VINSE Faculty News

  • Using nanotechnology to give fuel cells more oomph

    Using nanotechnology to give fuel cells more oomph

    At the same time Honda and Toyota are introducing fuel cell cars to the U.S. market, a team of researchers from Vanderbilt University, Nissan North America and Georgia Institute of Technology have teamed up to create a new technology designed to give fuel cells more oomph. The project is part… Read More

    Aug. 8, 2016

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • Vanderbilt University

    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 small, portable sensors that could expand the use of polarized light for drug screening, surveillance, optical communications and quantum computing, among other potential applications. The new detector was developed by a… Read More

    Sep. 22, 2015

  • Experts address promises and problems of 3D printing large structures

    Experts address promises and problems of 3D printing large structures

    Every month or so an article comes out reporting that some new object has been made using 3D printing: Everything from jewelry to prosthetic devices to electronic circuit boards to assault rifles to automobiles has now been created in this fashion. The prospect that this revolutionary manufacturing method will have… Read More

    Jul. 24, 2015

  • Valentine Selected to Participate in NAE’s 2015 U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium

    Valentine Selected to Participate in NAE’s 2015 U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium

    Washington, DC, June 25, 2015 – Eighty-nine of the nation’s brightest young engineers have been selected to take part in the National Academy of Engineering’s (NAE) 21st annual U.S. Frontiers of Engineering (USFOE) symposium. Engineers ages 30 to 45 who are performing exceptional engineering research and technical work in a variety of disciplines… Read More

    Jul. 10, 2015