Mechanical Engineering

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

Vijay Kumar and his students at the University of Pennsylvania build small, agile flying robots that swarm, sense each other, and form ad hoc teams that could be used for search and rescue in large-scale disasters. Penn Engineering Dean Kumar Kumar, recognized around the world for his groundbreaking work on… Read More

  (Vanderbilt University) VISE is keeping its acronym but changing its name. The Vanderbilt Initiative in Surgery and Engineering will become the Vanderbilt Institute in Surgery and Engineering. The promotion from a three-year trial program to an established institute is the consequence of a Vanderbilt… Read More

FEI Helios NanoLab G3 CX Dual Beam FIB/SEM (Submitted photo) A team of Vanderbilt researchers won a $928,786 National Science Foundation grant to purchase a piece of equipment that, for now, researchers must travel to Oak Ridge National Laboratories to use. It’s called an FEI Helios NanoLab… Read More

Mark Hatch says the Maker Movement is changing the world. He knows and he’ll tell you how. Mark Hatch Hatch is CEO and co-founder of TechShop, a fast-growing chain of co-working spaces where people come to build prototypes for the products they want to sell. What… Read More

Austin Hardcastle's new malaria test, unveiled at the VUSE Summer Research Program poster event. (Heidi Hall/Vanderbilt University) Austin Hardcastle stood pensively next to a giant poster explaining his research, the ultimate in “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” reports, holding the malaria test he designed. Soon, the… Read More

  Britt Autry (BE’92), vice president, North American Production Promotion Center, DENSO Manufacturing Tennessee, presents a check to VUSE Associate Dean Cynthia Paschal. Back row, from left: Brian Crawford, DENSO senior specialist; Gary Walker, energetics lab manager; Dexter Watkins, mechanical engineering graduate teaching assistant; Chris… Read More

  Undergraduates and Jianing Liu (CE’16) and Ashley Peck (ME'17) are helping design the robot kits. A visit by Adventure Science Center campers helped them see how young students would interact with the kits. (Heidi Hall/Vanderbilt University) Pietro Valdastri’s STORM lab is a cacophony of whirring motors… Read More

With the flick of a tiny mechanical wrist, a team of engineers and doctors at Vanderbilt University’s Medical Engineering and Discovery Laboratory hope to give needlescopic surgery a whole new degree of dexterity. Needlescopic surgery, which uses surgical instruments shrunk to the diameter of a sewing… Read More

Karl Zelik (Vanderbilt University) In his effort to develop better prosthetic limbs, Karl Zelik had to start with deciphering more clearly how muscles function in walking. His path not only led to a better way of quantifying human locomotion, but also to the discovery that muscles around… Read More