Skip to main content

Home Features Category

Lego robot building, wood glider competitions to highlight 2023 E-Week activities

Feb. 10, 2023—Vanderbilt engineering students will showcase their ingenuity through some challenging–but fun–competitions and events during National Engineers Week February 20-24. All events will take place in Featheringill Hall’s Adams Atrium. The Engineering Council pulls the week together each year with help from student organizations. This year, sponsoring organizations include Engineers Without Borders, VandyHacks, VUSat, National Society...

Read more


Vanderbilt supercharges its computer science program

Feb. 9, 2023—By Lucas Johnson In the early months of 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was scrambling university budgets and hiring plans across the country, Vanderbilt saw a golden opportunity to catapult its rapidly growing computer science program into the upper ranks of this booming field. In September of that year, the university launched Destination Vanderbilt,...

Read more


Piran Kidambi receives Chan Zuckerberg Initiative grant to further quest for first-ever high-res imaging of live viruses

Feb. 8, 2023—Piran Kidambi, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, has been awarded a grant to further his research into capturing high-resolution images of live viruses in tissues. The three-year grant from Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Frontiers of Imaging is one of 20 awarded worldwide with the aim of revolutionizing the study of viruses, human health and...

Read more


Team of Vanderbilt experts selected to develop low-cost training tools aimed at expanding global access to minimally invasive surgeries

Feb. 7, 2023—Project will be led by Mechanical Engineering Professor Nabil Simaan, a globally renowned expert in robotic surgery A multidisciplinary team from the Vanderbilt Institute for Surgery and Engineering has received a multi-year, multi-million dollar contract to develop a low-cost simulation tool to train medical personnel in Kenya to perform minimally invasive laparoscopic procedures. The project will...

Read more


Biomedical engineering graduate student is a Ford Foundation Fellow

Feb. 7, 2023—Biomedical engineering graduate student Ismael Ortiz has been awarded a fellowship in the Ford Foundation Fellowship Programs competition administered at the Fellowships Office of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. Ford Predoctoral Fellowships are highly competitive with a typical overall success rate of only 4% to 5%. Fellowships provide three years of support at...

Read more


Biden announces appointment of engineering alumnus to the President’s National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee

Feb. 6, 2023—President Joe Biden announced Feb. 3 his intent to appoint Corey E. Thomas, BE’98, as one of 14 new members of the President’s National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee. The National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee (NSTAC) advises the White House on the reliability, security, and preparedness of vital communications and information infrastructure. The new appointees will...

Read more


Engineering professor applies eye tracking technology and machine learning algorithms to education and training environments

Feb. 3, 2023—By Lena Anthony First-year nursing students, U.S. Army soldiers and a middle school science class might seem very different at first glance. But when you consider the recent work of Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Engineering Gautam Biswas, the similarities become clear. Each group has been a test case for Biswas’ research, which collects multimodal data...

Read more


Vanderbilt student engineering team’s steel-timber beam machine wins DOE national challenge

Jan. 31, 2023—An all-women team from Vanderbilt won a U.S. Department of Energy competition that offers the winner an internship at a DOE national laboratory. Engineering science students Arielle Kopp and Alexandra Filipova and civil engineering students Maggie Chudik and Jacqueline Quirke created a composite beam machine that makes steel-timber beams. Steel and cross-laminated timber beams provide...

Read more