News

Graduate student Kent Hallman checking the sample alignment the vapor deposition machine located in Vanderbilt Institute for Nanoscale Science and Engineering’s clean room. (Joe Howell / Vanderbilt) An ultra-fast and ultra-small optical switch has been invented that could advance the day when photons replace electrons in the innards of consumer… Read More

Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering Jason Valentine has received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development grant. The four-year, $400,000 grant – All-Dielectric Optical Metasurfaces For Controlling Wave Fronts – will allow Valentine to continue research that will lead to a new class of ultra-compact optical elements that can… Read More

A new way of assembling things, called metamaterials, may in the not too distant future help to protect a building from earthquakes by bending seismic waves around it, similar to the principle applied to light waves in invisibility cloaks. Jason Valentine, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, has developed such an invisibility… Read More

  From left, Scott Guelcher, Ph.D., Jeffrey Davidson, Ph.D., Christopher Nelson and Craig Duvall, Ph.D., showed that an enzyme-blocking molecule released by a biodegradable scaffold can enhance wound healing in a mouse model. (photo by Susan Urmy) Biomedical and chemical engineers at Vanderbilt University, working with a… Read More

Solar cells that produce electricity 24/7, not just when the sun is shining. Mobile phones with built-in power cells that recharge in seconds and work for weeks between charges. These are just two of the possibilities raised by a novel supercapacitor design invented by material scientists at Vanderbilt University that… Read More

How do you get students excited about science? Try some blackberries, nanotechnology and solar cells mixed with Tennessee high school students at a Vanderbilt lab. Watch VUCast Extra now.  … Read More

Growing up close to nature in the small timber-and-fishing community of Gold Beach, Ore.—population 2,000—gave John Wilson an early interest in biology and biologically inspired design. That, combined with an aptitude for math and physics, drew him into the field of bioengineering. When Wilson sets up his… Read More

Leon Bellan, assistant professor of mechanical engineering B.S., Caltech, 2003 M.S., Cornell University, 2007 Ph.D., Cornell University, 2008 Bellan’s research focuses on developing novel 3D microfluidic materials. A major focus of his lab is the production of biomaterials and biodevices—created with nontraditional, scalable fabrication techniques—that… Read More

As a graduate student in professor Todd Giorgio‘s biomedical engineering laboratory, Charleson Bell played a central role in developing a novel nanotechnology system that can detect bacterial inflections within a matter of minutes, compared to current tests that take several days to complete. It was innovative and promising… Read More

Deyu Li, associate professor of mechanical engineering, was one of five faculty members receiving a Chancellor’s Award for Research, which also recognizes excellence in research, scholarship, or creative expression. These awards are given for works presented or published in the preceding three calendar years. Read More