News

Environmental engineering alumnus Sam Shelby Jr. (BE’73) has received a lifetime achievement award from the Water Environment Federation. Sam Shelby Jr. Shelby, principal of Environ Corporation’s Nashville, Tenn., office, was presented the Industrial Water Quality Lifetime Achievement Award in October during the WEF’s annual… Read More

A computer software system based on game theory was installed nine months ago at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach – the eighth busiest ports in the world – to protect the area’s harbors against terrorism attacks. The anti-terrorism system, called Port Resilience Operational/Tactical Enforcement to Combat Terrorism… Read More

Nabil Simaan testing a surgical robot that he designed. (Joe Howell / Vanderbilt) 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… Read More

Douglas Adams (John Russell / Vanderbilt) A remote acoustic detection system designed to identify homemade bombs can determine the difference between those that contain low-yield and high-yield explosives. That capability – never before reported in a remote bomb detection system – was described in a paper by Vanderbilt… Read More

Silicon chip with porous surface next to the special furnace where it was coated with graphene to create a supercapacitor electrode. (Joe Howell / Vanderbilt)   Solar cells that produce electricity 24/7, not just when the sun is shining. Mobile phones with built-in power cells that recharge in… Read More

  Popular Mechanics has named Michael Goldfarb, H. Fort Flowers Professor of Mechanical Engineering, one of its “Ten Innovators Who Changed The World” for 2013. Goldfarb, who develops robotic adaptive equipment for people with disabilities, and his former graduate student Ryan Farris were recognized for the Indego, an… Read More

Ph.D. biomedical engineering candidate Alex Walsh and colleagues are studying new imaging techniques to distinguish breast cancer subtypes and determine if specific therapies are working against cancer cells. (photo by John Russell) A group of Vanderbilt researchers has used laser technology and a custom-built multiphoton… 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. Mahadevan-Jansen Mahadevan-Jansen, an acknowledged leader in biomedical photonics, is the Orrin H. Ingram Professor of Biomedical Engineering and a professor of neurological surgery. As… Read More

A small, wireless capsule has been developed that can restore the sense of touch that surgeons are losing as they shift increasingly from open to minimally invasive surgery. During open surgery, doctors rely on their sense of touch to identify the edges of hidden tumors and to locate hidden blood… Read More

One of the earliest biomedical engineering programs in the United States, Vanderbilt’s Department of Biomedical Engineering is celebrating its 45th anniversary as a program and its 25th anniversary as a department in the School of Engineering. BME Week, commemorating these two milestones, kicks off… Read More