March, 2015: Cornell Neurotech — a joint initiative launched in 2015 by Cornell Engineering and the College of Arts & Sciences — aims to build powerful new tools that can be used to map the individual cells and complex neural networks that change from moment-to-moment within the brain. The group was encouraged by Paul McEuen, co-director of the Kavli Institute at Cornell — which not only provided nominal funding for the monthly meetings, but since 2011 had also been pushing a much larger national research initiative to substantially invest in studies of the brain.

June, 2015: Uyen Nguyen’s origami art is part of a VOGEL collection that features creased textiles. Info on the collection is available on their Indiegogo page. Nguyen works in KIC member Itai Cohen's research group studying the mechanical properties of Origami and designing materials with tailored mechanical properties.

July, 2015: Physicists in the McEuen research group use the principles of kirigami to manipulate graphene, laying the groundwork for future nano-machines. Both Co-Directors of KIC, Paul McEuen and David Muller, contributed to the July article in Nature. 

July, 2015: Trapping vortices key to high-current superconductors. KIC member Séamus Davis and researchers from Cornell, Brookhaven and Argonne national laboratories have found that irradiation can create nanometer-sized defects that trap swirling eddies in the flow of electrons, keeping them out of the way so more current can flow. They reported their discovery in the May 22 issue of the journal Science Advances.

June, 2015: Cornell chemist and KIC member Jiwoong Park has received a Department of Defense Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) award. The highly competitive program supports research teams working in more than one traditional science or engineering discipline to accelerate breakthroughs in basic research.

April, 2015: Cornell Chemistry Professor and KIC member Jiwoong Park has demonstrated a way to create a new kind of semiconductor thin film that retains its electrical properties even when it is just atoms thick. 

April 2015: The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has named three Cornell faculty members, including KIC Director Paul McEuen, among its 197 new fellows for 2015.  The fellows are among "The world's most accomplished scholars, scientists, writers, artists and civic, business and philanthropic leaders."

March 2015: Postdoctoral fellow Tsevi Beatus, working with KIC member Itai Cohen, associate professor of physics, and John Guckenheimer, professor of mathematics, have discovered that flies stabilize themselves during flight using a control reflex that’s among the fastest in the animal kingdom. Their results were published March 11 in Royal Society Interface. 

March, 2015: KIC Member Itai Cohen and his research group have found that the square twist origami fold produces a distinct snapping between folded and unfolded states, like a light switch. By applying this to a gel polymer the size of a speck of dust, they are developing the foundation for origami-inspired materials and microscopic machines.

February, 2015: KIC Member Kyle Shen‘s group offers insight on how different “knobs” can change material properties in ways that were previously unexplored or misunderstood. Studying strontium iridate the researchers were able to flip it from behaving like metal to a semiconductor by applying spin-orbit interactions or changing molecular bond angles.