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Inspiration Takes Aim
To be a researcher is to be a detective, a problem-solver—and above all, a dreamer. These innovators and inventors are defined by their curiosity. When confronted with challenging and befuddling problems, they don’t back down, but instead press forward with their own questions—How can we do things better? Where is there room for change? What haven’t we tried before?
You can find many examples of such creative thinkers in the labs, classrooms, and lecture halls of The University of Texas at Arlington. Researchers across campus are testing novel ways to benefit humanity and are looking in new directions to solve persistent global problems. From 3D-printing coral reefs and skull bones to reappropriating entertainment tech to treat dementia and substance addiction, their work is pushing the boundaries of discovery to help shape a brighter future.
Coral Paradise, Courtesy of Ancient Rome
Nature reveals itself in complex shapes and sizes, but manufactured structures created to repair natural landscapes often come from standard molds. Sometimes those geometric shapes might get the job done, but not when it comes to the elaborate surfaces of a coral reef damaged by climate change and other human influences.
“Coral and oyster reefs are optimized shapes that evolved over millions of years, and it’s difficult to construct them with our current practices,” says Warda Ashraf, associate professor in the Department of Civil Engineering.
Not only do standard molds miss the mark on the shape of a coral or oyster reef, but they utilize traditional concrete that leaves a high carbon footprint, degrades in seawater, and is highly alkaline, all of which causes negative impacts on the environment. As a potential alternative, Dr. Ashraf is using a composite material developed by ancient Roman engineers that has a lower pH level and actually becomes stronger in seawater, a naturally corrosive environment.
This durable, carbon-negative artificial reef substrate can also be 3D-printed into different shapes and sizes.
“We can create these beautiful structures out of our concrete,” Ashraf says.
She and her team installed trial concrete samples in the Gulf of Mexico near Corpus Christi, Texas, last year. When these were removed and examined in early 2024, the researchers found biological growth such as mussels and barnacles—demonstrating that many organisms are compatible with the new composite—and that the material had improved in strength.
“Nature will heal itself, but we need to provide help because there’s so much damage,” says Ashraf, who is now investigating how to use the concrete material for artificial coral and oyster reefs.
She is collaborating with biology Professor Laura Mydlarz, civil engineering Assistant Professor Adnan Rajib, and researchers from UT Dallas and Texas A&M University on the project, which is supported by the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation with approximately $3 million in funding. The study will wrap up in 2027, when Ashraf expects to install artificial reefs in various areas.
“As we’re creating a habitat for those organisms, the benefits also come back to coastal communities—improvement in fisheries and other economic benefits,” she says. “We’re helping to recover from some of the natural disasters we have seen.”
Recycle, Reuse, Repave
America creates tens of millions of tons of plastic waste every year. But despite what we may hope when we drop our empty soda bottles into recycle bins, when there’s no market for the material, that plastic waste still ends up in landfills.
Sahadat Hossain, the director of the Solid Waste Institute for Sustainability at UTA and a professor in the Department of Civil Engineering, has spent much of his career developing new uses for the waste clogging up our environment.
“Some countries use plastic waste in pavement. So I thought, what if we use it as road construction material? There could be the potential to increase the life of the road,” Dr. Hossain explains. “Additionally, since climate change has caused more potholes and cracks to form in roads, I realized we could actually solve two problems at once.”
One of the causes for those potholes is heat: Highway infrastructure regularly endures high temperatures, often more than 100 degrees during summer months in Texas. To investigate the viability of his idea, Hossain collaborated with the Texas Department of Transportation’s (TxDOT) Dallas district on a feasibility study of reusing plastic waste for asphalt pavement construction.
After testing to see what types of plastic worked best—including the kind used in non-recyclable plastic bags—Hossain and his team created a composite of recycled plastic that, when added to the traditional dry mix of the surface layer of pavement material, could withstand the heat. They tested the resulting composite plastic mixture in the field by constructing the equivalent of 1 ½ miles of road in two parking lots on the UTA campus. After one year of heavy use, the pavement showed no signs of cracking. And even though the composite replaced just 8 to 10% of asphalt content and was only used in the surface layer of the pavement, it still repurposed 8 tons of plastic waste.
The research team also constructed a new section of road in Bangladesh with the composite mix in the surface layer of pavement and 5% plastic in the aggregate layer. With that formula, 250 tons of recycled plastic was used as replacement for aggregate over a 1 mile, one-lane stretch of road. After nearly a year of heavy traffic loading in high temperatures, the plastic road is still performing well.
In addition to the more apparent benefits of using the mixture—including reduced financial costs and lower greenhouse gas emissions—Hossain’s study found that the amount of microplastics leeching from the pavement was negligible, as opposed to what you’d experience in an ocean environment, for example, where much plastic waste ultimately ends up.
“Plastic waste breaks down into small pieces in the ocean, and fish eat it, so it ends up in our food chain,” he says. “Plastic waste has a huge consequence on our lives if we don’t manage it correctly.”
This summer, he and his team began construction for a project to install and monitor a section of plastic road in TxDOT’s Dallas district. Plans for similar plastic road projects in Fort Worth and internationally in Ethiopia and Colombia are also on the agenda.
Wearable Music Therapy
A great song can evoke happy recollections of the past, even for people living with memory loss due to dementia. To harness the therapeutic power of music, Kathy Lee, assistant professor in the School of Social Work, has collaborated with a team of researchers to develop an app called SoundMind that detects a user’s biorhythms and automatically plays songs that will trigger those good feelings.
“Music therapy is common in elderly care, but it’s typically provided in assisted living facilities or nursing homes by a specialist,” Dr. Lee says. “Since we know music has significant benefits, I thought, why can’t we use music therapy in a person’s house? After all, many people can’t afford a care facility or just prefer to age in their own home.”
Previous research has shown that listening to music can stimulate memory and cognitive function in people with dementia and improve their ability to communicate and socially interact with others. To take advantage of these benefits, the SoundMind app is designed to be installed in a wearable device such as a smartwatch, where it can detect an unhealthy pattern in the user’s physiological symptoms—such as being sedentary at a particular time of day—and auto-play a preselected playlist of songs on the device or through Bluetooth in the user’s home.
Lee came up with the idea for the app after she was one of just 24 scholars selected to participate in the first cohort of the Alzheimer’s Association Interdisciplinary Summer Research Institute in 2021. There, she met a rehabilitation medicine professor (now the project’s principal investigator) and a computer engineering professor from New York University. The trio teamed up and began work on the app. In 2022, they received a grant for a one-year pilot study from the University of Pennsylvania’s Artificial Intelligence and Technology Collaboratory for Healthy Aging—an initiative funded by the National Institute of Aging—and are currently gathering physiological data to better understand how the human body works before and after listening to music.
“As dementia progresses, people eventually begin losing mobility, and their activity level becomes more limited,” Lee says. “We want them to have a good quality of life, so music is an early intervention; they get excited and want to talk about their memories related to the music they hear.”
From Plant Biology, a Brainy Solution
Current treatment for a traumatic skull injury involves a surgeon placing a titanium or polyetheretherketone (PEEK) implant over the damaged area. Neither material is ideal—titanium is stronger than bone; PEEK is weaker—and complications such as inflammation can arise. With these synthetic materials in place, the damaged bone is also slow to repair itself, taking many months to heal, even up to a year in some cases.
Researchers with UTA’s Bone-Muscle Research Center, including Venu Varanasi and Kamal Awad, may have uncovered a way to speed up that process using novel silica-based biomaterials. They’re employing the dielectric/electrical properties of these semiconductor-based materials to stimulate antioxidants for faster bone regeneration.
“Our inspiration for using these materials came from plant literature,” Dr. Varanasi says. “Under drought conditions, plants use silicon ions in sand to keep themselves sustained with antioxidants. We’re borrowing recipes from Mother Nature to solve human problems.”
The team’s research has shown that a titanium implant coated with a thin film of bioactive silica-based nanomaterial creates a better bond with the body and promotes faster bone regeneration. In animal models, this treatment method reduced healing time from 24 weeks to only eight.
“A large number of these implants fail because they do not form a chemical bond with the surrounding bone, requiring another surgery to revise placement or remove them,” Dr. Awad explains. “If we coat the titanium implant with the materials we extract from the bone, there’s a much stronger bonding with the bone. It’s one homogeneous structure, so there’s faster healing and bone regeneration.”
In a separate but related project, Varanasi and Awad are creating implants by combining the bone’s existing tissues with soft biomaterials.
When faced with a catastrophic injury, the traditional treatment is to remove and discard bone fragments and then either wait several weeks for a customized implant to be constructed or use an off-the-shelf implant sooner that might not fit the bone structure as well. Instead, the UTA team is using a 3D printer to print the bone/biomaterial mixture directly into the cranial bone defect.
“We thought that instead of wasting those bone fragments, we could potentially use them as a mesh implant,” Varanasi says. “When the bone regrows, there’s no plate left on the skull. The bone regenerates, and the biomaterial eventually becomes consumed by the surrounding living tissue.”
Although they are using the 3D-printing technique only in animal models right now, Varanasi is confident it will eventually be adopted for clinical translation.
“In vivo printing is the future.”
Virtual Setting, Real Results
Treatment for substance use disorders may be successful while a person is in rehab, but returning to everyday life—and the familiar people, situations, and cravings it brings—can present significant challenges to maintaining recovery. Micki Washburn, social work associate professor, thinks practice can make perfect for patients facing triggers while attempting to maintain their long-term recovery.
“People are most likely to relapse during the first three months after they complete residential treatment and go back to their everyday lives,” Dr. Washburn says. “They have stopped using substances, but the rest of their world hasn’t changed. They are still regularly exposed to the cues related to their substance use.”
When she worked as a practitioner and saw families in the child welfare system, the No. 1 issue they faced was unaddressed substance use needs.
“In larger public systems, people are usually told to go to 12-step meetings, which can be very helpful but are often not enough to address substance use treatment needs,” she says. “When I was in practice, I thought, There has to be a way to do this better.”
She wants to give patients a way to face their triggers in a safe environment. Along with Chris McMurrough, computer science and engineering associate professor, and tech startup InnateVR, she is exploring whether virtual reality (VR) cue exposure therapy can be an effective treatment for substance use.
“Through VR, we’re exposing people to situations that trigger craving and teaching them what’s going on with their body, their cognitions, and their emotions,” Washburn says. “We’re not trying to stop the craving, but instead to teach people how to ‘ride the wave’—to experience it and learn that it eventually dissipates.”
The UTA team is the first in the nation to conduct a randomized clinical trial investigating whether these VR experiences would be a beneficial addition to standard treatment.
“I can’t go with a client and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to go to where you used to buy drugs. But when your dealer comes, you’re going to say no.’ That doesn’t work for many ethical reasons,” Washburn says. “But we know that exposure to substance use cues is what helps prevent relapse. VR makes this exposure safe and feasible.”
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