Priya Premnath, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, has received the 2026 Shaw Early Career Research Award to study a dual approach to bone cancer treatment and recovery. With $200,000 in seed funding, she will explore how stem cells can be directed to heal bone after surgery without triggering new cancer growth.

The annual award, established by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, supports research in biochemistry, biological sciences, and cancer by early career scientists at UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee. The award is made possible by the late James D. and Dorothy Shaw, donors to the foundation.

How to stop stems cells from turning cancerous

Stem cells are the body’s shapeshifters. In a healthy environment, they begin as generic cells and mature into specific kinds, such as bone, liver or kidney cells. But in a cancer-promoting environment, the same process might reignite the disease instead.

Premnath has a novel idea to guide stem cells to become committed bone cells instead of new cancer cells.

She will study whether a certain drug designed to kill cancer could also help rebuild bone after removal of tumors. For it to work, stem cells in the location would have to be commissioned to mature into bone cells in a cancer-primed environment.

What is UC2288?

A compound used by researchers to kill cancer cells, UC2288 works by inhibiting a gene known as p21. Premnath suspects the gene causes stem cells to mature differently depending on what environment they are surrounded by.

Even before Premnath became aware of the drug, she and her lab members had already found that inhibiting p21 had an effect on stem cells in healthy tissue. It seemed to help bone fractures heal because the stem cells in the location of injury were being nudged into becoming bone cells.

In searching for a non-invasive treatment for bone fractures, Premnath looked for existing drugs that blocked the gene – and uncovered UC2288.

Potential for patients

Now she wants to see if UC2288 can accomplish both staving off cancer expansion while also fostering healing after bone surgery.

The approach has shown potential.

In lab studies, Premnath found that she didn’t need high, cancer-killing doses of the drug to see an effect on stem cells. At much lower concentrations, UC2288 still changed how the cells behaved – even in environments designed to mimic cancer conditions.

For patients, especially young people with bone cancers like osteosarcoma, the implications could be significant. These cancers often strike near growth plates – areas where bones are actively lengthening during puberty.

New insight into bone regeneration

The project could also verify a new idea about bone regeneration.

Evidence from other recent research suggests that stem cells have a middle stage in the transformation to bone cells. They first become cartilage cells. The cartilage serves as a kind of template that is later replaced by bone.

Premnath hopes to uncover what is happening during this process.

Along with chemical signals, Premnath’s team suspects that mechanical forces also help trigger cartilage cells to become bone cells. That insight has inspired her team to investigate a second question.

“Why not just go straight to using cartilage cells and use our mechanical methods to prompt them into bone cells?” she asked. “This would make it much safer to use stem cells, opening the door for their increased use in cancer treatment.”

It would mark a shift in thinking, from trying to control stem cells that have a high propensity to revert to cancer, to working with more stable, committed cells, she said.

“I’m delighted to be chosen for this award and grateful to the Greater Milwaukee Foundation for its support of research that can lead to life-changing cures,” Premnath said.

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Turning underused space into a permanent collaborative work area for senior design teams required extensive renovation. This is the first time they have all been brought together in one large, interdisciplinary studio space.

The project was entirely funded by private philanthropy, including the Alan D. Kulwicki Legacy Fund and the fund of Paul McNally, Senior Lecturer Emeritus, computer science. Additional support came from donors to the CEAS General Fund.

Guests at the event also included representatives of area industries, including those who have sponsored senior design projects. (View a full gallery of previous senior design projects here.)

A possible “next step”

51����’s Community Design Solutions worked with the college to provide illustrations of what a “next step” could look like (below). These images reflect further modernization, collaborative spaces and greater visibility from outside the studio.

Interested in leaning more? If you or your organization would be interested in supporting this project, please contact Jean Opitz at opitz@uwm.edu.

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They’re also why a record number of students in the College of Engineering & Applied Science are spending nights and weekends in a garage deep inside the Northwest Quad parking structure, home to the 51���� student chapter of the Society for Automotive Engineers (SAE). 

Baja SAE is an intercollegiate design competition challenging students to design and build single-seat, off-road vehicles capable of endurance races.

A strong start: first and second place in regional competitions

This fall, the team placed first and second with two different vehicles in two��multi-state,��regional��competitions��–��a rare accomplishment in a single year.��

51����’s SAE student organization has steadily recovered from a dip in membership during COVID to draw more than 40 dues-paying members this fall – the highest in the group’s recorded history, said junior Liam Carroll, the club’s vice president and technical director. 

“Some are just car enthusiasts, but it goes much deeper than that,” Carroll said.

The season opened at Backwoods Baja, hosted by UW–Stout, that drew six teams from Wisconsin and seven from surrounding states.

The team brought two cars: No. 46, a rear-wheel-drive workhorse completed in 2020, and No. 47, a newly finished machine sponsored by Komatsu Mining Corp. Car 46 handily captured first place in the four-hour race. 

The debut of car 47 wasn’t perfect, but it was promising, ranking 13th out of 30 competitors. 

Car 47 marked a major leap forward. It was the team’s first four-wheel-drive design, requiring the drivetrain to run the length of the vehicle rather than stay compact in the rear.  

More than 30 51���� students traveled to the competition, reflecting the club’s emphasis on participation and hands-on learning – not just podium finishes. 

A second chance  

The��new design��faced its next challenge at��Winter Baja, hosted by Michigan Tech in Houghton, Michigan, attracting 19 teams, including teams from Northwestern University and the University of Michigan. Snow and ice turned the course into a traction-starved proving ground��–��ideal conditions for testing four-wheel drive.��

Between the Backwoods and Winter Baja races, the team reworked car 47’s front suspension to improve durability and handling and installed new body panels. 

The improvements paid off. Car 47 roared to a second-place finish, completing the hours-long race without a mechanical issue. Meanwhile, car 46 battled through multiple rollovers but still finished in the top 10 among 39 competitors. 

Learning through revision 

After each race, the students document every design decision, so lessons carry forward to the next car. 

“Our strategy compared to other schools is to focus on durability above all else,” said junior Noah Schwebel, the club’s new president. “When weaknesses appear, the team responds with major structural revisions.” 

Troubleshooting is central to the experience, but students are also drawn by the community, said Assistant Professor William Musinski, the group’s faculty mentor.

The group is quite interdisciplinary.��Electrical engineering and computer science students are developing a data acquisition system, and leaders hope to recruit��students in business,��marketing, and graphic design��majors to help with sponsorships and outreach.��

“The student organization has been doing a tremendous job engaging new students, and they are learning from each other in ways that extend well beyond traditional classroom studies. The group also gives them the chance to share information and prepare for internship or co-op opportunities,” Musinski said. 

Engineering in real time 

Each new vehicle is treated as a clean-sheet design. Car 47, which started in 2021, took far longer than planned to complete. 

Now, as the team begins concept work on car 48, they are reconsidering four-wheel drive. While it performed well in winter conditions, it adds weight and complexity, Schwebel said. 

“Our organization’s teaching mission is very comprehensive,” Schwebel said. “Compared to other design-challenge organizations, we believe ours is closest to providing a real-world engineering experience. Our goal is to challenge members and prepare them for a professional environment.” 

Along the way, students gain more than trophies. They practice cross-functional teamwork, deal with manufacturing constraints, and conduct failure analyses after races.

Many members are “motorheads at heart,” Carroll said. But the real draw isn’t just horsepower.  

“It’s the chance to see their ideas survive – or fail – in the harshest environments, then come back to the shop and build something better.” 

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The two organizations will join others in a collaborative effort called Founder Factory, designed to close critical early- and mid-stage gaps in the startup pipeline.

Founder Factory also includes the UW Center for Technology Commercialization, Milwaukee Tech Hub Coalition, and Midwest Founders Community. Together, the partners will provide an innovation bootcamp, accelerators, pitch events, matchmaking, networking, and more.

The Lubar Entrepreneurship Center will host and co-facilitate the program’s 10-week pre-accelerator that gets underway in the fall.

“Great founders don’t just need ideas – they need a coordinated system that helps them test, build, and scale,” Avdeev said. “Founder Factory brings together the training, mentorship, capital pathways, and partnerships required to move teams from concept to investment readiness.”

In total, the Founder Factory initiative is supported by a $772,000 grant from the Wisconsin Economic Development Commission through its inaugural Ignite program.

The initiative is guided by a 20-member consortium of universities, healthcare and research institutions, investors, and regional innovation organizations working to strengthen Southeast Wisconsin’s startup ecosystem.Top of Form

In addition to launching promising startups, the program’s aims in its first two years are to increase follow-on funding and commercialization, strengthen founder leadership, activate intellectual property, and build a durable, data-driven venture engine for the region, said Jessica Silvaggi, president of the 51���� Research Foundation.

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Kissinger joined the engineering firm Graef-USA Inc., in 1984 and has been Chief Executive Officer of the company since 2012.

During his career, he has been involved in hundreds of building and infrastructure projects, including the Milwaukee Art Museum addition, the Wisconsin (Baird) Center and the Lambeau Field renovation.

His extensive community service includes serving on the Employ Milwaukee board, as well as the boards of the UW-Milwaukee Foundation and the United Way of Greater Milwaukee and Waukesha County.

Last year he was named to the Milwaukee Business Journal’s .

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STEM Forward is a Milwaukee-based non-profit organization that inspires youth to pursue STEM careers. Premnath was chosen for her contributions to the profession and her service as a role model for the next generation of engineers.

Premnath’s research focuses on interdisciplinary research combines engineering and cell biology to address bone health challenges through biomaterials, genetic engineering, and pharmaceutical approaches.

Beyond research, Premnath is a dedicated educator and mentor with a strong commitment to community engagement. She collaborates with local high schools and elementary schools, including summer programs that introduce high school girls to engineering.

She also mentors undergraduate researchers in her laboratory, many of whom have presented their work at regional and national conferences and have gone on to secure employment in Milwaukee’s engineering and biomedical industries.

Attending the banquet to honor Premnath were Andy Graettinger, the college’s associate dean for research; Professor Deyang Qu, department chair, biomedical engineering; biomedical department faculty members Qingsu Cheng and Mahsa Dabagh; Habib Rahman, chair of the mechanical engineering department; Sandeep Gopalakrishnan, 51���� associate professor, biomedical sciences; Chris Beimborn, STEM Outreach for the college; and Lisa McGovern, marketing director for the college.

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Treatment plant operators face a major challenge: Conducting critical water-quality tests take days to complete, while operators often need to make decisions within hours.

A growing field of artificial intelligence – explainable AI, or XAI – is helping bridge that gap, said Fuad Nasir (’25 PhD Civil Engineering), a water supply specialist with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

During his graduate studies, Nasir delved into research involving data collection from a local treatment plant. And he noticed something important happening in the broader world of technology: “AI and machine learning were becoming used in many sectors,” he said, “but they were not using AI in wastewater treatment very much in the United States.”

A matter of trust

The problem wasn’t lack of interest – it was lack of trust.

Traditional machine learning has been compared to a black box: It takes in data and produces predictions, but, Nasir said, “Operators were hesitant to use it because they couldn’t see the process for how it arrived at its prediction.”

For wastewater operators making high-stakes decisions about chemical dosing and treatment timelines, that opacity was a deal-breaker.

That led him to explainable AI. XAI doesn’t just predict an outcome; it highlights the variables that shaped that prediction. “It reveals what’s going on in the background,” Nasir said. “You can literally visualize it when you apply XAI.”

A real-world example

A key example illustrates why this matters. Wastewater plants rely on a lab test called biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) to gauge how much organic material remains in treated water. High BOD can harm aquatic life, so operators need to adjust treatment chemicals to keep it low. But BOD testing takes five days, too long for operators to make decisions.

XAI-guided models can predict BOD using historic data, showing which factors – such as temperature, flow rate, or ammonia – are driving the levels up or down.

XAI has grown rapidly. “I’ve seen a surge of people using it in wastewater in the last few years,” he said. The medical field adopted explainable AI earlier, but wastewater research is now catching up and citing Nasir’s work in the process.

Real-world deployment will take time, he admitted, because utilities need instruments, training, and funding, but the direction is clear.

Nasir arrived at 51���� in 2019 as a master’s student from Bangladesh, attracted by 51����’s strong research culture and environmental engineering faculty, including Professor Jin Li, his advisor. “51���� was ranked as an R1, a top research institution, which definitely caught my attention,” he said.

After a year, he switched to the PhD track. Today, Nasir focuses on aspects of public water systems tied to health and regulation. With AI advancing quickly, he believes technical expertise will be increasingly valuable in regulatory spaces.

His advice for undergraduates? Pay attention. “The thing about AI or machine learning is it changes so fast.”

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Nathaniel Stern teamed up with Sasha Stiles, who has a concurrent solo exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC to develop the exhibit “Generation to Generation: Conversing with Kindred Technologies.” Stern has degrees in both mechanical engineering and design and is a 51���� professor of both mechanical engineering and visual art & design.

The exhibit invites viewers to consider the relationship and the “always-evolving dialogue” between humans and the tools we invent.

“Overall, we should neither approach with blind optimism nor crippling fear around new technologies,” Stern said. “We’re trying to nuance the conversations from a space of real understanding and use.”

More than a theme

The answer is both, he said. The exhibit highlights human–technology interaction while also grappling with real concerns – like the environmental cost of running large AI systems.

To reduce energy consumption, the artists used AI selectively and with small datasets. For example, they trained their own diffusion model on photos of letters to create a stylized alphabet. Because the model was given minimal data, the results resemble rough, childlike handwriting – an intentional artifact that underscores the trade-offs between creativity, technology, and resource use.

This environmental tension shows up thematically as well. “We’re balancing matters of technology vs. the environment,” Stern said, noting that pieces like the Mother Computer in the installation, Weighing, hint at “Mother Earth.”

Not everything in the show was computer-driven. Some components rely on decidedly “old school” methods as a nod to technologies of the past. For Weighing, for instance, letters were cast at MetCovery Foundry in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, using recovered industrial waste metal. It continues the conversation around human and technology’s evolving side by side.

Is AI really original?

Another question Stern is often asked to debunk: “Is this just artwork stitched together from other people’s creations?”

The creative process, he said, is intentional and transparent with manipulation of the AI tools in nonstandard ways, to invite strategic possibilities. Viewers can decide.

In the piece The E-Waste Land, AI is used only to extend Stern’s own experimental imagery, and all training data comes from owned sources. For this, he used Adobe Firefly’s stable diffusion –feeding in fragments of his abstract images and prompting the system to complete them.

Stiles, meanwhile, works with a large language model that she has fine-tuned on her own contemporary poetry. She treats AI as “a sounding board” – asking it for multiple sentence variations and iterating those until the results emerge in a way she is happy with.

Both artists began incorporating AI into their practices long before the current buzz. For example, Stern custom-built the motion-tracking algorithm used in the interactive installation Still Moving, predating today’s body-tracking tools such as MediaPipe.

The exhibit runs Feb. 12-20 at the Kenilworth Square East Gallery. This research was funded by 51����’s Office of Research. The Milwaukee exhibit was funded by Center for 21st Century Studies and the Lubar Entrepreneurship Center.

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The Transportation Research Board, a program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, hosts the world’s largest gathering of transportation researchers and practitioners at its annual meeting.

Faculty members from the college who co-authored the papers are: Xiao Qin, professor, and Xiaowei Tom Shi, assistant professor, civil & environmental engineering, and Susan McRoy, professor, and Tian Zhao, associate professor, computer science. Also represented is Robert Schneider, from 51����’s urban planning department.

The list of papers and their authors are:

• Rai, N.; Liang, X.; Shen, D.; Huang, S.; Shi, X.* Taming Stop-and-Go Traffic Shockwaves: Evidence from Radio-Controlled Car Experiments.
• Sadeghi Koupaei, A.; Shi, X.* A Novel Surrogate Safety Measure Incorporating Detection and Communication Imperfections.
• Jung, S.*; Qin, X. Data-Driven Approach to Prioritizing Emergency Facility Deployment in High-Risk Freeway Tunnels.
• Schneider, R. J.*; Hemze, N.; Barbee, H.; Sveen, C.; Thorne, K.; Ogunniyi, O. E. Midblock Pedestrian Crossing Volumes and Crash Rates in Milwaukee, WI.
• Schneider, R. J.*; Gu, X.; Nelson, K.; Ferenchak, N. N.; Qin, X. Neighborhood-Level Shifts in Fatal and Severe Injury Pedestrian Crashes: 2008–2012 vs. 2017–2021.
• Overstreet, J.; Qin, X.*; Parajuli, S.; Cherry, C.; Li, Y. Does Height Matter? An Analysis of Contributing Factors to Tall Vehicle – Pedestrian Crashes.
• Rukhsana, F.; Qin, X.*; Schneider, R. J. A Sequential Spatial-ML Framework for Interpretable Macro-Level Pedestrian Crash Modeling.
• Abrari Vajari, M.; Shi, X.; Qin, X.* A Computer Vision Pipeline for Crosswalk Detection, Classification, and Quality Evaluation.
• Parajuli, S.; Cherry, C.; Overstreet, J.; Li, Y.; Qin, X.* Impact of Tall Vehicles on Pedestrian Injury Severity Outcomes: Insights from Multi-State Pedestrian Crash Data.
• Devadiga, M.; Abrari Vajari, M.; McRoy, S. W.; Qin, X.* Enhancing Data Accessibility Through Automated PII De-Identification in Crash Narratives.
• Fahad, M.; Tasnim, A.; Xiong, T.; Damaraju, A.; Zhao, T.; Qin, X.; Shi, X.* A Trajectory Dataset of Pedestrian – Vehicle Interactions at Crosswalks via Deep Learning and Roadside Cameras.
• Fahad, M.; Tasnim, A.; Xiong, T.; Damaraju, A.; Zhao, T.; Qin, X.; Shi, X.* A Comprehensive Evaluation Framework for Roadside Perception Systems.
• Liang, X.; Yang, C.; Shi, X.* An Unsupervised Framework for Abnormal Driving Detection Using Utility-Based Feature Sequences.

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Each element has different properties alone — and when combined — leading to endless possibilities. Niu’s lab is using AI to quicken the pace of finding the best properties for each battery application. Different uses require different qualities, Niu said.

“It [AI] can tell you, ‘No, this is not possible. Even if you tried, you will not get the ideal result you expect.'”

The lab then tests the most promising blend of elements to validate. The chemistry must be made into a battery for this step.  

The segment also featured M Shaikhul Islam, a PhD student in materials science & engineering, working in the Niu lab. He explained his research into how the element of nickel may help improve rechargeable batteries used in electric vehicles.

“My target is to increase the nickel content so that we can get a higher capacity and higher energy in one charge,” Islam said. “The vehicles can run like 6 or 7 hours. My target is to increase this to double.”

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