Author: Melanie Noble

A Bright Idea: Connecting STEM Learning and Energy Efficiency

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Two students stand at the Light Bulb Face-Off table at UConn Engineering's 2026 STEM Family Field Day.How much can a light bulb teach us about energy use? At UConn Engineering’s 2026 STEM Family Field Day, the Southern New England Industrial Training and Assessment Center (ITAC) brought energy efficiency into the spotlight with its “Light Bulb Face-Off.”

Held October 4 at the UConn Volleyball Center, STEM Family Field Day invited families to explore engineering through interactive exhibits and hands-on activities. The event offered an opportunity to introduce younger learners to the science and engineering concepts that shape everyday life.

The Light Bulb Face-Off also reflected a practical challenge with real-world implications: understanding how lighting choices affect energy consumption. For manufacturers and other businesses, improving lighting efficiency can be one way to reduce electricity use and operating costs.

Based at UConn Tech Park’s Innovation Partnership Building, the ITAC connects engineering education with industrial applications. Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the center provides eligible small and medium-sized manufacturers with no-cost energy assessments to identify opportunities to improve efficiency, reduce waste, and strengthen productivity. Its faculty-and-student teams gain hands-on experience evaluating energy use and developing recommendations for real facilities.

By bringing energy efficiency into a family STEM event, ITAC helped connect a familiar technology with a broader engineering challenge: finding practical ways to use resources more efficiently. Activities like these can encourage curiosity about how everyday systems work—and how engineering knowledge can help solve problems at home, in industry, and throughout the community.

CyberSEED 2026 Challenges 129 Teams to Put Cybersecurity Skills to the Test

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Team of four men work on cybersecurity challenge on their laptopsCybersecurity requires more than understanding the theory behind digital threats. It takes analytical thinking, technical skills, and the ability to solve problems under pressure. Those skills were on display October 3 as 129 teams competed in CyberSEED 2026, an online Capture the Flag (CTF) competition hosted by UConn’s Connecticut Advanced Computing Center (CACC).

The annual competition brought together students from 70 colleges and universities across the country for hands-on challenges in cybersecurity, including cryptography, open-source intelligence, password cracking, digital forensics, network traffic analysis, reverse engineering, and web application security.

Teams earned points by solving technical problems and analyzing potential security vulnerabilities. The competition also included an incident response briefing, giving participants an opportunity to practice communicating technical findings and risks to an audience of stakeholders.

Bits For Everyone from the United States Military Academy took first place, followed by cu_kaazmo from Cedarville University in second and CyberLions from Pennsylvania State University in third. Teams from Purdue University, the University of Central Florida, the SANS Technology Institute, and other institutions also finished among the top 10. View the complete list of winners.

Bits for Everyone Logo cu_kaazmo logo CyberLions logo
Bits for Everyone
First Place		 cu_kaazmo
Second Place		 CyberLions
Third Place

For participants, the experience offered more than a leaderboard finish. One team from the Rochester Institute of Technology described how the competition helped deepen its understanding of cybersecurity concepts through practical application. The team also highlighted the incident response briefing as an opportunity to strengthen its ability to communicate technical risks and recommendations.

Hosted by CACC and sponsored by Synchrony, with the competition platform provided by Cyber Skyline, CyberSEED connects students with challenging, practical exercises that complement their academic studies. By encouraging participants to apply their knowledge in a competitive setting, the event helps students develop skills relevant to the evolving cybersecurity field.

The 2026 competition continued UConn’s longstanding involvement in cybersecurity education and research, bringing students together to learn, collaborate, and test their abilities against a diverse set of technical challenges.

Separations Technology Workshop Connects Research with Real-World Challenges

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Six speaker panelists sitting at the front of a conference room.From recovering critical materials to improving water treatment, separations technologies play an important role in addressing industrial and environmental challenges. At the 5th Industrial Workshop on Separations Technology, held October 1–2, 2026, at UConn Tech Park’s Innovation Partnership Building, researchers, industry leaders, startups, and investors came together to discuss emerging technologies and the challenges of bringing them to market.

Hosted by the University of Connecticut, the workshop drew 120 attendees from more than 70 companies and universities. The two-day program combined technical presentations with opportunities to exchange ideas, showcase research, and build connections across the separations technology community.

Two men standing in front of a poster session research poster.The event began with an early career workshop, followed by a networking reception featuring 20 student research posters and a startup pitch competition. Students from UConn, Yale University, MIT, Tufts University, and Clarkson University presented their work, while five startups pitched technologies addressing opportunities in water and critical materials. Hydron Desalination won the pitch competition, receiving a trophy and a cash award sponsored by Xylem.

Friday’s sessions explored applications across energy, industrial processing, critical materials recovery, desalination, water treatment, and water reuse. Presenters from organizations including PolyCera, SLB, Via Separations, ChemFinity Technologies, KMX Technologies, Xylem, Veolia, and NanoH2O shared developments ranging from advanced membranes to new approaches for recovering valuable resources.

The program also looked beyond the technologies to consider what it takes to move innovations forward. Panels on water technology, critical materials and energy, and sustainable technology financing brought together representatives from startups, established companies, and investment organizations. Additional briefings highlighted initiatives from XPRIZE, the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E), and the MEMBRANE Center led by the National Laboratory of the Rockies.

Attendees also toured the Connecticut Center for Applied Separations Technologies (CCAST) at the Innovation Partnership Building, gaining a closer look at the facilities supporting the center’s applied separations research.Professor Jeff McCutcheon speaks to a group of visitors in the CCAST lab at IPB.

Throughout the workshop, discussions connected technical advances with the needs of the industries that could put them to use. Understanding those needs can help researchers and emerging companies identify opportunities for further development and more effective solutions.

By bringing together people working across research, industry, and investment, the annual workshop creates opportunities to share expertise, explore common challenges, and strengthen connections that can help move separations technologies toward practical application.

Interested in attending or participating in future workshops? Click here to join the mailing list.

Eversource Energy Center Faculty Receive Prestigious NSF CAREER Awards

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The Eversource Energy Center at UConn is celebrating the achievements of two of its leading researchers, Diego Cerrai and Junbo Zhao, who have each received the National Science Foundation’s highly competitive Faculty Early Career Development (NSF CAREER) Award.

 

Diego-Cerrai-Photo
Diego Cerrai, Ph.D.

Dr. Diego Cerrai, Interim Director of the Eversource Energy Center and Assistant Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is advancing the science behind power outage prediction and restoration. His research focuses on improving how utilities forecast outages caused by snow and ice storms — and how they respond. By combining detailed observations of snow density with improved weather models, Cerrai’s work will refine the UConn Outage Prediction Model, already used by major utilities. His project also includes developing a new restoration model that factors in road conditions during winter weather, with the aim of reducing inequities in power restoration for rural communities. Read more about Cerrai’s research.

Junbo-Zhao photo
Junbo Zhao, Ph.D.

Dr. Junbo Zhao, Associate Director of the Eversource Energy Center and Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is tackling the challenges of keeping our power grid stable and secure in an era of rapid growth in renewable energy. Zhao’s CAREER project will improve grid operators’ ability to monitor and control power systems in real time, helping prevent large-scale blackouts like the 2003 Northeast blackout. His integrated research and education plan also includes hands-on training, industry collaboration, and outreach to inspire the next generation of energy innovators. Learn more about Zhao’s research.

Congratulations to both faculty for their exceptional contributions to grid reliability and resilience — and for strengthening the Eversource Energy Center’s role as a leader in energy research.