New Tech Development

Highlighting Consensus-Driven Development of an Important New Standard

Balancing Competing Interests in Lighting Quality and Energy Use

February 2025

If you’ve bought a light bulb recently, you’ve likely encountered an overwhelming number of choices. This stems from two major trends: the growing demand for energy-efficient products and advancements in light emitting diodes (LEDs), which create more light per watt and offer a wider range of color-related qualities.

As LEDs started replacing incandescent bulbs in the 2000s, it became clear that a new evaluation standard was required to balance the competing goals of lighting quality and energy efficiency. The Illuminating Engineering Society‘s Color Committee—comprising experts in human perception, lighting research, interior design, energy engineering, and manufacturing—took on the challenge. By synthesizing research findings and existing methodologies, they developed TM-30, a standardized system for specifying and rating the color rendition of light sources.

In this webinar, Dr. Michael Royer (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) and Dr. Kevin Houser (Oregon State University) discussed the committee’s challenges, the collaborative approaches that led to both the creation and widespread adoption of TM-30, and key lessons for other HIBAR projects—including the benefits of aligning a project’s leadership structure with its goals.

Key Takeaway Messages

Politics and opposition to change can be significant barriers to progress for a HIBAR project.

Contributions to HIBAR projects are often not valued as highly as they should be by university promotion and tenure processes.

A small group of highly vested and active collaborators often drives progress.

Early career team members can develop HIBAR leadership skills with the help of mentorship from experienced colleagues.

If a group has established trust and a sense of urgency, it can more efficiently make decisions and reach consensus.

Persistent effort is necessary to turn HIBAR research results into lasting impact.

Read the key takeaway messages from all of our webinars here.

Watch the full webinar recording

Watch key excerpts from the webinar

Webinar Speakers

Michael Royer

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Dr. Michael Royer is a chief engineer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), where he leads the core lighting research sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy. He conducts experiments to help refine metrics and specification guidance, with the ultimate goals of advancing lighting quality to improve building occupants’ satisfaction and wellbeing while increasing the use of energy efficient lighting technologies. Michael is a Fellow of the Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) and serves on the IES Vision Science committee and the IES Color committee.

Kevin Houser

Oregon State University

Dr. Kevin Houser is a Professor in the College of Engineering at Oregon State University, and he holds a joint appointment as Chief Engineer at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. His work focuses on human perceptual and biological responses to light and applications of light within the built environment. Kevin is co-founder of Lyralux, Inc., a Fellow of the Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) and former editor-in-chief of LEUKOS, the IES journal.

Upcoming Webinar: In Pursuit of Water-Health Equity For Indigenous and Rural Communities

In Pursuit of Water-Health Equity For Indigenous and Rural Communities

Delivering Sustainable Solutions With Next Generation Partnerships and Ecosystems

May 2024

Rural communities face challenges of growing complexity which require increasing breadth and depth of skills, all in support of expanding community solutions. This requires innovators to adopt new strategies and internal capabilities.

Community Circle (formerly the Reseau Centre for Mobilizing Innovation) is a nonprofit center of excellence dedicated to the design and implementation of innovative solutions for drinking water quality and community health in Indigenous and rural communities. Community Circle’s problem-solving approach empowers communities to define success on their unique terms, while building grassroots trust and confidence in proposed solutions to drive projects from concept to execution and beyond.

In this webinar, Community Circle leaders Madjid Mohseni and Irving Leblanc described the practices required to upgrade partnering arrangements from basic research to full solution-oriented and end-to-end ecosystems. They shared insights about how a deep partnership between researchers and community members developed through an initial collaborative project to improve water quality, building a solid foundation from which a wide range of projects have been launched. Together, the Community Circle team has solved several long-standing boil water advisories in rural settings, redefining sustainability, the economics of drinking water, and community health along the way.

Key Takeaway Messages

Communities co-leading HIBAR projects need to share equally in the benefits of the project outcomes.

A culture change is needed for academic researchers to shift their focus to what society truly needs.

Communities participating in co-production through HIBAR projects take pride in the positive outcomes.

The time required to build trusted relationships is often not compatible with typical grant funding cycles.

Long-term funding commitments are often required to sustain the positive outcomes of community-based HIBAR projects.

Read the key takeaway messages from all of our webinars here.

Watch the full webinar recording

Watch key excerpts from the webinar

Webinar Speakers

Madjid Mohseni

University of British Columbia

Madjid Mohseni is a professor of chemical, biological and environmental engineering at the University of British Columbia. An internationally renowned expert in drinking water quality and advanced water treatment processes, he is the the Scientific Director and co-founder of Community Circle.

Irving Leblanc

Community Circle

Irving Leblanc, P. Eng., is Former Director, Infrastructure at the Assembly of First Nations (AFN). He is the Chair of the Board and the Co-director of Community Circle and has been involved in its governance and evolution since 2008.

Permanent Carbon Removal

Creating sustainable solutions for permanent carbon removal at scale

November 2022

There is an urgent global effort to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in order to mitigate climate change. While many industries are striving to transition away from the fossil fuels-based energy sources that have generated this atmospheric carbon dioxide, it is widely understood that a full transition to renewable energy sources will take several decades, and in the meantime there will be an ongoing reliance on fossil fuels. As a result, parallel efforts to develop effective strategies for reducing atmospheric carbon emissions, by capturing and storing the carbon dioxide, are an essential part of the global climate change mitigation effort. The next decade is critical for scaling up and commercializing carbon removal technologies.

UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management (ICM), led by Professor Gaurav Sant, is tackling this challenge of creating and developing sustainable solutions for carbon removal, and demonstrating that they are effective at a scale that is globally relevant in a range of carbon-intensive industries, including power plants and cement and concrete manufacturers. The technologies they have developed ensure carbon removal that is both durable and permanent, locking away the carbon for thousands of years or more.

The work at ICM is an excellent example of HIBAR research: projects pursue new knowledge that is needed to develop solutions to an urgent and global problem, in deep partnership with experts in industry, government, and non-profit organizations. Webinar speakers Gaurav Sant and Thomas Traynor will describe how ICM approaches this HIBAR work, including the challenges of demonstrating technology scalability in a university laboratory environment and bridging skills gaps by integrating experienced industry professionals within the university-based team. With this approach, ICM has demonstrated that it can successfully navigate a field that is moving quickly and is likely to have near-term global impact.

Key Takeaway Messages

As a form of cross-sectoral partnership, universities can hire knowledgeable, experienced people from outside universities to co-lead HIBAR projects.

The university environment offers greater intellectual and funding flexibility for HIBAR projects than the industrial environment.

Balance in team composition is needed for HIBAR projects to be agile and pivot quickly.

Read the key takeaway messages from all of our webinars here.

Watch the full webinar recording

Watch key excerpts from the webinar

Webinar Speakers

Gaurav Sant

Pritzker Professor of Sustainability
Director, UCLA Institute for Carbon Management

Thomas Traynor

Technical Lead, Technology Translation Team
UCLA Institute for Carbon Management

The Future of Genomic Medicine

Developing lipid nanoparticle delivery systems laid the groundwork for COVID-19 vaccines and the future of medicine

April 2022

Jointly presented by the HIBAR Research Alliance and the National Academy of Inventors.

During the record-breaking sprint to develop mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, developers faced a key challenge: they needed a drug delivery system that would enable the messenger RNA, or mRNA, to get into cells in the body. Fortunately, this was not the first time this challenge had been encountered, because the delivery of RNA or DNA to cells to prevent or treat disease at its genetic root cause has been under development for decades, and the success of the COVID-19 vaccine is the tip of the iceberg for genetic medicine.

This delivery solution uses lipid nanoparticles – microscopic bubbles of fat – to encase and protect the mRNA and enable it to be taken up by a cell and released inside to produce the desired immune response. Decades of research in lipid systems enabled the dramatic speed of the COVID-19 vaccine development, from concept to clinical trials within 3 months of sequencing the viral genome. The groundwork for lipid nanoparticle delivery systems was laid more than 40 years ago in the lab of Dr. Pieter Cullis at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Since then, he has played a founding role in a number of companies developing pharmaceutical solutions based on drug delivery research, including Inex Pharmaceuticals, Acuitas Therapeutics, and Precision Nanosystems.

Prior to a year or so ago, lipid nanoparticles were relatively unknown, despite the decades of effort by many researchers to demonstrate their value as drug delivery systems. As a result of the demonstrated success of the COVID-19 vaccine, lipid nanoparticle–RNA drugs are now poised to cause a revolution in medicine, because of their ability to deliver precision gene therapy drugs to treat a wide range of diseases, and to enable vaccines for many other infectious diseases.

Key Takeaway Messages

HIBAR research projects are often challenging in many ways, but they are immensely enjoyable and rewarding.

New approaches to graduate student training are needed to better address the challenges facing society.

There is growing support for public-private research partnerships tackling big challenges.

Read the key takeaway messages from all of our webinars here.

Watch the full webinar recording

Watch key excerpts from the webinar

Webinar Speakers

Peter Cullis

Professor, University of British Columbia

James Taylor

CEO, Precision Nanosystem

Collaborators Dr. Pieter Cullis (Professor, University of British Columbia) and Dr. James Taylor (Co-founder and CEO, Precision Nanosystems) described the HIBAR research journey that led to the global vaccine success, the prospects for a revolution in genomic medicines, and some of the HIBAR research challenges they faced along the way.

Restoring Historical Audio Recordings

Developing an imaging technology to preserve fragile and deteriorating recordings with historical significance

February 2020

Dr. Carl Haber of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory described an exciting HIBAR project for restoring and preserving historical audio recordings. The process has been credited with restoring many historically-valuable recordings, including the earliest known recording of a human voice and early recordings of the voice of Alexander Graham Bell.

Dr. Haber and his research team developed a new digital imaging technology, adapted from their earlier work in creating detectors for particle physics experiments. The imaging system, known as IRENE, uses a high-powered microscope that follows the groove path on an audio recording disc or cylinder and prepares a detailed spatial mapping of the groove. This spatial data is then processed with software that converts it into a digital audio file. The non-contact approach is particularly well suited to safely “play” archived sound recordings, which were often made on now fragile, deteriorating or delicate phonograph cylinders or discs. The process can also be used to recover sound recordings that were designed to be played on devices that are now obsolete.

In 2013, Dr. Haber was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship to continue development of the process. It is currently in use by several archives and institutions in the United States, including the Library of Congress, seeking to preserve and digitize historical audio. In the webinar presentation, he described some of the challenges that the research team faced, and ultimately successfully navigated, throughout this ongoing HIBAR project.

Key Takeaway Messages

Developing a deep partnership with experts in at least one external organization is critical to the success of a HIBAR project.

It is essential to nurture relationships with individual people who share enthusiasm for the project.

It is easier to maintain the enthusiasm of the research team for the duration of a long-term project if it can be structured as a series of smaller projects with specific achievable goals.

Read the key takeaway messages from all of our webinars here.

Watch the full webinar recording

Watch key excerpts from the webinar

Webinar Speaker

Dr. Carl Haber

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Predicting Readmission for Heart Failure

Using AI to develop a tool that enables clinicians and patients to identify early warning signs related to heart failure

June 2019

Dr. Katherine Kim from the University of California Davis Health shared her experience in designing and initiating an inspiring HIBAR research project to develop a much better tool for both clinicians and patients to identify early warning signs related to heart failure. The project received a 2019 CITRIS Seed Funding Award.

This research required the integration of new techniques in artificial intelligence using large and complex data sets with the practical needs of a particular segment of the health care system, with a goal of achieving considerably better health outcomes. Dr. Kim described the approach that she used to design and initiate this HIBAR research project, with particular emphasis on some of the challenges that she had to navigate during the process.

Her research addresses a key challenge related to hospital re-admittance of patients requiring treatment for heart failure. A significant number of heart failure patients develop serious symptoms that require further hospitalization, and there is currently no straightforward way for patients and their care providers to accurately identify early warning signs, so that patients can receive appropriate treatment before symptoms progress. One reason for this diagnostic challenge is the enormous amount of disparate data that is generated during each patient’s previous hospitalization and treatment periods. The project aims to develop a mobile application tool through which the early warning sign predictions generated by the data analysis approach can be readily visualized and interpreted by both patients and clinicians, so that appropriate treatment decisions can be made long before hospitalization is required.

Dr. Kim’s initial research results demonstrated that predictive learning algorithms developed in artificial intelligence research can be used to analyze this data and uncover early warning signs for individual patients that would otherwise be very difficult to discern. In addition to demonstrating a helpful tool for heart failure patients and their care providers, the preliminary research indicated that some measures that are considered subjective (such as the patient’s sense of wellness) can be surprisingly accurate indicators of the need for further treatment. The new knowledge generated by this insight may prove valuable in a wide range of health care situations.

Key Takeaway Messages

A HIBAR project requires building bridges, not just grant proposals: bridges between academic disciplines, academia and industry, and professionals and citizens.

Even small funding amounts are valuable for building capacity for HIBAR research.

Leadership vision and programmatic contributions from funding programs are essential to enable HIBAR projects.

Read the key takeaway messages from all of our webinars here.

Watch the full webinar recording

Watch key excerpts from the webinar

Webinar Speaker

Dr. Katherine Kim

University of California