Eleanor Nelsen

About Eleanor Nelsen

Eleanor Nelsen is the communications manager at the Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science at Virginia Tech. She has also written for NOVAnext, TED-Ed, and Wisconsin Public Television.

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With President Sands’ help, NSF award recognizes Virginia Tech’s strength in nanoscience

By in Feature 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , ,

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Professors Mitsu Murayama and Bill Reynolds using one of the transmission electron microscopes at the Nanoscale Characterization and Fabrication Laboratory.
Professors Mitsu Murayama and Bill Reynolds using one of the transmission electron microscopes at the Nanoscale Characterization and Fabrication Laboratory.

The National Science Foundation just announced the winners of a collective $81 million in funding for the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI), and Virginia Tech is one of the universities involved.

The NNCI will be a network of 16 centers, each with a unique area of expertise in nanotechnology. Virginia Tech’s center will focus on earth and environmental nanoscience—an area in which Tech has achieved international recognition, thanks to the leadership of University Distinguished Professor Mike Hochella, a professor of geosciences.

The NNCI network will serve as a central resource for colleges, universities, and companies who are interested in pursuing nanoscience and nanotechnology, but don’t have access to specialized equipment, or the expertise to analyze materials at scales a hundred thousand times smaller than the thickness of a sheet of paper. NNCI centers can offer access to instrumentation and internationally renowned experts, speeding up the pace of discovery in the rapidly expanding “nano” sector.

So membership in the network dramatically raises a university’s profile in the world of nanotechnology, identifying it as a source of cutting-edge research and a hub for scholarship and technology transfer.

As the university moves forward, it’s not surprising that nanotechnology will be an area of growth. The Virginia Tech Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology, directed by Hochella, and the Nanoscale Characterization and Fabrication Laboratory (both initiatives of the Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science) have helped make the university a destination for nanoscience, particularly environmental nanoscience. Virginia Tech president Timothy D. Sands’ own background is in nanoscience, both in academia and industry, and he directed the Birk Nanotechnology Center at Purdue before becoming that university’s provost.

In a letter of support for the NNCI proposal, Sands wrote that his long-term vision for Virginia Tech “includes a continued commitment to nanoscience and nanotechnology,” and praised Hochella’s leadership in preparing the university to become “the dominant force in this relatively new and now critical area of study and development.”

With this award, the Virginia Tech is well on its way.

Watch VT News for the official university announcement!

At the Hume Center, inspiring young leaders starts early

By in Engineering, Feature, Research, Virginia Tech 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Kira SMWV cropped

You’re never too young to be an engineer.

The primary mission of the Ted and Karyn Hume Center for National Security and Technology is to educate the next generation of leaders in national security technologies. One way they do that through is through outreach across the K-12 spectrum—to students who may not know, yet, that they’re already engineers at heart.

The Science Museum of Western Virginia’s Science Girls! summer camp offers elementary-school girls hands-on experience with science. Dr. Kira Gantt, the Hume Center’s Associate Director of Outreach and Education, visited the camp to talk about careers in science and engineering.

To learn about the kinds of things they might do as an engineer, rising kindergarteners, first-, and second-graders experimented with basic coding, instructing the computer to display text and to perform arithmetic equations. They also learned about cybersecurity, including geo-tagging of cell phone photos.  A second visit, to rising third-through-fifth graders, focused on basic coding, cybersecurity and general online safety practices—including knowing what information is included in those posted selfies.

Summer camps organized by Virginia Tech’s Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Diversity (CEED) introduce middle- and high-school students to engineering; this summer, as in years past, Hume Center scientists lent their expertise to the program. Zach Leffke, a research associate at the Hume Center, taught middle-school students in CEED’s Imagination camps and high-school girls in the CTECH2 program about how versatile radio communications are—including how software-defined radio can be used to listen in on land-based radios as well as satellite communications.

Hume Center faculty Dr. Joey Ernst and Dr. Chris Headley, along with graduate students Deirdre Beggs, Kayla Straub, and Seth Hitefeld, led demonstrations on topics including satellite communications, software-defined radio, and wireless security. These outreach programs gave students a taste of the cutting-edge technology that’s used in national security—and Virginia Tech research that they could, one day, be involved in themselves.

The Hume Center is organized under Virginia Tech’s Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science.

Why engineers need biology

By in Agriculture and LIfe Sciences, Animals, biological models, Engineering, Feature, Research 4 Comments Tags: , , , , , ,

Bats can sip water while they're flying. Understanding that feat could help design flying machines that can draw up water on the go--for firefighting, for example. Image source: Wikimedia commons.
Bats can sip water while they’re flying. Understanding that feat could help design flying machines that can draw up water on the go — for firefighting, for example. Image source: Wikimedia commons.

More and more, engineers are looking to biological systems for inspiration. Can we make a more efficient flying machine by studying a bat wing? Can we make a quieter wind turbine by looking at owl feathers? Could schools of fish inspire “smart” traffic control?

Virginia Tech has a new center specifically dedicated to this type of research: the Center for Bioinspired Science and Technology (BIST). The center is directed by Rolf Mueller, a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering whose research plumbs the complexities of bat biosonar. Other researchers find inspiration in the adaptations developed by birds, fish, and insects to live efficiently in their environments.

What makes biological systems so useful as models for engineered ones?

Evolution, Mueller said.

“Evolution is in a class by itself, but it has a lot of similarities to engineering optimization,” Mueller explained. Both processes have a goal — like to walk efficiently on uneven terrain, or move air from one place to another — that they approach gradually through trial and error. Prototypes are produced and tested. Unsuccessful models are discarded; successful ones are refined further.

“The amazing thing with biology is the enormous timescale. You have a lot of prototypes, and each prototype is evaluated in the real world,” Mueller said. Engineers, though, are more constrained: they typically have to choose between building a few prototypes to test in real conditions, or setting up a computer model to test a lot of prototypes in simulated conditions.

Evolution, though, has had billions of years to run its optimization, testing huge numbers of prototypes in real conditions.

The results of that tremendous optimization protocol have been meticulously recorded in the organisms themselves.

Those biological systems are a living record of the of the processes that yielded their finely-tuned adaptations; they can point engineers towards strategies that have already been field-tested. All that data, Mueller explains, “is a natural resource that we should mine more.”

The BIST center is partially supported by the Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science.

Read more on the BIST center from VT News.

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