From designing a reversible male contraceptive to detecting life on distant ocean worlds, the latest Cornell Engineering SPROUT Awards are cultivating breakthroughs across medicine, space exploration, robotics and environmental sensing. 

SPROUT – which stands for Support for Promising Research Opportunities and Unconventional Teams – launched in 2022. The annual program aims to fill a funding gap and provide encouragement for emerging collaborations, especially those that involve unexpected combinations of people and ideas.

"Fresh and unconventional ideas often hold the potential for significant impact and rewards, though they may need extra time and support during their initial development," said Lois Pollack, associate dean for research and graduate studies at Cornell Engineering. "The SPROUT Awards exemplify Cornell Engineering's dedication to fostering cross-disciplinary collaboration and research that drives meaningful change."

In 2025, following the standard round of SPROUT submissions, Cornell Engineering leadership announced an Expanded SPROUT program, which is designed to encourage the expansion of the college’s research footprint at a time of potentially limited federal support. Expanded SPROUTs prioritize research that has been paused due to a stop-work order or other federal action, and the recipients of those awards will be announced at a later date.

This year’s winning projects for standard SPROUT Awards are:

Development of a long-term reversible male contraceptive via regulation of meiotic entry genes

Nearly half of all pregnancies worldwide are unwanted, with close to two-thirds of those ending in abortion, affecting the lives and health of millions of women. Despite more than 60 years since the advent of the birth control pill, long-term contraceptive innovation has stagnated – especially for men, where reliable options remain virtually nonexistent.

The goal of this collaborative project – jointly spearheaded by Christopher Alabi, associate professor in the R.F. Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Paula Cohen, professor of genetics in the College of Veterinary Medicine – is to design small interfering RNAs that can degrade one or more mRNA/protein products of the three key genes involved in meiotic entry. The researchers hypothesize that silencing this gene will induce a contraceptive effect by blocking meiotic entry, while its restoration will reinstate fertility.

Custom system-on-chip design for insect-scale robots

There is growing interest in bioinspired robotics where fundamental biological principles are used to guide the design of robotic systems. This approach can enable new behaviors and potentially provide insight into underlying biological mechanisms. The funding for this project would go towards the pursuit of three research tasks: Development of an insect-scale water skating robot with onboard control; development of a system-on-chip simulation framework for insect-scale robots; and exploration of a custom hardware accelerators for image processing on insect-scale robots.

This project integrates the complementary areas of expertise of Christopher Batten, professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Elizabeth Farrell Helbling, assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Designing an electrospray ionization mass spectrometer for detecting life at icy ocean worlds

Detecting life beyond Earth remains one of the most profound unanswered questions in science. This collaborative project aims to deliver the first truly space-ready, high-sensitivity mass spectrometer capable of detecting intact biomolecules – an achievement that could unlock definitive evidence of life on ocean worlds like Saturn’s moon Enceladus. 

Building on the legacy of Cornell figureheads such as Professors Carl Sagan and Steve Squyres, this project – proposed by Elaine Petro, assistant professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and Britney Schmidt, professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences – seeks to pioneer the next generation of life-detection efforts and positions Cornell researchers at the forefront of answering “Does life exist elsewhere in our solar system?” Zach Ulibarri, a postdoctoral associate and 51 Pegasi b Fellow, will advise and contribute to the project.

Harnessing the atmosphere as an adaptive optical medium: Towards sensitive and specific remote detection of greenhouse gases and trace contaminants

The optical properties of the atmosphere – a complex and dynamical mixture of gases, aerosols and particulates – are key to the development of novel technologies impacting the climate, energy and environment. Detection of greenhouse gases, water cycles, air turbulence and trace molecular contaminants rely on the optical absorption and scattering properties of the atmosphere. Telecommunications, solar irradiation and remote direction of optical power depend crucially on the propagation of light through the atmosphere.

The project, led by Jeffrey Moses, associate professor in the School of Applied and Engineering Physics, and Robert DiStasio, Jr., associate professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, aims to show that optical constants of certain molecules can be controlled with ultrafast lasers via a novel nonlinear optical mechanism, using a comparison of experiments and predictive computational methods.

Sensing airborne hazards with filamentous fungi

Can airborne hazards to human health be uniquely detected by tapping into fungal electrical networks? This proposal aims to engineer fungal-based sensor systems to monitor and report airborne hazards to ensure safety in indoor public spaces. Since the catalog of critical airborne hazards is constantly evolving, the goal is to seek a platform technology that can be adapted to new hazards as they arise, and that can reliably sense multiple hazards.

This work, headed by Robert Shepherd, the John F. Carr Professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the Systems Engineering Program; Lori Huberman, assistant professor in the School of Integrative Plant Science; and Meredith Silberstein, associate professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, will demonstrate a new class of highly engineerable sensors that detect airborne hazards.

Production and screening of high-value phytochemicals for pain treatment

Chronic pain is debilitating and affects millions of people in the United States. Opioids are commonly prescribed as pain treatment but have high addiction liability and high risk of respiratory depression. By contrast, kratom is a naturally occurring plant used for pain relief with reduced side effects compared to opioids. To develop kratom as a pharmaceutical, a key challenge is that the constituent compounds in kratom are difficult to manufacture in large quantities and their effects on the brain are poorly understood.

The goal of this project, which is spearheaded by Sijin Li, associate professor in the R.F. Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Alex Kwan, professor in the Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering, is to develop a novel platform to synthesize kratom-based compounds, and then rapidly and iteratively screen them for therapeutic potential.

Integrating machine learning, materials modeling, and high-throughput experiments for the discovery of ultra-stable metal-organic frameworks for water purification

This project by Nicole Benedek, associate professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering; Julia Dshemuchadse, assistant professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering; Michael Thompson, the Dwight C. Baum Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering; and Phillip Milner, associate professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, is a renewed award. The ultimate goal is to integrate machine learning, atomistic and coarse-grained modeling, and autonomous experimentation for the rapid discovery of ultra-stable metal-organic frameworks for water purification.

Patrick Gillespie is a communications specialist for Cornell Engineering.