{"id":311126,"date":"2026-10-21T07:02:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-21T07:02:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/311126\/"},"modified":"2026-10-21T07:02:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-21T07:02:11","slug":"pioneering-research-from-temple-student-inventors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/311126\/","title":{"rendered":"Pioneering research from Temple student inventors"},"content":{"rendered":"

PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) — Invention has always been part of Philadelphia’s DNA.<\/p>\n

A program at Temple University helps undergrads bring their great ideas to life.<\/p>\n

“This is called an optical magnetometer. It’s a thing that detects magnetic fields,” explains Ben Maitre, a physics major and junior.<\/p>\n

“I’m designing porcelain corals that we can implement for deep-sea coral restoration,” notes Eva Close, a senior who is a biology major and art minor.<\/p>\n

Eva merges biology with art.<\/p>\n

Both are Temple Diamond Research Scholars, undergrads doing groundbreaking research normally reserved for graduate students.<\/p>\n

Ben’s goal is a low-cost, mobile device to detect early-stage lung cancer without radiation.<\/p>\n

“The tumor needs more blood than the surrounding healthy tissue. We can make the blood release a magnetic field, and then this device can detect that field,” he says.<\/p>\n

The scholars work with collaborators and mentors across Temple and beyond. That can even include other institutions.<\/p>\n

Ben’s partners include Temple Health cancer experts.<\/p>\n

“What’s often surprising to our scholars is the degree to which folks are interested in helping them,” says associate vice provost Emily Moerer, who oversees the program.<\/p>\n

Moerer says the 7-month program “really gives the scholars enough time and space to develop a significant body of work.”<\/p>\n

It also helps develop students’ research skills, with a strong emphasis on communications.<\/p>\n

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“We focus on communication and their ability to communicate with each other and communicate their highly complex projects to an educated but non-specialist audience,” she says. “That is really critical in being able to translate this research and this work to a broader audience.<\/p>\n

Support from faculty collaborators is also key.<\/p>\n

“They foster that mentoring relationship and they also develop critical skills in our students that we know are in demand of employers, things like creativity, dealing with ambiguity, collaboration, problem-solving, and communication skills,” Moerer says.<\/p>\n

Eva’s idea came from a love to create: “I’ve been taking ceramics classes since I was really little.”<\/p>\n

And seeing news of the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill when she was 5.<\/p>\n

Her biology lab was already trying to restore coral there.<\/p>\n

“They had tried ceramic in the past and it didn’t work. And so I brought to them the idea of using porcelain,” Eva says enthusiastically.<\/p>\n

Coral branches are made in a mold, then embedded in a concrete base.<\/p>\n

The concept is already in tests.<\/p>\n

“We have one in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s about 100 miles off the coast of Louisiana,” she says proudly.<\/p>\n

And they’ll go back to the Gulf next year to see if coral has attached to those branches.<\/p>\n

Temple has 16 Diamond Research scholars this year, each working on equally unique projects.
<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2026 WPVI-TV. All Rights Reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) — Invention has always been part of Philadelphia’s DNA. A program at Temple University helps undergrads…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":311127,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[127288,69,71,70],"class_list":["post-311126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-127288","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311126"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311126\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/311127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}