Researcher Highlight

Jason Valentine, Professor of Mechanical Engineering (primary) and Electrical Engineering; Deputy Director, Vanderbilt Institute of Nanoscale Science and Engineering Advances in optical materials and technologies have been a key enabler of the information age. Conventional free-space optical elements such as lenses, beam splitters, and polarization optics have, however, remained relatively… Read More

Craig Duvall, Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering; Professor, Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences; Professor, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering The central dogma of biology is that genomic DNA encodes for messenger RNA (mRNA), which is then translated into proteins. Proteins are the fundamental units that drive the functions… Read More

Geordan Dorsey, a Fisk physics graduate student who uses VINSE facilities to take measurements. Gallium Oxide has been of particular interest in the last few decades due to its outstanding optoelectronic properties. The most important of these is its ultra-wide band gap of 4.8 eV, making it an… Read More

Soren Smail, 2nd year Interdisciplinary Materials Science graduate student in the Weiss and Laibinis labs In the past few years, the need for rapid and sensitive point-of-care diagnostics has become readily apparent, especially for monitoring and controlling viral transmissions. Optical biosensing is a promising alternative to widely used diagnostic… Read More

Aaron Hunsaker, a 5th year Ph.D. student in Professor Haglund’s Applied Optical Physics group. I came to Vanderbilt through the Fisk-Vanderbilt Bridge Program, where I received my master’s degree in physics before transitioning to the physics Ph.D. program at Vanderbilt. My master’s research involved fabricating and characterizing a ceramic scintillator… Read More

Zhiliang Pan, a postdoc in Dr. Deyu Li’s Lab in the Mechanical Engineering department after earning his Ph.D. from the same lab in May 2023. Cooling technologies are important in a wide spectrum of engineering applications from thermal management of micro/optoelectronic devices to maintenance of comfort building environment. It is… Read More

Tian Zhu, 5th year Chemical and Biomedical Engineering graduate student in the Rafat Lab While radiation therapy (RT) is an efficient treatment for patients with triple negative breast cancer, patients continue to experience recurrence after RT. The extracellular matrix (ECM) in the tumor microenvironment plays a major role in… Read More

Professor of Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering; Professor of Department of Chemistry Energy-efficient chemical transformations and separations are key to solving our society’s many issues toward substantiality. The long-term goal of the Jiang Research Group is to achieve data-driven design and discovery of functional materials and molecules for… Read More

Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering The Rafat Lab combines engineering and cancer biology concepts to examine the mechanisms driving tumor recurrence and metastasis. We study the relationship between tumor cells, normal tissues, and the immune system as a means of understanding the microenvironment to determine how each… Read More

Alex Stoneman, senior Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering & Chemistry undergraduate student in the Lang lab T-cells are key parts of the mammalian immune response, and T-cell receptors (TCRs) help them recognize their foreign targets. Previous lab work has shown that TCRs act as mechanosenors; piconewton-scale forces facilitate their… Read More