Lehigh University doctoral student Rodrigo Manzano has a degree in advanced solid mechanics, or the science of figuring out how materials react to being placed under stress. They might bend, deform in different ways, or even break, and a single material might react differently under different conditions. At Lehigh, he is focussing his research on auxetic materials, which he describes as a “special kind of metamaterial [an artificially engineered material] that, when you stretch it, instead of compressing from the sides as you would expect, it also expands.” For example, pulling on the opposite sides of a rectangle made of auxetic materials results not in a longer, skinnier rectangle, but in a fatter one. These materials have, he says, “interesting and diverse applications” in areas such as health care and protection for impact sports.
For his doctoral research, Rodrigo uses optical cameras, which offer very high-resolution views of how the material changes. He pairs this with a computational approach to measure how the materials deform, then confirms the results with infrared measurements. It might sound straightforward, but auxetic materials are unpredictable. You might expect that placing, say, a one-pound object on a material would result in 1 unit of change, and therefore placing a two-pound object on it would cause twice as much change. But that’s not the case with auxetic materials; they react in a nonlinear manner. Rodrigo’s challenge is taking many measurements of auxetic materials under different loads to try to discern a pattern that would make their behavior predictable. The novel aspect of his approach is that he’s coupling a few techniques, such as optical cameras, infrared measurements, and a thermal camera. His goal is to confidently predict, using data-driven techniques, the deformation of a material so it can be used in areas where reliable, consistent performance is important; as Rodrigo says, “I’m trying to see if we can confidently say, based only on data-driven techniques, ‘this is where the material changes its behavior from something to something else.’”
Rodrigo earned his undergraduate degree in his native El Salvador, then went to UCLouvain in Belgium and the University of Lille in France for his master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering. While he was in France, Lehigh University Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics Natasha Vermaak visited and gave a lecture about her research, which involves auxetic structures. Rodrigo was intrigued by her talk, so as he was about to graduate and considering pursuing a doctoral degree, he emailed Vermaak and found out she had an open position in her lab at Lehigh. Rodrigo applied, was accepted, and arrived at Lehigh in 2024, starting the doctoral program that fall.
Spring 2026 marked his last semester of coursework, and thinking he’d “try something new,” he enrolled in Professor Valerie Holt’s ENGR 497 Interdisciplinary Pathways to Community-Engaged Energy Solutions, which is part of the university’s National Science Foundation supported graduate research traineeship (NSF NRT) called Solutions in Energy, Electrification and Delivery (SEED). Holt’s class took him away from auxetic materials and into another unpredictably changing area: data centers. This interdisciplinary graduate course gave students a chance to explore the community-focused side of engineering, focusing on the potential impacts of data centers on a community.
Holt says she designed the interdisciplinary course to provide graduate students “with an opportunity to collaborate on an important energy-related challenge in the Pennsylvania region.” For spring 2026, the students examined community impacts of data center growth in the greater Pennsylvania region.
Students researched a set of key community impact areas: power, water, economics, environment, and local policy. Then, the group worked together to develop the foundation for a Multi-Criterion Decision Support Framework that can integrate the impact dimensions to provide a view of impacts at a more local level. The spring 2026 group mapped the foundation for the framework, and the spring 2027 cohort will complete it. This framework can be customized by local communities when they assess and evaluate proposed and operational data centers within their communities.
Rodrigo chose to research the environmental footprint of emissions from data centers. He was attracted to this approach because, similar to his usual work, “it has numerical metrics...and it’s a topic that’s important to me because the environment is critical for our survival.”
Diesel generators create emissions at data centers, which rely on them for backup power when the electrical grid’s supply is interrupted due to natural events, such as storms, or in response to minor grid disturbances such as changes in voltage or weather related demand fluctuations. Data centers are also required to do a test-run of their generators periodically to ensure “5-9s availability,” which means the data center has to be operational 99.999 percent of the time. There’s potential for fairly frequent use of the diesel generators for the testing and as “fill-in” or backup power for the grid.
But, given that intermittent use of backup generators are context specific and often in response to unpredictable and variable local conditions, Rodrigo says, the task of quantifying the impact of data center backup generators, which produce CO2, nitrous oxides, and particulates, as well as noise, becomes more difficult. The true emissions impact should be examined at the community level.
Rodrigo says that historically, there has been a lack of transparency about data center operations further compounding tracking and reporting emissions data. Increasingly, environmental impacts reporting has become part of data center siting and operations discussions and decisions. Data center operators can no longer simply claim the information is proprietary.
Rodrigo notes that the energy and pollution implications of data centers in Pennsylvania is multifaceted. Data centers need energy, which Pennsylvania has abundantly in the form of natural gas. But the cheapest way to get to that gas is fracking, which generates its own set of pollutants. Rodrigo says this underscores for him that “you can’t look at one thing in isolation.”
The interdisciplinary networks found in the energy ecosystem in Pennsylvania were reflected in ENGR 497. Guest experts shared deep knowledge of data center impacts including those related to energy markets, water resources and protection, grid integration and planning, and local and state planning. Students in the course came from various engineering disciplines as well as environmental science. Communicating across disciplines and to others with different backgrounds is a skill Holt hopes her students continue to build. She says, “the need to develop the knowledge, skills and confidence to collaborate across sectors and disciplines is fundamental for all graduate students and core to addressing these complex energy problems.”
As Rodrigo says,”Differences in disciplinary perspectives sometimes made communication difficult. I think the biggest contribution that the course had for me was learning how to express what I want to say in a way that other people with other backgrounds and expertise will understand.”
Having passed his general exam in the spring semester, Rodrigo will spend the summer doing research in Vermaak’s lab on the third floor of Packard Lab. At the close of the spring semester, he said, “Right now I’m trying to do some research to give some credibility to my proposals and maybe write one or two papers.” His next step will be preparing his research proposal and defending it, then he’ll write and defend his dissertation. And if all goes well, he’ll be contributing breakthrough science on auxetic materials.