News

The 17th annual VINSE Fall Faculty Celebration was held on October 10, 2023, recognizing accomplishments of our community and celebrating faculty promotions. WELCOME TO VINSE Xiaoguang Dong | Mona Ebrish | Marjan Rafat | Krishnendu (Krish) Roy | René Colehour | Jasmine Zhang FACULTY PROMOTIONS… Read More

October 9 is the National Nano Day! This annual event features community-led events and activities on or around October 9 to help raise awareness of nanotechnology, its use in products that enrich our daily lives, and the challenges and opportunities for the future. This date, 10/9, pays homage to… Read More

Chloe Frame, 5th year Chemical Engineering PhD Candidate in the McCabe Lab Summary of Research: My work focuses on the outermost layer of the epidermis, the stratum corneum, which consists of corneocytes (dead skin cells) embedded in highly organized lipid lamellae. This lipid matrix is responsible for the barrier… Read More

Jason Valentine, Professor of Mechanical Engineering (primary) and Electrical Engineering; Deputy Director, Vanderbilt Institute of Nanoscale Science and Engineering Advances in optical materials and technologies have been a key enabler of the information age. Conventional free-space optical elements such as lenses, beam splitters, and polarization optics have, however, remained relatively… Read More

Craig Duvall, Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering; Professor, Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences; Professor, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering The central dogma of biology is that genomic DNA encodes for messenger RNA (mRNA), which is then translated into proteins. Proteins are the fundamental units that drive the functions… Read More

Geordan Dorsey, a Fisk physics graduate student who uses VINSE facilities to take measurements. Gallium Oxide has been of particular interest in the last few decades due to its outstanding optoelectronic properties. The most important of these is its ultra-wide band gap of 4.8 eV, making it an… Read More

Right to left: smallest quantum dots to largest (2 to 6 nanometers) The 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus and Alexei I. Ekimov “for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots”. These tiny particles can emit very bright colored light and are… Read More

Soren Smail, 2nd year Interdisciplinary Materials Science graduate student in the Weiss and Laibinis labs In the past few years, the need for rapid and sensitive point-of-care diagnostics has become readily apparent, especially for monitoring and controlling viral transmissions. Optical biosensing is a promising alternative to widely used diagnostic… Read More

Aaron Hunsaker, a 5th year Ph.D. student in Professor Haglund’s Applied Optical Physics group. I came to Vanderbilt through the Fisk-Vanderbilt Bridge Program, where I received my master’s degree in physics before transitioning to the physics Ph.D. program at Vanderbilt. My master’s research involved fabricating and characterizing a ceramic scintillator… Read More

Zhiliang Pan, a postdoc in Dr. Deyu Li’s Lab in the Mechanical Engineering department after earning his Ph.D. from the same lab in May 2023. Cooling technologies are important in a wide spectrum of engineering applications from thermal management of micro/optoelectronic devices to maintenance of comfort building environment. It is… Read More