Four engineering faculty members have been selected for spring 2024 Seeding Success internal funding. Their projects are among 13 chosen across seven colleges and schools. This year’s cycle was highly competitive, with 29 applications. All applicants receive tailored feedback from reviewers, regardless of whether their proposals are funded. The engineering faculty and their projects are:
- Eric Barth, professor of mechanical engineering, School of Engineering: “Enabling Unprecedented Control Dexterity for Soft Robots”
- Christos Constantinidis, professor of biomedical engineering, School of Engineering: “Recording single neuron activity in the human cortex”
- Xiaoguang Dong, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, School of Engineering: “Wirelessly Actuated Ciliary Airway Stent for Excessive Mucus Removal”
- Sharon Weiss, professor of electrical engineering, School of Engineering: “Energy Transduction at the Nanoscale Enabled by Bowtie Photonic Crystals”
Seeding Success has proven to be a catalyst for Vanderbilt researchers, enabling them to transform their innovative ideas into impactful projects with external funding. For example:
David Hyde, an assistant professor of computer science, also benefited from the Seeding Success initiative with his project, ADVISER—a software platform designed to democratize cloud computing for researchers—which secured $400,000 in NSF support last year.