McKelvey School of Engineering

If you’ve ever experienced jet lag, you are familiar with your circadian rhythm, which manages nearly all aspects of metabolism. Every cell in the body has a circadian clock, but until now, researchers were unclear about how networks of cells connect with each other over time. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and collaborating institutions have developed a new method that sheds light on these circadian rhythm networks.

Scientists in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis have, for the first time, created a biosynthetic spider silk that behaves like the real thing. And they may soon make it even stronger.

William Yeoh, of the School of Engineering & Applied Science, is designing algorithms to run the smart homes of the future – and he’s making sure they won’t bother us too much.

By looking into the brains of locusts, researchers in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis have determined how one smell can affect another, and how a locust can recognize a smell even though its brain activity looks different depending on the context.

Amit Pathak, a mechanical engineer at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in mechanobiology, plans to take a closer look at various aspects of cell group behavior — and their implications for diseases such as cancer — with a prestigious five-year, $1.9 million grant for early-stage investigators from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

A team of international researchers led by engineers at Washington University has developed a way to use a light field to trigger a mechanical movement that will generate an acoustic wave.

A multidisciplinary team from Washington University in St. Louis and the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base has developed a high-tech fix that brings some medical diagnostic tests out of the dark and into the light.

Tommy John surgery, or reconstruction of the ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) in the elbow, has been dubbed an epidemic among Major League Baseball pitchers. A mechanical engineer at Washington University in St. Louis plans to develop a bioinspired imaging technique to study how damage accumulates in the UCL during loading, or the stress of activating the ligament. This could provide insight into what is progressively happening to these soft tissues when pitchers throw fastballs dozens of times during a game.

Like our eyes, microscopes are limited in what they can see because of their resolution, or their ability to see detail. An engineer at Washington University in St. Louis plan to use funding from the National Science Center to build a more precise microscope.

Engineers at Washington University in St. Louis have developed tools that mathematically describe the kinetics in a system right before it dissolves into randomness.