Sadie Magnani reunited with an old love last spring. She joined a collaborative laboratory started by Illinois State’s art and engineering programs to bridge creative exploration and technical expertise in ceramics.
The then-freshman engineering student’s interest in ceramics dates back to high school, when she took courses on that artistic medium all four years. “It was literally life-changing for me,” Magnani said. “And so taking art, which is one of my passions, and taking engineering and combining the two of them just sounded like a really cool experience, and I really wanted to try it out and see what I could learn from it.”
Appears InMagnani was one of seven students from the College of Engineering’s inaugural cohort, along with three advanced ceramics majors, to volunteer for the noncredit lab, held every Friday during the spring semester in the ceramics program’s temporary home in Classroom Building No. 2.
One lab day last February, Magnani and her lab mates huddled together, holding mesh screen bowls over green buckets, and cleaning the impurities out of clay they had dug from the ground.
“Everything that we have done is something that I haven’t done before,” Magnani said. “Like, I’ve never done any of the test tiling that we’ve done. I’ve never made my own clay from scratch. I’ve never sourced my clay like we did from Lake Evergreen. This is all brand new.”
It wasn’t just new to Magnani. The unique lab was the first part of an interwoven, multifaceted, multiyear research and education interdisciplinary project begun by faculty from across campus: Albion Stafford, an associate professor of ceramics; Tyler Lotz, a professor of ceramics and director of the Wonsook Kim School of Art and Design; Dr. Salil Bavdekar, a founding assistant professor of Mechanical Engineering; Dr. Stacey Jones Bock, associate dean in the College of Education; and Dr. Terry Noel, associate dean in the College of Business.
The professors kickstarted their initiative in fall 2025 with the help of a two-year, $200,000 grant from Illinois State’s Advancing Research and Creative Scholarship (ARCS) program. Titled C-Innovate: Building an Educational Bridge Between Engineering, Art, and Enterprise for Ceramic Innovation, the project offers a prototypical example of the type of research and creative endeavor ARCS was created to support—interdisciplinary research teams seeking to address “big, bold scholarly themes.”
The C-Innovate team aims to close a gap in the development of innovative ceramics due to the traditional divide between engineering and art in education.
“We’re trying to merge these two fields and teach students in engineering about arts and arts about engineering,” said Bavdekar.
The researchers are deploying ARCS funds to buy equipment, pay student researchers, and leverage any research completed during the project’s initial two years to procure a larger grant from a federal agency such as the National Science Foundation or Department of Energy.
The students and professors’ ultimate goals are to create marketable flameware free of the light metal lithium, and, separately, silicon-carbide lava glazes.
“A flameware body is pretty much what it sounds like: It’s something you can put directly on a flame,” Bavdekar said. “But one material that is very commonly used to create flameware bodies, called spodumene, has lithium in it. And currently, with lithium being used in batteries a lot, there’s a huge demand for it. It’s very hard to get, and the prices have started going up.
“So what we’re trying to work on is, can we find any other additives, any other materials, that have the same property that we want but are not lithium-based? The basic property we want is a near-zero coefficient of thermal expansion. That is a material that does not expand much with heat.”
Interdisciplinary collaboration
The C-Innovate project evolved out of informal meetings between Bavdekar and Lotz. They were introduced by Department of Mechanical Engineering Chair Nesrin Ozalp shortly after the engineering professor’s arrival on campus in fall 2024 due to his research background in ceramics, specifically involving ballistics and body armor.
The professors bonded over their shared experience with silicon carbide—a very hard, synthesized compound of silicon and carbon. “When the ARCS request for proposals came out late that fall, we got in touch again, and we started talking about how we could put something together that combines engineering with the arts,” Bavdekar said.
Their project was inspired by a course Lotz and Stafford took while M.F.A. students at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. That class paired art and engineering students in an effort to get engineering students to help the ceramists overcome technical hurdles to attain their artistic goals.
“We both always wondered how that might work here,” Lotz said. “Of course, as soon as (Illinois State) developed an engineering program, we found a willing partner.”
Illinois State’s lab serves different aims than the one at Alfred. Before the students could explore lithium-free flameware, they needed to take a deeper, hands-on dive into how ceramics are formed and behave under different conditions and with varied ingredients. So last spring semester, the curriculum centered on teaching the students from both disciplines about ceramics as materials.
“This first component is a collaborative research program. So they’ve done some fun, what I’ll call fundamental research, testing basic materials and seeing how they behave at different temperatures, things of that sort,” Stafford said.
The students tested the resulting powdered material by mixing in additives to either make the clay more workable as an art material or denser for industrial purposes. Finally, they heated the materials at varying temperatures to see how they reacted.
Through this research, the art students were building a better understanding of what happens chemically and mechanically within these materials. The lab introduced the engineering students to a substance that they may not otherwise learn much about in the normal course of their studies.
“My hope would be that (the engineering students) get some exposure to the artists and the way that the artists think, which isn’t always about durability or longevity of the material or something like that,” Stafford said. “And so it causes the engineering student to have to confront problems from a different vantage point than they typically do.
“The other thing I hope that the engineering students get out of this is having a direct way to touch, feel, and experience the science because of what we’re actually testing. With this local clay, for example, we have a group of engineering students with shovels in hand and scarves around their necks, up at the freezing cold lake in the wind, getting samples. And that field research is really great.”
Mauricio Sanchez, a then-freshman engineering student, has enjoyed the hands-on research and learning about ceramics as an engineering material.
“They’ve highlighted that ceramics is a lot more than just pots and stuff that you think about when you hear ceramics, which was basically my understanding of it when I signed up,” Sanchez said. “There are so many things that ceramics apply to, like armor, that have been interesting to learn about.”
To support the educational side of the project, Jones Bock and graduate assistant Tieola Lambey Requena developed interactive online learning modules. The students completed these on their own each week to prepare for the lab sessions.
“Since we’re trying to merge these two fields and teach students in engineering about arts and arts about engineering, we thought it would be good to have someone who’s an expert in education on board as well,” Bavdekar said.
The asynchronous model will allow the researchers to seamlessly add new students as the program progresses. Those students can use the modules to catch up with their peers w