New award for Rachael

Rachael Hansel has just accepted a AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowship position.  She will be working at the Pentagon in the Office of the Secretary of Defense on the Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) team.  She will be part of a team of analysts that advises the Secretary on the efficiency and effectiveness of everything from nuclear weapons to preventing PTSD.

Kudos Rachael

New position for Nick

Nick Roberts (TELab alum) and his wife have accepted positions at Utah State.  Nick secured a post-doctoral fellowship at Oak Ridge National Lab immediately upon graduating Vanderbilt.  He will join the Mechanical Engineering department in Logan Utah starting Fall semester 2013.  His wife (worked for Anita Mahadevan-Jansen at Vanderbilt) will be in the Biomedical department.

Way to go Nick. 

New Nano Letter article

Zack and Wei's publication on heat generation in plasmonic nanostructures has been accepted for publication in ACS Nano Letters.  Check back here for a link once the article is available online.

New JVSTB article

Terry Musho (now an Assistant Professor at West Virgina University) has published a JVSTB (Journal of Vacuum Science and Technology B) article on using non-equilibirum Green's functions and a quantum framework to solve thermionic emission and heat transfer with comparisons to Richardson's equation. The article can be found online [Quantum simulation of thermionic emission from diamond films].

The analysis was performed and the article written while Terry was a graduate student in the Thermal Engineering Lab with D.G.Walker at Vanderbilt.  The co-authors include W.F.  Paxton and J.L. Davidson in the EE department.

Congratulations to Terry.

New NCC article

Terry Musho (now an Assistant Professor at West Virginia University) got a new article published in Micro-Nanoscale Thermophysical Engineering.  The article is titled "Quantum Simulation of Nanocrystalline Composite Thermoelectric Properties" and shows how nanocrystalline composites are advantageous to thermoelectric materials compared to superlattice materials structures.  The paper considers electronic effects using a Green's function quantum solution. Congratulations to Terry.

Zack Defends

Zack Coppens successfully defended his Master's thesis on November 29, 2012. He has been on loan from Sandia National Lab to conduct thermal studies on metamaterials. The title of his thesis is ``Probing and Controlling Photothermal Heat Generation in Plasmonic Nanostructures.'' His contribution included a demonstration of how a nanoantenna can be optimized for localized heat generation. He also pioneered a novel temperature measurement technique using thin layers (100 nm) thermographic phosphors (ruby to be exact). A link to his work will be provided as soon as we get the URL from the grad school. We wish him the best as he transitions back to Albuquerque.

Zack after his defense

AVS presentation

Bobby Harl (Chemical Engineering PhD candidate and LumRad group member) will be presenting a poster and will be giving a talk at the 2012 AVS 59th International Symposium and Exhibition in Tampa Florida that is taking place this week. The title of his work is "Synthesis and characterization of yttrium aluminum garnet and lanthanum zirconate particles" (Poster: SS-TuP5; Talk: SS+OX-WeM4). Congratulations to Bobby and his co-authors (S. L Gollub, D.G. Walker and B.R. Rogers).