News

  • Advance in creating atomically thin electronic and optical devices

    Advance in creating atomically thin electronic and optical devices

    Sokrates Pantelides (Joe Howell / Vanderbilt University) A future generation of atomically thin optoelectronics devices, including transistors, photodetectors and solar cells, is a step closer because of an advance in the art of epitaxy made by scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) with an… Read More

    Apr. 15, 2016

  • John Wilson receives NSF Career Award

    John Wilson receives NSF Career Award

    John T. Wilson, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, has received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development award. The five-year, $500,000 grant – Engineering Polymeric Nanomaterials for Programming Innate Immunity – will allow Wilson to develop new synthetic materials for “encoding” immunological messages and tightly regulating their… Read More

    Apr. 5, 2016

  • Alice Leach (IMS graduate student) part of team MERLIN: Winners of the 2016 TechVenture Challenge

    Alice Leach (IMS graduate student) part of team MERLIN: Winners of the 2016 TechVenture Challenge

    Wednesday saw the completion of yet another successful TechVenture Challenge. After six years, we are still encouraged that each year the presentations continue to improve and be of higher quality. This can be attributed not only to the student teams and their hard work, but also to the student organizers… Read More

    Apr. 1, 2016

  • Vanderbilt University

    24 high schools from 15 Middle TN counties are participating in the VINSE Field Trip in Spring 2016

    24 High Schools representing 15 Middle TN counties are participating in the Spring 2016 VINSE high school field trip program. Groups of up to 20 from each school will to visit our facilities, perform an experiment, utilize our electron microscope, and learn about nanotechnology and energy during a day visit. Read More

    Mar. 11, 2016

  • How to make electric vehicles that actually reduce carbon

    How to make electric vehicles that actually reduce carbon

    An interdisciplinary team of scientists has worked out a way to make electric vehicles that only are not only carbon neutral but carbon negative, capable of actually reducing the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide as they operate. They have done so by demonstrating how the graphite electrodes used in the… Read More

    Mar. 3, 2016

  • IMS graduate student Alice Leach (Macdonald Lab) wins People’s Choice at 4th Annual Three Minute Thesis Competition

    IMS graduate student Alice Leach (Macdonald Lab) wins People’s Choice at 4th Annual Three Minute Thesis Competition

    Topics ranged from giving nanoparticles the aquatic skills of an Olympic swimmer so they can deliver anti-cancer drugs more effectively…to using game theory to help Sri Lankan farmers decide what crops to plant…to developing an ultrasonic Trojan horse to destroy tumors…to using blue light as an alternative to antibiotics in… Read More

    Mar. 1, 2016

  • Dr. William Fissell’s Artificial Kidney

    Dr. William Fissell’s Artificial Kidney

    Vanderbilt University Medical Center nephrologist and Associate Professor of Medicine Dr. William H. Fissell IV, is making major progress on a first-of-its kind device to free kidney patients from dialysis. He is building an implantable artificial kidney with microchip filters and living kidney cells that will be… Read More

    Feb. 15, 2016

  • Cotton candy machines may hold key for making artificial organs

    Cotton candy machines may hold key for making artificial organs

    Cotton candy machines may hold the key for making life-sized artificial livers, kidneys, bones and other essential organs. For several years, Leon Bellan, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Vanderbilt University, has been tinkering with cotton candy machines, getting them to spin out networks of tiny threads… Read More

    Feb. 11, 2016

  • Quantum dots made from fool’s gold boost battery performance

    Quantum dots made from fool’s gold boost battery performance

    If you add quantum dots – nanocrystals 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair – to a smartphone battery it will charge in 30 seconds, but the effect only lasts for a few recharge cycles. However, a group of researchers at Vanderbilt University … Read More

    Nov. 11, 2015

  • Valentine featured on Phys.org and Vanderbilt Research News

    Valentine featured on Phys.org and Vanderbilt Research News

    VINSE member Jason Valentine’s work published in Nature Communications was featured in Phys.org and Research News @ Vanderbilt 09/22/2015 “First circularly polarized light detector on a silicon chip” Invention of the first integrated circularly polarized light detector on a silicon chip opens the door for development of… Read More

    Sep. 24, 2015