Engineering

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, the way invisibility cloaks bend light. Jason Valentine, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, is quoted. Read More

With the help of computerized eye trackers, new research finds that at least 50 percent of people can see the movement of their own hand even in the absence of all light. Read More

Providing surgical robots with a new kind of machine intelligence that significantly extends their capabilities and makes them much easier and more intuitive for surgeons to operate is the goal of a major new grant announced as part of the National Robotics Initiative. Read More

Anita Mahadevan-Jansen has been elected to the Board of Directors of SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. Her three-year term begins Jan. 1, 2014. Read More

Michael Miga, professor of biomedical engineering, will serve on the editorial board of the Journal of Medical Imaging, a new publication of SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. Read More

A pair of Vanderbilt graduate students has received a national award of $15,000 to pursue the development of an unique synthetic foam as a new treatment for deep skin wounds such as chronic foot ulcers caused by diabetes. Read More

Two months before graduating with a degree in civil engineering Mason Hickman earned two awards at the 2013 Southeastern Section Conference of the American Society for Engineering Education for his research on portable structures capable of withstanding blasts from explosives. Read More

In the foreseeable future, robots will be sticking steerable needles in your brain to remove blood clots; capsule robots will be crawling up your colon as a painless replacement for the colonoscopy; and ultra-miniaturized snake robots will remove tumors from your bladder and other body cavities. Read More

Meghan Bowler, Erica Curtis, Melanie Gault, Samantha Saratt and Chelsea Stowell, biomedical engineering; Kirsten Heikkinen and Richard Hendrick, mechanical engineering; and Thushara Gunda, civil and environmental engineering, have received graduate research fellowships from the National Science Foundation. Read More

Vanderbilt graduate student Charleson Bell, who is the president of the high tech startup BioNanovations, is participating in a 12-week accelerator program in Silicon Valley specifically designed to encourage underrepresented tech entrepeneurs. Read More