McKelvey School of Engineering

New and improved consumer goods, better planes, vehicles, and electronics, and new biomedical products that could lead to better pharmaceuticals and innovative medical devices are among the objectives of a new, interdisciplinary center housed in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. The Center for Materials Innovation, (CMI) located in the refurbished basement of Crow Hall, will enable collaborators from across campus to make basic and applied advances in materials research, eventually touching many aspects of daily life.

Photo by David Kilper / WUSTL PhotoGiammar discusses a batch reaction cell.As global temperatures continue to rise, many methods have been proposed to deal with the excess of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. An environmental engineer at Washington University in St. Louis just wants the problem to go away – out of the atmosphere, into the earth.

Washington University is among 15 universities across the country selected by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City, Mo., to participate in its “Kauffman Campuses Initiative,” a new program aimed at making entrepreneurship education a common and accessible opportunity campus-wide. The Kauffman program builds on an emerging trend at colleges and universities — expanding […]

Kenneth L. Jerina’s honor is the highest society recognition for individual contributions to standards activities.

Twenty students, including 15 from other universities, are participating in a program known as Research Experiences for Undergraduates.

O’SullivanAn electrical engineer at Washington University in St. Louis has devised a theory that sets the limits for the amount of data that can be hidden in a system and then provides guidelines for how to store data and decode it. Contrarily, the theory also provides guidelines for how an adversary would disrupt the hidden information. The theory will have a major impact on homeland security applications.

Next time you think “oil spill,” remember that the vegetable oils used to make Freedom fries also can create an environmental mess.

Using the Electrostatic Levitator at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, a physicist at Washington University in St. Louis led a research team that validated a 50-year-old hypothesis explaining how liquid metals resist turning into solids. The research, led by Ken Kelton, Ph.D., a professor of physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University, is featured in the July 2003 issue of Physics Today and includes an image on the magazine’s cover of a solid drop of metal suspended inside the levitator. The NASA-funded research challenges theories about how crystals form by a process called nucleation, important in everything from materials to biological systems.

Science & Technology Tip Sheet

Lewis the robotic photographerMay and June are prom, graduation and wedding months, times when the family camera gets a steaming workout. Computer scientists at Washington University in St. Louis can take that camera out of your designated photographer’s hands and perch it atop Lewis, the world’s first robotic photographer.