VINSE Faculty News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VINSE member Jason Valentine’s work published in ACS Photonics was featured in C&EN magazine and Nature Materials 06/15/2015 “Simple Process Creates Near-Perfect Mirrors Out Of A Metamaterial Photonics: A layer of self-assembled particles allows researchers to etch an almost-perfect reflector that might be used in telescopes and lasers out… Read More

Take gold spirals about the size of a dime…and shrink them down about six million times. The result is the world’s smallest continuous spirals: “nano-spirals” with unique optical properties that would be almost impossible to counterfeit if they were added to identity cards, currency and other important objects. Students and… Read More