 Good afternoon, everyone. Good afternoon, esteemed guests, distinguished faculty, staff, and students. It's my great pleasure to start our lecture this afternoon as part of our Purdue Engineering Distinguished Lecture Series. The introduction of our speaker today will be done by the Dean of the College of Engineering, and I have the distinct pleasure to introduce Dean Mang Chiang. Mang is the John A. Edwardson Dean of the College of Engineering and the Roscoe H. George Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering here at Purdue University. Previously, he was also the Grand Doty Professor of Electrical Engineering, one of the youngest and doubt-shared professors at Princeton University before he came here to Purdue as a Dean. He received his BS, MS, and PhD degrees all from Stanford, and for his research, he received the 2013 Alan T. Waterman Award as one of the many recognitions that he has received all his career. His online courses and textbooks reached over 25, 250,000 students, so a significant distribution, and he co-founded several start-up companies and a non-profit consortium. I had the great pleasure to work with Mang as an Associate Dean for Undergraduate and Graduate Education, and on a personal basis, I truly enjoyed his tremendous vision for the college, his never-ending amount of new energy, of new ideas that he brings to the play, to the meetings, and his tremendous energy in getting things done. So it's my great pleasure. Please welcome, help me welcome Dean Mang Chang. Thank you very much. It was great to work with you, and thank you and congratulations on your outstanding work leading our great School of Mechanical Engineering, and it is my distinct honor to welcome you and to introduce all of you to today's Purdue Engineering Distinguished Lecturer. And I want to start by highlighting that achieving the Pinnacle of Excellence at scale is an aspiration for all of us here, bottom-maker engineers in Purdue Engineering. And because of the efforts and success of our faculty, students, and staff, our ranking, for example, of our Graduate Research Program has been rapidly rising in recent years, and this year we're ranked number four in the United States by US News. And equally importantly, we educate 14,000 students in residence and several thousand more online in this truly Pinnacle of Excellence at scale. And part of what we do is to invite outstanding speakers to campus, perhaps virtually a hybrid right now, and the Purdue Engineering Distinguished Lecture Series was created several years ago to bring in on average about eight such distinguished lectures from all over the world, from academia, industry, and government to Purdue Engineering. And today we are very excited and delighted to welcome Professor Victor Castano to Purdue. And Victor is a recognized international leader, and I would not have the time in this brief introduction to read his entire resume, but he has been known as an innovative leader in research in multiple areas throughout 800 different articles, and many of the students that he supervised. In particular, Victor is the founding director of the Center for Applied Physics and Advanced Technologies of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. And I have heard also that Victor is the only member of all three academies of Mexico, the Academy of Engineering, Science, and of Medicine in Mexico. We are delighted to be able to have a chance to talk to Victor during the virtual visit here at the panel, and we are so looking forward Victor to your distinguished lecture coming up. Thank you so much for visiting us and welcome. Thank you very much. It is an honor and a real pleasure to be with you. And I would like to share with you today my personal experiences going through the pandemic in the last 14 months. First of all, let me tell you that the academia has changed in the last year. And this article in December by Nature says that indeed science before and after COVID-19 is different for a number of reasons. First of all, because as you see here, there is a cascade of articles. It is incredible the amount of articles that in 10 months have been published in things related to COVID or related diseases. The other thing that we noticed and it was pointed out during the panel is that this also has demonstrated a gap between male and female. You can see here in this plot that the amount of papers submitted to Elizabeth journals include more men than women. And that's also a gender called attention that we need to pay attention to. The second thing is that the topic of the different articles is changed. At the beginning there was a cascade of articles related to models, how the epidemic is growing. And as you see this is declining. But what is taking a very accelerated pace is the mental health. Mental health is one of the forgotten consequences of the pandemic. And all of these affect us either as citizens, as students and as professors in universities all over the world. So what skills we need to navigate through this pandemic? Still number one, we have to determine exactly where we are. Exactly where we are. And to do that, please allow me to invite you to visit virtually Paris. About 10 years ago my wife and I visited Paris and wandering around we discovered this little known museum is the museum of medieval art. It's not the local museum, not one of the most famous museums, but in my opinion it's one of the finest ones. And after that trip I have been able to go to Paris quite often. And my wife asked me to go and to visit again to get souvenirs at this museum. I kind of remember that this museum was not far from Notre Dame. I went there and for about four or five years I was unable to locate this museum. And until it came to my mind that all I need to locate this is a map. And when you see the map, it is clear where it is. This is Notre Dame. This is the University of Mexico where I work has a facility here. And I asked them where this museum was located and nobody knew. And the reason is that the museum is not in a main street but in a lateral side of the street, very small. And the second reason is that the facade of the museum has changed. And I walk in front of this museum several times and I was hoping to look at this. This thing is still there but behind gives me this new front. So the lesson I want to share with you is that to find where we are, we need a map. Of course, but we need a map of knowledge. A map of knowledge is a way to understand where are the concepts of knowledge that are relevant to the problem we are looking at. As you saw, Nature reports over 200,000 papers in 10 months published related to COVID. It is impossible to revise all of them. What of those papers are relevant? The ones published in Nature or Science, the ones published in health-related journals, in engineering journals. And not only that, what's the relation of this knowledge with the strategies and the processes that we want to pursue? So, asking ourselves this question and after this experience in Paris, one student of mine and I, Cesar Aguado, decided to construct a map. A translation and knowledge map of COVID-19. This was published last November in this journal, a journal of Spiderman's BG Lunches. And what we found was the following. First, the knowledge map allows us to know what the knowledge is. This knowledge, most of the time, is scattered and is not available at the time and the place where it is needed. Most importantly, it is available to only a few people. And sometimes not to the people who are the key to solve the problem. So that's what we need from a knowledge map. Let me first recall you that this journal means new. They were reported in 1965 from a couple of medical doctors who were looking for an unknown kind of cold. And in 1968, the first electron microscopy images were published and the term coronavirus was going at the time. It was found that coronavirus, the SARS-CoV-2, belongs to the B-line edge of the coronabiruses and it is related to the SARS-CoV virus. First thing that we did in this knowledge map, which was produced by inventing, by developing a bot that goes through hundreds and millions and millions of articles, paper, tissues to do through artificial intelligence a mapping of what we have in the following. First, that the first virus discovered in 1965 after 55 years has evolved in a very wide variety of different viruses and this is increasing. In the last year or so, we have discovered at least 20 more variants of the ones that are described here. To our knowledge, this is the very first line edge mapping of the virus and this is important because we need to know the structural relationship of a given type of virus and another one and how we are going to deal with it. The second thing is that in the last few years nobody paid attention to coronavirus. These are a number of papers and you see this is the average number of papers and in the last 10 years it was a decline of the interest in coronavirus until the 1916 company in Wuhan filed for a patent on this SARS-CoV-2 virus and that attracted the attention of the literature and obviously in 1920 the number of papers have grown exponentially. While I think all the data available, millions of data reports and articles you find this very complex structure of concepts related to coronavirus. It's almost impossible to start from China but you can see that there are many concepts related to that and it is impossible to decide where to begin with. By doing this official intelligence analysis we found that all this data can be mapped into these five different groups of concepts and the important thing here is that in spite of all the thousands of articles, papers, reports, patents that are about COVID-19 please pay attention, this is COVID-19 as a disease we have islands of knowledge no matter how big is this, how big is this how much effort we put into that or into this whereas we don't have a connection between these islands then we have no hope to get a good picture. This is also hierarchically arranged as you can see here how each of these islands contain different concepts that can go on and on and on and how these gaps here means that there is no connection between these gaps but on the other hand this is the conceptual map of SARS-CoV-2 that is the virus and in this case we see that at least some of the concepts are related to each other please compare this map in which you have islands connected with this island in which there is no connection remember this is COVID-19, the disease and this is SARS-CoV-2, the virus gives me to an important lesson to know where we are, we need a map but also we need to be able to construct a map of what we need we of course are interested in the details of the virus but most importantly as citizens of the world we are concerned with the relevance of the disease which is what really affects us another important thing here is what the amount of research done around the world on SARS-CoV-2 in the last 30 years and it is very interesting because you see that the places where there is more research, not surprisingly there are the places where the vaccine has been developed perhaps the only exception is Russia which had no report on this SARS-CoV-2 in the last 20 years but interestingly enough they had relations with China which developed its vaccine and with Mexico which had a long tradition of doing research in virus but not in the disease and the ones who took advantage of this knowledge in the virus to fight the disease were the Russians so that's another lesson of this map we need to know where we are and how we are going to use the knowledge available to us second skill we need once we know where we are we need to determine where are we going perhaps the first article which was published in March 2020 on the modeling of the epidemics was this paper made by some co-workers in France, Senegal and China where they pointed out that the latency period of COVID-19 was important there was a period of around 14 days in which people may show no symptoms but still they were able to infect others based on that some other people was able to produce what E.J. mentioned at the panel that the mask and the social distancing was still one of the most important measures to take against COVID this is an article of July 2020 based on that a colleague of mine who is an expert in nonlinear thermodynamics Iban Santamaria-Hollig and myself produced perhaps the first article on the future of the pandemic what are the possible phases of the spread we can describe how the disease is spreading but what we really need to know is what are the future where are we going and how we can prepare ourselves we took this concept of nonlinear thermodynamics to produce these equations in which we took into account the active and the active persons but also the recovered the susceptible people and people who were not aware but were infecting others if you take that into account we were able to produce various scenarios of how the pandemic was going to be in the following month in October and up to now we have a coincidence with the official figures by the government of Mexico of about 96% this is important because this is not a fit of data as most articles this is a prediction of how we are going to do in this scenario depending on how people susceptible and active are going to interact and the lesson is basically the same the best we can do is to keep isolated from each other because we don't know for sure whether we are infected or not then we know where we are we know where we are going but if we are going to travel from where we need to determine the risks around us and let me show you this plot this graph of the market of global surface disinfectants in the United States this is data from 2017 and at that time it was over 1.2 billion dollars worth of market today nobody knows for sure but it should be at least double of this most of the products are quaternary ammonium compounds the most known brand of this is Lysol and in the case of North American Mexico in 2019 the expected growth of this market was over 8% and 7% very good market that grows 8% a year is very good my last calculation is that it has grown almost 20% and the reason being that until 2019 most of the use of these surface disinfectants was in the industrial and institutional now after the pandemic it has changed completely this picture nobody again knows for sure how this market has changed all we know is that it is different because of this pandemic and it is also much bigger than two years ago but what people don't really pay attention to is reports like this this is a report one year ago from the national poison data system of the United States this is an office of the American government that follows poisoning cases all over the United States to detect whether or not there is an accident or a problem that should be looked at please look at this here is the plot of cleaners and this is the plot of disinfectants year 2018-2019 and you can see a very standard procedure some months there are more some others are less but the average is the same in the last 20 years and of course in the year 2020 there was a tremendous increase in people poisons are intoxicated with this and the same with disinfectants are cleaners that's very clear because we are exposed to chemicals that we were not used to every single day each of us use cleaners, disinfectants, gels and how that affects the health that's a question that remains to be solved so to solve that we need to develop another skill develop the skill that we need to survive and of course we have no time to go to the library to look for all the research that has been done especially if we don't have a map as the one I showed you before so we need to look around what we have to survive and let me show you perhaps the most important, the most common diagram of all of us that all of us require to survive this one this is an electronic description of photosynthesis thanks to photosynthesis there is life in this planet if this process here that is basically plants are not able to produce energy and food from full of light it will be gone all life will be gone from this planet so how we use this to survive and the way we use this concept is to find of course we are not able yet to produce artificial photosynthesis but we are able to produce photocatalysts people in Purdue that do photocatalysts for various applications and that's a concept that is being used all over the world for different technologies and photocatalysts and photosynthesis are similar in principle but the difference relies on basic science photocatalysts promote reactions with delta G below zero whereas photosynthetic devices use the energy to drive reaction with delta G bigger than zero this difference between here and here is what we call life so how we are able to use photocatalysts to to produce and to interact with life and the way to do that is through a technology that we develop in which photocatalytic nanoparticles that we design are not commercial nanoparticles we design and build these nanoparticles and they produce photocatalysts and it's converted into photosynthetic when they interact with microorganisms when they do that if you stay here you have delta G enthalpy below zero when you interact with the microorganisms you have enthalpy bigger than zero these are commercial products already they produce in the Mexican company over 1 million liters a month in different presentation gels, liquids and foam we have tested with a bunch of gram positive bacteria gram negative bacteria, fungus and all type of microorganisms not only bacteria and viruses but also B, C, and most importantly coronavirus until about a month ago we were able to test it with SARS-CoV which is the closest relative to SARS-CoV-2 and right now as we speak we are doing with a Mexican laboratory which was first allowed to use SARS-CoV-2 to produce testing we are producing also the tests to demonstrate that it kills 99 on 99-99 of coronavirus in 30 seconds thanks to this photosynthetic structure this has been approved by the Mexican equivalent to the FDA and the FDA has approved the gel version to be sold in the United States and the reason I am mentioning this is because this was one of the projects that we are pursuing with a group of colleagues in Purdue University that I will go into that as Ajay mentioned during the panel in 1920 and in 2020 the main technology that we have against COVID-19 is the masks and of course it will be embarrassing for all of us not to have an improved version of the masks that our grand-grandfathers used 100 years ago so I am very fortunate to be able to collaborate with a bunch of very bright young students Tania Pujar, Antonio Esquivel John Quinones and many others in developing new products based on new ideas of science and technology this is our proposal of a Nobel mask with filters for anti-virus we presented this paper which has the characteristic among others to be interchangeable thanks to the facilities at Purdue we were able to test a number of interesting practical characteristics of this material of these masks first the pressure drop against velocity one big problem why people don't like to wear masks is that it is very difficult to wear this is a plot of having no mask whatsoever and we compare this with an N95 mask surgical mask and our COVID filter our COVID filter is the best in terms of the drop that this is more available than the others we also tested the efficiency of these filters against different viruses of course only recently laboratories have been allowed to test SARS-CoV-2 viruses the laboratory in Purdue we had no access to that so we decided to use a model virus which is M2 virus which has many resemblances with the coronavirus in terms of the structure this is the experimental setup and we were able to determine that this filter is really efficient in terms of protecting against the virus the end of this research is that our results show that the COVID filter is superior to the surgical mask and to the N19 mask so to give a little hope after 100 years we were able to produce something that is at least a little better than the masks that were used in the 1920s so that shows that again having a map of how we are going to handle how we are going to use the knowledge around we will be able to produce something that is usable and helpful to people we have also used this to produce a filter for a robot this is the diagram of these several layers of our mask that has a hydrophobic and lipophobic layer I will go back to this concept which is I think very interesting as an innovation a diamond like carbon layer that is very efficient in killing pathogens and a number of other layers that provide the functionality of this this robot was done in collaboration with the group of Richard Boyle at the Purdue and he has been tested in Purdue here you can see some pictures and there are some videos about this and we also studied with some of the students associated to the group how the particles expelled during breathing coughing and sneezing affect different environments it is very surprising again to see that the things that one could expect to begin with are not necessarily correct and I go back to the concept of map this study, this numerical simulation allow us to have a mapping of how we have to deploy a robot and how we are going to use UV light and filters and this nanoxin disinfected that I just showed you a minute ago to disinfect facilities first in campus and then hopefully in the rest of the country and for this matter in the rest of the world we also produce some Hello yes we also produce some papers on how to deploy this robot in different conditions with a number of colleagues in China and in the United States and then let me discuss briefly with you a little bit about physical chemistry of surfaces I'm a physicist and I have worked most of my life with interaction between solid gas and liquid interfaces here you have a diagram showing the different forces, interfacial forces between a hydrophobic polypropylene which is the material from which most masks are made of which is naturally hydrophobic against a material that is basically hydrophobic like a glass you can see that in some cases the water wets the surface, in this case the water doesn't drop the surface and what we have here is a different configuration of interfacial forces that depending on how you play with them could change the interactions within the water droplet and in this water droplet is where the tiny viruses are contained. Remember that these viruses are basically viruses that are covered by a lipidic that is a greasy surface and if you are able to affect that grease surface of the viruses then you are able to in principle annihilate or at least inactivate it. So what we have produced is hydrophobic coating you can see how a droplet of water on a standard aluminium look like and once the coating the hydrophobic coating is applied you see how the material becomes from poorly hydrophobic and the interesting thing here is that we were able to see that just to using a hydrophobic surface we can inactivate viruses I think this is a very important finding because what I said using disinfectant and chemicals on a daily basis will affect our health to the extent that nobody really knows whereas by using just a physicochemical interaction of the viruses with the different surfaces with which we deal daily namely wood metals, ceramics, plastics and so on and so forth we can reach up to 99% inactivation the question is how we effectively disperse those nanoparticles that form this hydrophobic surface which is a pattern that I was granted in 2019 and to do that we are using electrostatic spraying which allows to do a much more homogeneous spread of coatings on the surface we are using this for two purposes first to be able to spread more efficiently the nanoxane disinfectant and secondly to be able to cover more homogeneously different surfaces with the same amount of material okay next skill, what we need to do in the panel we also discuss that we need to think on the future the future is going to be different from what we are used to in every aspect including social, scientific and technology aspects of it so we need to generate in each of you including of course students which are our main responsibility as professors but also scholars officials responsible for doing or producing public policies and so on and so forth we need to generate a perspective mind wait and think not on what we are leaving right now but prepare ourselves for what is coming in the near future let me show you some other aspects of the pandemic that perhaps is horrible to say but this here is here the increase of drought in one of the things that the COVID has produced in addition to all that you know is a tremendous amount of drought cyber crime and this on the road and it has represented a very serious threat to international agencies the Interpol and the OCDE have signed an agreement on December 2020 three months ago to produce innovative measures against cyber crime and particular cyber fraud because the original ones are not effective any longer so what we do let me introduce to you blockchain technology this perhaps you have heard of cryptocurrency bitcoins well what's interesting here is that the technology behind could also be used for other applications this is a diagram of how it works you produce a new transaction and it is transmitted to a network of computers this network of computers solves very complex non-linear questions to validate the validity of the transaction once it is confirmed this information is clustered into blocks and this is so efficient that this chain of blocks create a history which is basically impossible the probability of being able to cheat with this technology this blockchain technology is about 10 to the minus 30 so it's impossible you can spend the rest of the life of the universe trying to unblock this so it's a very cute very interesting technology which has been used only for this cryptocurrency but this has also some other applications one of the things that have been lately very interestingly reported in the literature are the NFT non-fungible tokens that is things like pieces of art that do not exist physically but have an existence in the cyber war and no long ago the first piece of art which is a non-fungible token was sold for several million dollars and you can say how I make sure that this really exists well thanks to blockchain you know that nobody can falsify that can produce a fake version of what you have just bought and therefore your investment is safe how we use that let's talk again about educational institutions educational institutions like Purdue like the National University of Mexico spend a lot of time doing repetitive work most of the institutions in 2020 produce paper certificates and this reaches only a small part of the students it is very time consuming it is very expensive I need this very fragile because it could be very easily fake just to give you a piece of information the National University of Mexico calculates that about 10% of the title that has granted are fake so because the people is more cheaper to go and get a fake title from the University of Mexico than to go through all the process of the education this is a big problem all over the world the market of this certification in education institutions in Europe, in Latin America is about 1.5 billion dollars a year and how this relates to COVID this is a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine dated March 31, 2021 there is only a couple of weeks old and it discusses the vaccine passport policy and ethical consideration some countries and some organizations are proposing issuing a passport vaccine to be able to travel through the world and this has pros and cons the main con is that this is a study made all over the world and what they found is that people don't trust the government for several reasons and in most cases with very good reasons so because they don't think those documents are going to be reliable what to do? we are starting a project at the National University of Mexico with this company this is a start up of some Mexican and Colombian students that work with me at MIT and I want this grant to develop this company certified and we are using now this technology first to issue all the certificates that are issued by the National University of Mexico the National University of Mexico has 350,000 students the largest university in the world and you can imagine the amount of certificates that have to issue not every year but every day and we hope to be among the very first in the world to be able to certificate and our second goal is to be able to use this for health certificates to use the technology with this perspective vision to be able to deal with what is coming about a complete feeling of lack of confidence on what we are doing we need to develop methods to be able to gain again the confidence of the public all over the world to finish with my with the last skill I think we need to survive this pandemic be always optimistic in spite of that this is a great work to live in and the future this is still there this is a special message for younger people we leave you a very complex work but with your capacity and your optimism you can make it much better thank you very much great thank you very much Victor for a wonderful presentation I really appreciate your remarks so and I'm glad you finished up with something optimistic so that's something that we can all move the world I have to announce that we have a hard stop at 5.30 because Victor will have to run yet to another meeting we keep him quite busy today but we have some time for a couple questions you can unmute yourself and ask the question if you like or you can write a question go ahead and we can monitor that Luciano I see you are on Victor thank you for a great talk Victor I have a question you mentioned one of the important solutions to reduce the fraud in the future due to COVID and everything else is to use blockchain but I have a question for you the BBC an article that said that if cryptocurrency blockchain was a country it would consume more energy than England so we moved to blockchain but now you are in a problem that countries we have over a billion people without access to reliable electricity now you are bringing a big problem for countries that we are talking about so how do you propose to deal with that issue that many other countries will not have the energy power to do the calculations required for blockchain you are raising a very important point I have participated with a couple companies based on blockchain that have not been successful exactly for the reason you mentioned there is no access to the energy for the computer time that is required there are many approaches to solve that one of them is to develop new more reliable cheaper and available energy sources but the other one has to do with the question that was raised at the panel and I think it is important to understand that we humans are not isolated it doesn't matter that I get vaccinated if my next door neighbor is not vaccinated it doesn't matter if I am rich if the people that are around me have no nothing to it have no energy to produce reliable sources of energy so what I am trying to say here I guess is that we need to change our mind and one way to produce that is to use the countries the facilities remember that this is virtual so you can just collect the data and send the data all over the world this company that I am talking about began using some cloud computing in the United States and now is moving to Switzerland because of the reason that you are exactly mentioning so that is a big challenge, a big problem and those are the type of things that open opportunities to develop more technology but technology with the social conscience thank you anybody else if not I would like to ask the question myself and that relates to what you just mentioned we are looking quite often for engineers to provide solutions and the interaction with the social science becomes quite obvious we had this also as part of the earlier panel discussion but as part of this puzzle I think there is a need for the engineers to educate also just in general on engineering principles although engineering students take what we call educational electives but I always feel there is a need for everybody else to take basic engineering principles how do you see we can roll this out, how can we raise the engineering level, knowledge level in the society so that we can tackle these problems better, more combined with the general population I think we academicians and we engineers need to develop more precise and effective social communications technologies that is how we are able to communicate what we do so people realize that what engineering and science does is important to them not only a matter of crazy people that are allowed to be raising papers and doing crazy experiments at the lab but things that affect their their daily life I always thought that communication is a two components process on the one hand if the person who emits the message and on the other hand the people who receive the message and we scientists tend to forget about the first one we want to be heard when we have nothing to communicate this self criticism and I think we need to provide our engineering students with communications abilities in addition to math, in addition to physics which of course are wonderful we need them to also be able to communicate the relevance of what they do thank you Victor this is Tere Carvajal I'm an agricultural and biological engineering and I have worked with material surface properties of materials anyhow my question is with regards to the math that you are developing what will be the conditions of like you were saying we have to be social or humanistic thinking what about the environment with regards to the materials that you will be using for making the math what will be the ways and my second question is often you have to change that mask it's not effective of course but using the cloth with some filters they change it often or there was a mask so what will be the situation of this new mask that you are developing that's supposed to be very effective well you have raised a very important problem the amount of waste produced by masks and PPE additional protection equipment including gloves masks and gowns and everything has increased exponentially in the last 12 months so that's another problem we are going to face sooner than later which is the amount of waste so there are two answers to your questions first to produce things that can be used several times if you notice what we show the idea is that you can wear that several times as a part of your garment your scarf or part of your clothes every day so the answer is that yes we are planning to have this to be used and reused several times and the second part is to reuse that by effectively disinfecting why we also want to we are developing this electrostatic spray to being able to disinfect after a given number of uses the mask and have a long term use of this device to reduce the amount of garbage that is produced thank you so much and I really wanted to say as well that I enjoy very much your talk thank you again unfortunately we are out of time I got the signal I need to close this out so Victor thank you very much again for a tremendous presentation mind provoking ideas and thanks for being with us and answering our questions and with that this session and thank you for everyone else who was on our web meeting today thank you thank you very much