Spotlight Publications

Haohong Song is a third year Ph.D. student from Interdisciplinary Materials Science program. His PI is Prof. De-en Jiang. They report on the interfacial chemistry between water and defected Ti3C2O2 MXene at room temperature using first principles molecular dynamics simulations. They investigate how defects such as O vacancy, Ti… Read More

About the authors: The first author is Boyang Xiao, a second-year Ph.D. student under the supervision of Prof. Xiaoguang Dong in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. The co-authors also include a group of Mechanical Engineering undergraduate students. In their recent work published in Advanced Functional Materials, the team… Read More

Congratulations to Eric Skaar’s group for their Nature publication. The keys towards understanding the role of nutrients in guest-hosts interactions inherently reside at the nanoscale. The work by Pi et al. from the Skaar laboratory utilized the advanced electron microscopy capabilities in VINSE to reveal how C. difficile bacteria use… Read More

Zhiliang Pan is a 2023 Ph.D graduate from the Department of Mechanical Engineering under the direction of Dr. Deyu Li. He stays in the same lab as a postdoctoral scholar after graduation to further expand his Ph.D research on energy transport mediated by phonon polaritons in polar nanostructures. In… Read More

Christopher Stachurski is a 2021 PhD graduate from the Department of Chemistry under the direction of Drs. David Cliffel and Kane Jennings. He is current an Assistant Research Professor at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD working with Drs. Paul Trulove and David Durkin on using… Read More

Joshua Passantino is a 2022 PhD graduate from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering under the direction of Drs. Kane Jennings and David Cliffel. He is currently the Lead Electrochemist at Nth Cycle, an electrochemically focused green metals processing technology company based in Boston, Ma. His… Read More

Hanyu Zheng is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in Dr. Jason Valentine’s group majoring in Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research focuses on metasurface-based devices with applications in spatial light modulation and imaging processing. Hanyu’s recent publication in ACS Nano introduced a novel method based on compound meta-optics for… Read More

Sen Yang is a fifth-year graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Materials Science under the direction of Dr. Justus Ndukaife. Ndukaife’s group focuses on multidisciplinary research including plasmonic and resonant dielectric nanostructures for efficient nano-optical trapping, manipulation, enhanced spectroscopy, and sensing of nanoscale objects. Sen’s recent publication… Read More

Josh Greenlee is an NSF Graduate Research Fellow in the Michael King Laboratory where he has spent the last five-and-a-half years working toward his PhD. Josh’s research is focused on understanding mechanisms of metastasis and chemoresistance in colorectal cancer in order to identify weaknesses that can be exploited… Read More

Congratulations to Richard Haglund and Kent Hallman for their Nature Physics publication. This paper is the latest from a multi-year, multi-national (United States, Germany, Denmark, South Korea, France, United Kingdom) collaboration in which Vanderbilt’s part was the preparation and characterization (in conjunction with the Technical University-Berlin) of a… Read More