be recombined in many ways, what determines which combinations are possible? The answer may lie in the network of connections linking brain regions. Like a city’s map, this network defines the possible routes of communication between different parts of the brain.

Some regions communicate easily through direct connections, while others are more difficult to link. The brain’s flexibility arises from its physical wiring.

This redefines how we understand human intelligence. The brain does not simply process thoughts, it gives them their structure. By shaping which ideas can be linked, how easily they can be reached, and how efficiently they can be recombined, it makes general intelligence possible in a finite system. Intelligence, therefore, is the ability to move through a landscape of ideas whose terrain determines what can be even thought at all.

Read More:

[Notre Dame News] - Key to human intelligence lies in how brain networks work together

Decision Neuroscience Lab

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Putting a figure on a person’s bilingual experience can be daunting.

Esti Blanco-Elorrieta, assistant professor of psychology and neural science at New York University, looks into one way to do so.

Faculty Bio:

I am an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University. In my research, I combine insights from monolingual and multilingual individuals, who process language through speech or sign, to inform an inclusive and comprehensive neurobiology of language. My research combines data from neuroimaging, computational and behavioral methods with theoretical insights from linguistics, psychology and neuroscience.I obtained my PhD from New York University, where I worked at the Neuroscience of Language lab under Liina Pylkkänen’s supervision and completed my post-doctoral training at Harvard University, working in the Cognitive Neuropsychology lab under Alfonso Caramazza’s supervision. In 2019, I was recognized as a Forbes 30 under 30 scientist, and in 2025, I received the Early Career Award from the Society for the Neurobiology of Language.

Transcript:

For decades, bilingualism researchers have faced a deceptively simple question: how do we actually measure how bilingual someone is?We often collect rich language histories, but when it comes time to analyze the data, there’s no standard way to turn all that information into a single, interpretable number. As a result, different studies define “language dominance” and “degree of bilingualism” in very different ways, making it hard to compare results across labs and populations.In my research with my collaborator Jessica Chen, we set out to develop a simple, theoretically grounded way to quantify two things: how dominant someone is in one language versus another, and where they fall on the continuum from monolingual to highly multilingual.We built our approach around two variables that decades of work show are fundamental: self-rated proficiency and age of acquisition. Age of acquisition matters because the brain’s capacity for language learning changes over development, and later exposure typically limits ultimate attainment. Proficiency matters because it reflects how well the language is actually represented and used.We combined these factors into a formula that produces a continuous dominance score, ranging from perfectly balanced bilinguals to strongly dominant speakers of one language. We also introduced a multilingualism score that places individuals on a spectrum from monolingual to polyglot, while giving diminishing weight to each additional language, reflecting the fact that the jump from one to two languages is larger than from four to five.We validated these measures in large datasets, including both healthy adults and bilingual individuals with aphasia, and showed that our simple formulas closely match much more complex statistical methods.Our goal is to offer the field a transparent, biologically informed, and easily reproducible way to characterize language experience—so that when we talk about bilingualism, we’re finally speaking the same quantitative language.

Read More:

[NYU] - Neuroscientists Devise Formulas to Measure Multilingualism

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On Union College Week: What happens to our love lives when the rest of life gets messy?

Mariah Purol, assistant professor of psychology, examines this.

Faculty Bio:

Mariah received her PhD in Social & Personality Psychology from Michigan State University in 2024. She is currently a faculty member in the Psychology department of Union College. Her work examines how both individuals’ and their partners’ characteristics influence their relationship satisfaction, life satisfaction, and well-being. To that end, she’s interested in how we create happy, satisfying lives as individuals (studying traits like gratitude and optimism), and as relationship members (studying constructs like interpersonal perceptions and personality in romantic relationships/friendships).

Transcript:

We have lots of ideas about how life events, especially negative ones, might impact our romantic relationships. For example, what happens to a couple when one of them gets diagnosed with a chronic health condition? Has a parent pass away? Loses a child? Does relationship quality degrade in the face of these stressors, or do couples draw closer?In a recent project, I examined the relationship trajectories of over 10,000 couples in the U.S., the Netherlands, and Switzerland. I did this by combining data from three longitudinal datasets, each of which had information about couples’ relationship quality—like their satisfaction, their levels of support, or their closeness— and the life events that they experienced together. With this data, I examined how changes in relationship quality may be associated with the occurrence of these life events. Overall, it was extremely rare for negative life events to predict negative relationship outcomes (like decreased satisfaction). In a handful of cases, experiencing negative life events was associated with positive relationship outcomes. For example, individuals who experienced a potentially stressful life transition, like beginning a new job or experiencing a new negative health event, also reported feeling more support and responsiveness from their partner over time. However, these effects were rare, and, when significant, the size of the effects were very small. It was much more common for the occurrence of these life events to be unassociated with changes in relationship quality. While this may seem surprising, these results emphasize a point relationships theorists have been making for decades: the presence of a negative event alone is not enough to make or break a romantic relationship.

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