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Changmin Son, who will join the faculty in the Department of Mechanical Engineering in the College of Engineeringat Virginia Tech in early 2019, has been named the Rolls-Royce Commonwealth Professor by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors. The professorship enables Virginia Tech faculty to generate new research in the field of enhanced performance on aircraft engine systems. Recipients hold the title of Rolls-Royce Commonwealth Professor for a period of five years, and it's is renewable. Son has excelled at scholarship, teaching, service, and outreach throughout...

02 January, 2019

(Article by Andrew Tie, Macromolecules Innovation Institute) An interdisciplinary team of three Virginia Tech faculty members affiliated with the Macromolecules Innovation Institute has created a drug delivery system that could radically expand cancer treatment options. The conventional cancer treatment method of injecting nanoparticle drugs into the bloodstream results in low efficacy. Due to the complexities of the human body, very few of those nanoparticles actually reach the cancer site, and once there, there’s limited delivery across the cancer tissue. The new system created at Virginia...

02 January, 2019

A recent article in the American Chemical Society’s Applied Materials & Interfaces journal introduces a new thermodynamic-based modeling framework to solve a problem that may one day result in lowering the instances of biomedical-device associated infections. The modeling breakthrough came from an interdisciplinary team of Macromolecules and Innovation Institute faculty led by Bahareh Behkam, an associate professor of mechanical engineering in the College of Engineering, working with Amrinder Nain and Michael Ellis, also associate professors in mechanical engineering, and Professor Alan...

13 November, 2018

It’s not often an engineer is featured on the lineup schedule for a music festival, but Mike Roan, a professor of mechanical engineering in the College of Engineering has done it as part of Moogfest, a community of futurists who explore emerging sound technologies in Durham, North Carolina. This year, Roan, who works in areas of immersive audio, psychoacoustics, and digital signal processing, joined with Tanner Upthegrove, media engineer with the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology, to provide the festival...

13 November, 2018

In the ongoing search for strong, lightweight materials, researchers are looking at an odd source – sea urchins, which have spines made of chalk, a generally brittle substance. The highly complex three-dimensional structure of sea urchin spines that is 70 to 80 percent porous creates a stable and strong structure. Studying the sea urchin is part of a $540,000 National Science Foundation grant being investigated by Ling Li, assistant professor of mechanical engineering in the College of Engineering. By using design rules...

13 November, 2018

Michael von Spakovsky, professor of mechanical engineering in the College of Engineering and director of the Center for Energy Systems Research at Virginia Tech, has been named the Robert E. Hord Jr. Mechanical Engineering Professor by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors. The Robert E. Hord Jr. Professorship of Mechanical Engineering was established by a gift from the late Robert E. Hord Jr. Hord, who earned his bachelor’s degree in 1949 and a master’s degree the following year, both from the...

13 November, 2018