Dr. Hornbostel Research Group

Congratulations to our graduate student Iza Lantgios for passing the PhD qualifing exam!

Congratulations to our graduate student Aaron Esquino for being debt free! He was invited to be apart of the Dave Ramsey Show to share his story, see the youtube link below.

To get classrooms ready for the fall term, Pitt IT and the University Center for Teaching and Learning coordinated with the Office of Facilities Management to install hybrid classroom technology in more than 160 learning spaces across campus that are scheduled through the Office of the University Registrar.

Katherine Hornbostel, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering, and her team received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) Flexible Carbon Capture and Storage (FLECCS) program to design a natural gas/direct air capture hybrid plant that will take advantage of idle periods.

Dr. Hornbostel is interviewed by Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering about the impact of COVID-19 on air quality and how we can protect our air moving forward.

Dr. Hornbostel and her grad students, Mahpara Habib and Austin Lieber, discuss their piezoelectric wave energy harvesting buoy research in this video by the National Energy Renewable Laboratory.

Congratulations to our grad student Iza Lantgios at receiving the prestigious Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP) Fellowship! This fellowship will fully support her for three years to pursue a nuclear energy topic for her PhD thesis in our group.

Dr. Hornbostel was awarded a DOE NETL grant through the University Coalition for Fossil Energy Research (UCFER)! The project titled “Core-shell MOFs for Direct Air Capture” is a 2-year project in collaboration with Dr. Chris Wilmer from ChemE at Pitt and Dr. Nathaniel Rosi from Chemistry at Pitt. Together they will work to discover metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) that can effectively capture CO2 from air.

Dr. Hornbostel’s research on ocean carbon capture is featured along with several other Pittsburgh climate change researchers.

Dr. Hornbostel’s postdoc research on carbon capture capsules is featured in a press release by Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering.

Dr. Hornbostel’s breast pump attachment invention, Pump2Baby, is featured in the following press releases: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article and University of Pittsburgh press release. Dr. Hornbostel also discussed her invention in local TV interviews with ABC News in May 2018 and with FOX News in June 2018.

Dr. Hornbostel was invited to speak about her postdoc research on Freakonomics Radio Live! She was interviewed by Stephen Dubner and Angela Duckworth in front of a live audience in New York City, NY. The podcast was played on radio stations nationwide and is now publicly available online.