Engineering professors Joshua Caldwell and Bennett Landman won a Chancellor’s Award for Research at the 2022 Fall Faculty Assembly. Vanderbilt faculty marking 25 years of service to the university also were recognized, including five engineering professors.
Chancellor Daniel Diermeier, Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs C. Cybele Raver and the Faculty Senate celebrated faculty achievements and provided key university updates in person on Sept. 1. The Fall Faculty Assembly was recorded and can be viewed on YouTube and the Faculty Senate portal.
Caldwell is a Flowers Family Chancellor’s Faculty Fellow and associate professor of mechanical engineering. Landman is professor and chair of electrical and computer engineering. The Chancellor’s Award for Research recognizes excellence in works published or presented in the last three calendar years. Honorees receive $2,000 and an engraved julep cup.
Caldwell and Landman share the award for their co-authored piece “Deterministic inverse design of Tamm plasmon thermal emitters with multi-resonant control,” which was published in the journal Nature Materials in 2021. They were nominated for the award by Nilanjan Sarkar, David K. Wilson Professor of Engineering and chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering.
“The Caldwell lab has been developing infrared sources to exhibit narrow bandwidth—polarized and potentially directional emission that would match an arbitrary target spectrum. The work highlighted in this article offers multiple revolutionary advances beyond the current state of the art, and it has had a large impact,” Chancellor Diermeier said.
A leading manufacturing company within the semiconductor industry has approached the Caldwell lab about designing and developing TPP emitters for multi-gas sensors that could potentially be included with semiconductor processing equipment.
For their years of service to Vanderbilt, five engineering professors will receive a chair bearing a brass plate with their name and the Vanderbilt logo. They are:
- E. Duco Jansen is a professor of biomedical engineering and Senior Associate Dean for Graduate Education and Faculty Affairs.
- Anita Mahadevan-Jansen is an Orrin H. Ingram Professor of Engineering and director of undergraduate studies in biomedical engineering. She also is director of the Biophotonics Center at Vanderbilt.
- Sandeep K. Neema is a professor of computer science and electrical and computer engineering.
- Franz J. Baudenbacher is an associate professor of biomedical engineering and deputy director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Integrative Biosystems Research and Education.
- Eugene LeBoeuf is a professor of civil engineering.
Contact: Brenda Ellis, 615 343-6314
brenda.ellis@vanderbilt.edu