The week that would change Terrie Webb’s life is one she doesn’t remember. In that week, the then-57-year-old orthodontist clinic admin from Prince George County, Virginia, was rushed from a doctor’s appointment about her swollen, purple hand straight into emergency surgery. Where her memory picks back up, she recalls being informed she’d suffered a blood clot that traveled to her …
The woman bringing Virginia Tech’s power electronics to D.C. (VT Engineer Magazine)
Electrical engineering professor Dushan Boroyevich made a point of sitting next to Christina DiMarino during a dinner in spring 2012. As the then co-director of the Center for Power Electronics Systems (CPES), Boroyevich was on a recruitment mission. He saw promise in DiMarino, who’d been offered a competitive Webber Fellowship to study at Virginia Tech. There was only one problem: …
Shaking up a lab (VT Engineer Magazine)
When you buy a mobile phone, you might not think about how far it’s traveled to get to your pocket. You might think even less about the vibrational forces that acted upon it during its journey to you. But in the Advanced Vibrations and Acoustics Lab (AVAL), founded and directed by mechanical engineering professor Pablo Tarazaga, researchers are poised to …
The transformers (VT Engineer Magazine)
Rob Wallace ’00 and Walter Barnes ’00 first met the summer before their freshman year at Virginia Tech, in 1996. Ask them to tell you how, and they both laugh. “He used to rollerblade,” Barnes says. “I still rollerblade,” Wallace interjects. “I went rollerblading last night.” “He still rollerblades,” Barnes says, laughing. “Which I thought was very odd.” That first …
Gift creates a pathway for first generation engineering students (VT Engineer Magazine)
When electrical engineering alumnus Joe T. May ’62 was in high school, he says he wasn’t exactly on a path to success. After a suspension for smoking cigarettes — something that today, May said, “wouldn’t raise an eyebrow,” but did then in the small Mennonite community he lived in — May’s principal allowed him to graduate only if he promised …
Machine-learning enables a previously-unseen look at polymers helpful in biomedical field (VT News)
Polymers — molecules of repeating chemicals — are the basis of many materials: plastic water bottles, rubber tires, even the keratin in your hair. When certain kinds of polymers are sensitive to changes in external stimuli such as temperature, they become helpful, particularly in biomedical applications like drug delivery, tissue engineering, and gene delivery. A team of researchers led by …
Home of the future takes first place at international competition (VT News)
After years of research and development contributed by over 100 Virginia Tech students and faculty, the FutureHAUS Dubai team has officially built the world’s best solar home. The lone American team earned a first-place victory over 14 other selected teams and more than 60 total entrants of the 2018 Solar Decathlon Middle East, a competition launched by the United States Department …
Facebook Live: Tour the FutureHAUS in Dubai
While in Dubai covering the FutureHAUS Dubai team’s attendance at the Solar Decathlon Middle East, I hosted a Facebook Live tour of the house just before the beginning of the competition. The tour was met with enthusiasm and thousands of views, reaching over 44,000 people — far beyond the team’s followers (which, at the time, hovered under 1,000). Another Facebook …
House of the future and team that built it head to international competition (VT News)
The home of the future is en route to a temporary residence in the desert — and the Virginia Tech students and faculty who built it are following. FutureHAUS Dubai, an innovative, interdisciplinary, and ambitious project to design and build a futuristic, modular smart home, is the lone American team competing against 14 other university teams at the Solar Decathlon Middle …
New machine learning framework could lead to breakthroughs in material design (VT News)
Computers used to take up entire rooms. Today, a two-pound laptop can slide effortlessly into a backpack. But that wouldn’t have been possible without the creation of new, smaller processors — which are only possible with the innovation of new materials. But how do materials scientists actually invent new materials? Through experimentation, explains Sanket Deshmukh, an assistant professor in the …