09-22-11
The research of John O. Dabiri, Professor of Aeronautics and Bioengineering, on visualizing flow fields around jelly fish and ocean circulation is featured in the recent issue of the National Geographic Magazine. [Excerpt from magazine]
08-24-11
Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) student, Yuyang Fan, working with Research Scientist Daegyoum Kim and Professor Morteza Gharib, has built a wind tunnel that produces shear flow—flow in which wind speed changes with position or time. The tunnel is six feet long, four feet wide, and four feet tall. It is made from 100 coaster-sized computer fans that blow air at around nine meters per second. [Caltech Feature]
Tags: energy research highlights GALCIT Morteza Gharib SURF Yuyang Fan Daegyoum Kim
08-22-11
Siddhartha (Sid) Pathak, a W. M. Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS) Postdoctoral Fellow in Material Science, has received the first prize in the NanoArt 2011 International Competition. The inspiration for Dr. Pathak's entry entitled "In-situ SEM deformation of CNT micro-pillars" is his research on nano-mechanics of carbon nanotubes. As a KISS postdoc Dr. Pathak is working with Professor Julia Greer on mechanical testing of carbon nanotubes at submicron length scales, with a particular emphasis towards space applications.
Tags: APhMS energy research highlights Julia Greer KISS Siddhartha Pathak postdocs
08-19-11
Fulcrum Microsystems Inc., a company founded by former students of Professor Alain J. Martin, has been acquired by Intel Corporation. Computing and Mathematical Sciences (CMS) alumni Uri V. Cummings (Ph.D. '05) and Andrew M. Lines (M.S. '95) founded Fulcrum Microsystems in late 1999 to commercialize on the nearly two decades of work that they and Professor Martin had done to come up with clockless, low-power, high-bandwidth chips for managing switched communications. [Press Release]
Tags: energy research highlights CMS alumni Alain Martin Uri Cummings Andrew Lines
08-12-11
William A. Goddard III, Charles and Mary Ferkel Professor of Chemistry, Materials Science, and Applied Physics; and Posdoctoral Scholar Tod Pascal believe to have solved the mystery of why water spontaneously flows into extremely small tubes of graphite or graphene, called carbon nanotubes. Using a novel method to calculate the dynamics of water molecules they have found that entropy is the missing key. "It's a pretty surprising result," says Professor Goddard "People normally focus on energy in this problem, not entropy." [Caltech Press Release]
Tags: APhMS energy research highlights William Goddard Tod Pascal
08-08-11
Mani Chandy, Simon Ramo Professor and Professor of Computer Science; Deputy Chair for Education, and Julian J. Bunn, Principal Computational Scientist at CACR, are working with a group of Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships (SURF) in CMS, EE, and MCE to building a collection of medical devices that can be connected to a cell phone. "We want to exploit cell-phone technology and the Internet to provide inexpensive health-care tests for the poor in remote rural villages," says Chandy. [Caltech Feature]
Tags: EE research highlights health MCE CMS Kanianthra Mani Chandy Julian Bunn SURF
08-04-11
Liang Feng, a Postdoctoral Scholar in Electrical Engineering who works with Professor Axel Scherer, has designed a new type of optical waveguide - a 0.8-micron-wide silicon device. The waveguide allows light to go in one direction but changes the mode of the light when it travels in the opposite direction. This new technique to isolate light signals on a silicon chip, solves a longstanding problem in engineering photonic chips. [Caltech Press Release]
Tags: APhMS EE energy research highlights Liang Feng Axel Scherer postdocs
07-26-11
Postdoctoral scholar, Georgios Theocharis, and GALCIT alumnus Nicholas Boechler; working with Professor Chiara Daraio, have created the first tunable acoustic diode- a device that allows acoustic information to travel only in one direction, at controllable frequencies. [Caltech Press Release]
Tags: APhMS energy research highlights Chiara Daraio GALCIT Georgios Theocharis Nicholas Boechler postdocs
07-21-11
Lulu Qian, Senior Postdoctoral Scholar in Bioengineering; Erik Winfree, Professor of Computer Science, Computation and Neural Systems, and Bioengineering; and Jehoshua (Shuki) Bruck, Gordon and Betty Moore Professor of Computation and Neural Systems and Electrical Engineering, are the first to have made an artificial neural network out of DNA, creating a circuit of interacting molecules that can recall memories based on incomplete patterns, just as a brain can. [Caltech Press Release]
Tags: EE research highlights Jehoshua Bruck health CMS Erik Winfree Lulu Qian postdocs
07-19-11
Michael R Hoffmann, James Irvine Professor of Environmental Science, has received a $400,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to build a solar-powered portable toilet that could help solve a major health problem in developing countries. [Caltech Press Release]
