February, 2021
Five engineering faculty recognized with innovative teaching awards
Feb. 26, 2021—The extraordinary, creative efforts of five engineering faculty members to adapt to their new teaching environments in Fall 2020 were recognized recently with a Teaching Innovation Award from Philippe Fauchet, Bruce and Bridgitt Evans Dean of Engineering. The honorees quickly converted their in-person classes to online formats due to the COVID-19 pandemic and made innovative,...
Collaboration propels advancements in personalized cochlear implant procedures
Feb. 26, 2021—Vanderbilt University Medical Center is the busiest cochlear implant center in the U.S., performing more than 300 implant surgeries each year. A key driver is close collaboration among engineers, surgeons, audiologists, speech scientists and other experts. This interdisciplinary, trans-institutional work has enabled a truly customized approach for each patient. Research teams have developed image-guided surgery for...
Engineering Professor Michael Miga is 2021 SPIE Fellow
Feb. 23, 2021—Michael Miga, Harvie Branscomb Professor at Vanderbilt and professor of biomedical engineering, has been named a Fellow of SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, for achievements in technology guided surgery and computational modeling for therapeutic and imaging applications. SPIE will honor 57 new Fellows of the Society for 2021. Fellows are SPIE members of distinction...
Student vs. faculty trivia challenge marks E-Week
Feb. 22, 2021—With COVID-19 protocols, Engineering Week 2021 looks different from prior years but retains its signature combination of events for fun, enlightenment and career planning. The lineup features trivia contests, gear giveaways, public school outreach, game nights and more. Undergraduate engineering students started the week Monday by getting new professional photos taken and getting career-building ideas...
How to build a tiny home: Expert advice from civil engineering grad Sean Ticknor
Feb. 17, 2021—For Sean Ticknor, BE’99, the light-bulb moment came in 2016. That’s when he realized that his sons, now 13 and 16, would never have the opportunity to take a shop class—and that most schools in his San Francisco Bay area took a one-size-fits-all approach in directing students to college, but no other paths. “College is...
New $2 million NIH grant advances less invasive procedure for TLE
Feb. 16, 2021—A Vanderbilt research team has received a $2 million National Institutes of Health grant to further develop a needle-size robotic surgery system with real-time MRI guidance for drug resistant temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). Such a procedure has the potential to reduce or eliminate seizures using a minimally invasive approach over the current standard of care,...
Drug development under way with discovery of how to treat heart attack
Feb. 16, 2021—Vanderbilt researchers have identified the protein receptor in specialized heart cells that, when removed, preserves cardiac function after a heart attack. This discovery has significant implications for survival after a heart attack, with a promising therapeutic development now underway at the Warren Center for Neuroscience Drug Discovery. The research was led by David Merryman, a...
Gift from engineering PhD alumnus funds new EECS graduate student awards
Feb. 15, 2021—Starting this year, the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science will award three best paper prizes and $5,000 each to the winning graduate students, thanks to a gift from a School of Engineering alumnus and his wife. The awards program has been created by a gift from May Juan Chen, BA’68, and Chun Fu...