Creating Knowledge and Technologies for an Advanced Society
In research labs and groups across UVA Engineering, our faculty and students are making discoveries and disseminating their breakthroughs across the globe.
This group’s research is focused on designing resilient control systems capable of maintaining desired performance in the presence of uncertain system faults such as actuator failures, structural damage and sensor failures, with applications in aircraft systems and robotic systems for resilient and autonomous control.
Director: Gang Tao, Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering
This lab conducts basic and applied research in advanced aerospace technologies. Its experience derives from 30 years of projects including the National Aero-Space Plane (NASP) and the National Center for Hypersonic Combined Cycle Propulsion (NCHCCP). Ongoing work includes high-speed mixing and combustion, aerobreakup of liquids, and hypersonic rarefied gas jet interactions.
Director: Christopher P. Goyne, Associate Professor of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
The Agnew Research Group studies plasticity of metals, alloys and intermetallic compounds that advance both energy conservation through light weighting (Al, Mg & Ti) and energy production via nuclear technology (e.g., Zr and U). Plasticity is a field that supports manufacturing (forming and machining) and service of metals and alloys, since avoiding plasticity is the basis of achieving high strength, and understanding plasticity is a means to prevent or predict failure in applications that promote creep, fatigue or fracture.
Director: Sean Agnew, Professor of Materials Science & Engineering
The work of Dean Craig H. Benson's lab broadly falls into the field of geoenvironmental engineering, spanning several focus areas, including: municipal solid waste, hazardous waste, coal combustion residuals, mixed radioactive waste, and mining and mineral processing wastes. The impact of our work harnesses natural processes to prevent landfills from leaking pollutants into groundwater, balancing the need to keep the natural world clean and healthy with society's goals of economic growth and robust industries.
Current research teams are engaged in a broad array of issues related to reverse engineering of biological systems, including central pattern generator control, active tensegrity structures with integrated actuation, electro-active polymers (artificial skin/muscle), and hydrodynamics.
Director: Hilary Bart-Smith, Professor of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
This group works at the intersection of metallurgy, solid mechanics and chemistry, which is currently at the forefront of several important engineering challenges. Those challenges include: prognosis of environmentally degraded airframe and ship components; design of the maintenance protocol for storage and distribution of metal embrittling H2 for the hydrogen energy economy, material embrittlement and fatigue issues in the resurgent nuclear power field; and alloy selection and life prediction for bio-medical engineering.
Director: James T. Burns, Assistant Professor of Materials Science & Engineering
This lab is based in the Departments of Chemical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering, and the lab engineers biomaterials to explore the dynamic interplay between cells and their microenvironment. Researchers apply these platforms to address fundamental human health challenges including treatment of diseases such as fibrosis and cancer, repair and replacement of tissues and organs and improved understanding of how cells transduce microenvironmental signals.
Director: Steven Caliari, Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering
Research efforts are underway to better understand the electrowetting of conductive liquids on insulated electrodes and to optimize materials and geometry to enhance electrowetting performance. In addition, we are investigating how capillary forces might be harnessed to provide powerful actuators for micro electromechanical systems (MEMS).
Director: Carl Knospe, Associate Professor of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
The Cardiac Biomechanics Group focuses on the interactions between mechanics, function, and growth and remodeling in the heart. The mechanical properties of normal and diseased myocardium are important determinants of overall heart function. These mechanical properties change during growth, remodeling or disease, often in part as a response to changes in the mechanical environment. Our group studies this interplay between mechanical environment, tissue response, and heart function, not only to better understand the basis for heart disease but also to identify new opportunities to intervene.
Director: Dr. Jeffrey W. Holmes, Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Medicine
Heart function and failure are controlled by complex signaling and transcriptional networks that are just beginning to be mapped. This lab combines computational modeling and high-throughput experiments to discover molecular networks and drugs that control cardiac remodeling and regeneration. Experimental approaches include high-throughput microscopy and -omic profiling of primary and induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived cardiomyocytes. Computational approaches include large-scale regulatory network modeling and bioinformatic analysis of -omic data.
Director: Jeff Saucerman, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering
This research group employs experimental and theoretical engineering approaches to investigate chromatographic separation problems and develop new materials and processes for bioseparation applications. Researchers are especially interested in studying the relationship between adsorbent characteristics, biomolecular structure, and mass transfer and in the optimization of process chromatography for the recovery, separation, and purification of biomolecules.
Director: Giorgio Carta, Lawrence R. Quarles Professor of Chemical Engineering
Changes in cellular behavior underlie development, disease, and tissue homeostasis. The response of cells to external factors depends upon posttranslational signals and changes in gene expression. These biomolecules are wired together in cells to form networks. Intracellular signaling and gene-expression networks are highly interconnected and time dependent, making them difficult to study and even harder to understand at the systems level. This lab designs new experimental and computational approaches for analyzing such networks. Researchers draw from engineering principles to inspire new techniques that can be applied to network-level questions about signal transduction and gene expression. The lab is particularly interested in using these methods for problems in cancer biology, where the molecular “signal processing” has gone awry and cellular responses are inappropriate.
Director: Kevin Janes, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Cell signaling is the biochemical process cells use to make decisions about virtually everything they do – migrate, differentiate, survive, die, and more. While proper signaling is critical to normal development and health, aberrant signaling leads to numerous diseases, including cancer. Thus, the ability to engineer signaling processes or intervene effectively in aberrant signaling has huge medical implications. This lab integrates experimental and computational methods to study fundamental aspects of cell signaling regulation and applied aspects of cell signaling including the efficacy of therapeutics that target particular signaling pathways in cancer.
Director: Matthew J. Lazzara, Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering
This research group aims to advance the fundamental understanding of relationships between the structure of semiconductor nanomaterials and their optical, electrical and magnetic properties. New insights obtained from our research enable development of novel semiconductor nanomaterials with tailored properties for next-generation solar cells, light-emitting diodes, medical imaging agents and spintronics.
Director: Joshua Choi, Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering
This laboratory’s goal is to understand the genetic mechanisms that lead to increased susceptibility to cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. The interactions among hundreds of genes and gene networks along with environmental factors such as diet affect our health status. This lab uses systems genetics to uncover this complexity.
Director: Mete Civelek, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering
This group’s research interests include computational materials science, development of multiple length and time-scale computational methods for materials modeling, theoretical and numerical analysis of the dynamic non-equilibrium processes in materials undergoing processing by short laser pulses, investigation of the microscopic mechanisms of phase transformations, and properties of nanostructured and non-crystalline materials.
Director: Leonid V. Zhigilei, Professor of Materials Science & Engineering
Understanding biochemical networks will lead to revolutionary advances in medicine and biotechnology. This lab uses computational and experimental approaches to characterize biological systems relevant to human disease. In particular, we reconstruct integrated cellular networks and develop tools to analyze their properties. The analysis of these networks requires sophisticated computing capabilities and advanced experimental and mathematical techniques.
Director: Jason Papin, Professor of Biomedical Engineering
The Computing Hardware Research Lab (CHRL) is led by Prof. Nikhil Shukla. The lab is dedicated to research in the areas of microelectronic devices and circuits and the development of new computing approaches to enable energy-efficient computation.
This lab is interested in developing new or improved catalytic materials by studying how the structure of a catalyst affects its performance in a chemical reaction. Heterogeneous catalysts prepared in the Davis laboratory are often composed of small metal particles supported on an oxide carrier. Since the metal particles expose a significant fraction of their atoms to the surface, the interface between the underlying support and the particle is expected to contribute to the overall rate and selectivity of a catalytic reaction.
Director: Robert Davis, Earnest Jackson Oglesby Professor of Chemical Engineering
This lab focuses on designing materials with altered thermal and electrical properties and new hybrid energy conversion devices. The main applications are in thermal management, semiconductor devices and energy conversion technologies, such as thermoelectrics.
Director: Mona Zebarjadi, Assistant Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering and Materials Science & Engineering
The research for the ExSiTE group focuses on energy transport, charge flow, and photonic interactions with condensed matter, soft materials, liquids, vapors and their interfaces.
Director: Patrick E. Hopkins, Associate Professor of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
This group’s research emphasizes synthesis and structural characterization of electronic materials and materials that self-assemble on the nanoscale. Researchers seek to grow novel materials, often metastable, that might exhibit unusual and beneficial functionalities for logic, magnetic, and thermoelectric applications.
Director: Jerry Floro, Professor of Materials Science & Engineering
The Flow Simulation Research Group focuses on understanding the physics of complex flows of flying and swimming in nature by combining state-of-the-art computational methods, experimental tools, and theoretical fluid dynamics research. Research is driven by the quests to answer questions both from fundamental fluid dynamics problems and from practical applications.
Director: Haibo Dong, Associate Professor of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
The Fluids Research and Innovation Lab projects focus on unsteady fluid dynamics including micro- and nano-texturing coatings for self-cleaning, fluid dynamics and heat transfer of energy-storage systems, inlet aerodynamics of supersonic aircraft and inlet particle separators of helicopters, and bio-inspired morphing wind turbines to reduce offshore cost of energy.
Director: Eric Loth, Chair, Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, Rolls-Royce Commonwealth Professor
This lab’s research focuses on the application of chemical engineering principles to problems in microbial ecology. The aim is to develop a fundamental understanding of mechanisms underlying microbial behavior, which will provide insights for future technological innovation. Research areas include biofilms, bioremediation, thermophiles and modeling tools.
Director: Roseanne Ford, Professor of Chemical Engineering
This group focuses on the development and study of games that might provide solutions to broad societal issues. These issues vary widely and can include such things as enhancing education, raising awareness of cultural issues, crowdsourcing solutions to large-scale problems, or collecting data on how people collaborate.
Director: Mark Sherriff, Associate Professor of Computer Science
The Geise research group seeks to develop structure/property/processing relationships to guide polymeric materials design for membrane-based liquid separation and energy applications by understanding the influence of nano- and molecular-scale interactions and phenomena on mass transfer and system-level performance.
Director: Geoffrey Geise, Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering
This lab’s two research areas are related to the fields of haptics, human-machine interaction, and computational neuroscience. Researchers are using computational models and artificial sensor correlates to understand the neural basis of touch and capture the neural behavior of the skin-receptor interaction. In addition, the work to understand the science of tactile perception is applied in the design of simulators. We are working with a group of clinicians and medical and nursing educators to create human-machine interfaces to train health care practitioners.
Director: Gregory Gerling, Associate Professor, Systems Engineering
The Giri research group is focused on studying the fundamental processes (thermodynamic, kinetic, mechanical and optical) that lead to different organic molecule and metal organic framework morphologies, and utilizing this knowledge to create innovative methods of controlling microstructure and phase for pharmaceutical and energy applications. Microfluidics and X-ray diffraction analysis methods feature strongly in our program to study organic molecule packing and morphology.
Director: Gaurav Giri, Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering
This research group focuses on analyses and solutions for problems in global hydrology and water resources using modeling and observations (both from in-situ and remote sensing). These problems include (but are not limited to) floods, droughts, permafrost, landslides and water supply. We use standard hydrological models and advanced techniques such as AI/ML.
The primary mission of the Green Research Group is to lead in the formulation of advanced nanocomposite materials. It is simpler and more cost effective to create new materials from existing components assembled in innovative systems. These new materials have the potential to exhibit enhanced mechanical, optical, thermal, or electrical properties depending on their formulation. Future applications of this research include the automotive, aerospace, product packaging or medical industries.
Director: David Green, Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering
Research is carried out in the area of high power laser applications for solar cell manufacturing, thermal solar, thermophotovoltaics, quantum dots based solar concentrators, laser microtexturing of surfaces etc. An NSF supported Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for an application of lasers in manufacturing was established in 2002.
Director: Mool C. Gupta, Langley Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
This lab is dedicated to research in the area of very large-scale integrated circuit design. Ongoing research ranges from power-, temperature- and reliability-aware CMOS circuit design to explorations in spintronics and nanoelectronics.
Director: Mircea R. Stan, Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering
This is a group seeking to develop and advance ultrasound as a platform for imaging and therapy. The group investigates microbubbles, cardiac imaging, bone imaging, intravascular ultrasound, microfluidics, photoacoustics and molecular imaging.
Director: John Hossack, Professor of Biomedical Engineering
This group uses data-driven techniques to model and understand the human-generated big data. Researchers are engaged in cutting-edge research of user behavior analysis and modeling, generative modeling of user-generated data, and online interactive learning with users.
Director: Hongning Wang, Assistant Professor of Computer Science
This group’s research aims to address some of society’s most challenging water resources problems by understanding, analyzing, and managing water systems as cyber-physical systems. Current research focuses on designing and building next-generation flood warning systems, real-time adaptive control of smart stormwater systems, and river basin-scale water quality modeling and monitoring. We are part of the interdisciplinary Link Lab, a center of excellence in cyber-physical systems housed within the Engineering School at the University of Virginia.
Director: Jonathan Goodall, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
This lab’s research focus is on mm-wave and THz integrated systems, with applications in biomedical imaging, security and communication. Current research interests include holistic integration of high-frequency analog circuits, advanced digital circuits, and novel electromagnetic structures to enable the next generation of mm-wave applications, including adaptive mm-wave circuits as well as mm-wave power generation and radiation.
Director: Steven Bowers, Assistant Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering
This group’s research seeks to empower individuals and organizations to control how their data is used. Researchers use techniques from cryptography, programming languages, machine learning, operating systems, and other areas to both understand and improve the security of computing as practiced today, and as envisioned in the future.
Director: David Evans, Professor of Computer Science
The Kelly Laboratory is interested in analyzing how the various biological scales such as molecules, proteins, cells, and structures interact in both normal and abnormal states. We utilize a multidisciplinary approach with expertise in chemical biology, physiology, proteomics, molecular imaging, and nanotechnology to make fundamental discoveries that are linked to the diagnosis and treatment of disease.
Director: Kimberly Kelly, Professor of Biomedical Engineering
This group’s work includes studies of the electrochemical and chemical conditions inside localized corrosion sites in various alloy systems, corrosion in aging aircraft, atomistic and continuum modeling of electrochemical processes, development of embeddable corrosion microinstruments, as well as the use of microfabrication methods to probe the fundamentals of localized corrosion.
Director: Robert G. Kelly, AT&T Professor of Engineering
The Koenig Research Group investigates the design of new materials and material chemistries. This research involves the synthesis, characterization and evaluation of materials properties using a variety of techniques. The primary area of application that we focus on is rechargeable battery electrode materials.
Director: Gary Koenig, Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering
This is an interdisciplinary, translational research enterprise. The lab’s mission is to leverage cross-University collaborations to develop novel and more efficacious regenerative medicine/tissue engineering technologies for unmet medical needs. In particular, researchers are developing a technology platform for the treatment of volumetric muscle loss (VML) injuries. Researchers also endeavor to develop new biomaterials for enhanced muscle regeneration and neural innervation. The lab’s translational research efforts are enhanced by close integration/interaction with clinicians, most notably, the UVA Dept. of Orthopaedic Surgery.
Director: George J. Christ, Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Orthopaedic Surgery, Mary Muilenburg Stamp Professor of Orthopaedic Research, Director of Basic and Translational Research in Orthopaedic Surgery
The Lampe Group develops biomaterials for neural tissue engineering. Researchers are interested in the big questions surrounding diseases and injuries of the central nervous system (CNS), performing highly interdisciplinary work at the interfaces of biology, chemistry, engineering, and neuroscience.
Director: Kyle Lampe, Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering
Understanding cell adhesive interactions in inflammation and coagulation will lead to improvements in diagnostic and therapeutic technologies. The Lawrence Lab has developed several model flow systems to examine the dynamics of blood cell interactions with the vessel wall. The lab also is developing applications of molecular mechanics to the challenges of targeted drug and gene delivery.
Director: Michael B. Lawrence, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering
This group's research is focused on developing novel machine-learning techniques on important challenges in biomedicine, especially those dealing with enormous data sets. Researchers strive toward building and sharing benchmarked datasets and open-source releases of research prototypes.
Director: Yanjun Qi, Assistant Professor of Computer Science
This lab’s goal is to understand the molecular mechanisms by which cells move, with particular emphasis on muscle contraction. Researchers examine the mechanics of these processes at the level of individual molecules using laser traps, fluorescence microscopy, and reconstituted motile and adhesive systems. These allow us to better define the molecular underpinnings of many cell movements, and the molecular basis of many diseases.
Director: Will Guilford, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Associate Dean for Online Innovation
Researchers in this lab are fascinated by skeletal muscles, which are the motors for all the wide range of voluntary movements in the human body. Each muscle’s properties are beautifully tuned for a specific function in the body, which can be easily disrupted by diseases such as muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy, or in aging populations. This lab seeks to gain new insights into the form, function, biology, and diseases of muscles. Our work has the ultimate goal of improving treatments and quality of life for individuals suffering from muscle-related clinical problems.
Director: Silvia Blemker, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
Dedicated to developing new techniques to assist in measuring, understanding, and utilizing nanoscale thermal phenomena, this laboratory’s research is aimed at developing a fundamental understanding of energy transport on ultra-short time and length scales. The lab conducts a mixture of fundamental and applied research.
Director: Pamela M. Norris, UVA Engineering Executive Associate Dean for Research and Frederick Tracy Morse Professor of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
This group focuses on materials exposed to high temperatures and extreme environments such as hypersonic vehicles, combustion engines, and solid-oxide fuel cells. With a focus primarily on cutting-edge ceramics, alloys, and coatings, the group aims to investigate the fundamental mechanisms operating at high temperatures through a combination of experimental and characterization techniques.
Director: Elizabeth J. Opila, Associate Professor of Materials Science & Engineering
The appeal of the optical medium for communications, its tremendous bandwidth, is only fully exploitable through multiplexing of many signals, in time, wavelength, or other domain. Our research explores the use of signal processing, communication theory, and optical techniques in designing high capacity optical multiuser/multichannel systems and networks.
Director: Maite Brandt-Pearce, UVA Engineering Executive Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering
This group is focused on photonic devices and integrated photonic technologies for optical communications, sensing and the emerging field of microwave photonics. Recent work includes the development of high-power, high-speed photodiodes for photonic microwave generation, radar transmit and receive applications, and optical communications. Other projects are focused on design, fabrication, and characterization of InP-based photonic integrated circuits on a silicon photonic-electronic platform.
Director: Andreas Beling, Assistant Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering
Nearly every tissue in the body needs a blood supply, and that demand is met by a network of interconnected blood vessels called the microcirculation. The microcirculation is a highly adaptable system of small blood vessels that are a tenth of the diameter of a human hair–-you need a microscope to see them–-and there are over a million microvessels in a single gram of tissue. Microvascular growth and remodeling are important processes in nearly every major disease, including diabetes, heart disease, peripheral vascular disease, stroke, neurodegenerative diseases, and cancer. In the Peirce-Cottler Laboratory, researchers develop and use experimental and computational techniques to study and design new approaches for growing and regenerating injured and diseased tissues by manipulating the structure and composition of the microvasculature.
Director: Shayn Peirce-Cottler, Professor of Biomedical Engineering
The research work in this lab focuses on cloud computing and datacenters, cyber-physical systems and the Internet of Things, big data, information retrieval, content delivery networks, mobile computing, wireless sensor networks, high-performance computing and social networks.
Director: Haiying Shen, Associate Professor of Computer Science, Systems & Information Engineering and Electrical & Computer Engineering
This group focuses on developing novel optoelectronic devices with emphasis on photodetectors. The research projects tend to fall into two broad areas: high-sensitivity photodetectors, e.g., avalanche photodiodes and high-power photodiodes.
Director: Joseph Campbell, Lucien Carr III Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering
Members of the Predictive Technology Laboratory design, implement and evaluate algorithms that predict future outcomes of interest based on historical data patterns.
Director: Donald Brown, W.S. Calcott Professor, Systems & Information Engineering
The Price Lab has two major areas of research interest: the use of image-guided focused ultrasound for targeted drug and gene delivery, and vascular biomechanics. The lab’s research is highly collaborative. Researchers work closely with UVA investigators in Radiology, the Human Immunotherapy Center, Neuro-oncology, and Cardiovascular Medicine, and the lab has a long-standing collaboration with investigators in the Johns Hopkins Center for Nanomedicine.
Director: Richard J. Price, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Radiology and Radiation Oncology
Our primary research interests are in the area of theoretical and experimental combustion, with emphasis on understanding the fundamental interactions between fluid dynamics and finite-rate chemistry. Some of the current research projects include fuel coking in gas turbine engines and hypersonic engines, exploring new catalysts to mitigate coke formation, understanding soot formation mechanisms at high pressure, fundamentals of flame stabilization mechanisms in high-speed flows using recirculation regions, modeling chemical vapor infiltration process in SiC synthesis.
This research group is interested in a wide range of materials, including the wonderful 2-D materials graphene and MoS2, the classic Si-surfaces as templates for nanostructures, and the curious, and novel nanospheres which form when fullerenes are heated on a metal surface. This last project is part of the investigation of catalytically active W-carbide materials (currently funded by NSF-DMR ceramics).
Director: Petra Reinke, Heinz and Doris Wilsdorf Distinguished Research Associate Professor of Materials Science & Engineering
This group investigates research topics related to modern VLSI design. Among the many challenges facing circuit designers in deep sub-micron technologies, power and variation are perhaps the most critical. Our group's focus is to confront these problems in a range of applications and different regions of the design space. Our specific research interests include low power digital circuit design, sub-threshold digital circuits, SRAM design for end-of-the-roadmap silicon, variation tolerant circuit design methodologies, and medical applications for low energy electronics.
Director: Benton Calhoun, Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering
The Rotating Machinery and Controls Laboratory (ROMAC) is an industrial research consortium that performs state-of-the-art research on turbomachinery design and performance. The Rotating Machinery and Controls Industrial Program supports cooperative research efforts conducted by faculty, staff, and students in various departments in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Virginia.
Director: Houston Wood, Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
In today’s society, data-centric computation is disrupting all aspects of our lives. With the rising volumes of data, systems must be able to store, analyze, and transform massive amount of data for useful computation. Unfortunately, computation today is bottlenecked by data storage and movement. The goal of ShiftLab is to design new systems to initiate a paradigm shift with a primary focus on rethinking and redesigning the current data and computation model and designing applications, systems and hardware in a holistic manner.
Director: Samira Khan, Assistant Professor of Computer Science
The vision of biologically inspired systems has tremendously affected materials and sensing paradigms, but challenges remain towards independently localizing and tracking disparate nanoscale biochemical events. This lab specializes in applying pulsed (us-ns) and radio frequency (10 kHz – 100 MHz) electric fields within micro/nanofluidic devices for spatial manipulation and temporal analysis of biosystems.
Director: Nathan Swami, Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director, Electrical & Computer Engineering
Fundamental research focuses on foundations and applications of automata computing. The Automata Processor is a novel, massively parallel computational accelerator capable of 1-2 order-of-magnitude speedups within existing computer system form factors and power constraints. The work is aimed at accelerating solutions for big data challenges.
This group studies the physics and chemistry of energetic ion, electron and uv-photon interactions with surfaces and gases. The processes of interest are desorption and sputtering, the radiolysis and photolysis of surfaces, and atmospheric evolution. The motivation for these studies is to interpret observations in astronomy. Of particular interest is the coupling of the surfaces and atmospheres of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn with the trapped plasma in the planetary magnetospheres. Researchers also study photon and cosmic ray ion interactions with kuiper belt objects and with grains in the interstellar medium and in young stellar objects.
Director: Robert E. Johnson, John Lloyd Newcomb Professor of Engineering Physics and Materials Science
This group is interested in synthesis and integration of materials for nanoelectronics and sustainable energy. Researchers seek to grow two dimensional, layered semiconductors with tunable properties designed to enhance, electronic, photovoltaic, and photocatalytic activity. They also study how these novel materials interface with insulators and metals since nano-device performance is often dominated by such interfaces.
Director: Stephen J. McDonnell, Assistant Professor of Materials Science & Engineering
This lab concentrates on image analysis problems, with an emphasis on biological and biomedical image analysis. The research emphases of VIVA include tracking, segmentation, representation, retrieval, classification and enhancement.
Director: Scott T. Acton, Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Biomedical Engineering
New signal processing theory, models, and algorithms are needed to address growing demand for new scientific and biomedical imaging capabilities that exceed physical limits due to wavelength or acquisition speed. Doctors will be able to study and diagnose diseases in living subjects at greater levels of detail, revealing new insights and improving accuracy. Microscopes will be able to locate and track molecules and cells in three dimensions with unprecedented precision. This lab’s research focuses on driving the field forward.
Director: Daniel Weller, Assistant Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering
This group’s focus is on understanding non-equilibrium properties of nano-scale material structures. The work applies a combined understanding of fundamental physics , chemistry, material science, and device engineering to explore novel device concepts. To address the challenges of extending today’s electronic devices to the next generation of devices, science can no longer work out of context to engineering, but rather both should work in tandem.
Director: Avik Ghosh, Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering
This group brings a fundamental materials perspective to the design and development of new high-performance materials. Researchers focus upon fundamental aspects of materials synthesis and processing, and the unraveling of linkages between the process created thermal, chemical and mechanical environment, the materials evolving 3-D structure and its eventual performance.
Director: Haydn N. Wadley, University Professor and Edgar Starke Professor of Materials Science & Engineering
This group’s research is focused on mechanics in extreme manufacturing of functional materials, structures and devices, in particular nanoporous structures, solid-liquid functionalized materials, bioinspired flexible devices and structures and soft-hard material integration. The group has been actively working on nanomechanics at extreme conditions, including mechanics of liquids in nanoconfinements, nanofluidics in response to environments, and nanomechanical characterizations.
Director: Baoxing Xu, Assistant Professor of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
Electrochemistry opens unique opportunities for materials synthesis and surface modification. Our group is developing the fundamental science and synthetic abilities necessary to tailor materials and device components to specification. Research efforts encompass the electrochemical deposition of metals, alloys and semiconductor materials, the formation of a variety of self-assembled nanostructures, as well as their integration in information storage, sensors and energy conversion devices.
Director: Giovanni Zangari, Professor of Materials Science & Engineering