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Highlights and Latest News

Congrats to Katja!

Aug. 13, 2024—Congratulations to Katja Diaz-Granados for successfully defending her dissertation!  

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David Flores wins best poster award for VINSE REU

Aug. 2, 2024—David Flores, an NSF VINSE REU student from Penn State, won best poster award at the end of the season poster award! Congrats to David! Thank you to his two exceptional mentors John Buchner and Saurabh Dixit!!! That makes 5 years in a row for the Caldwell group!!!

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Caldwell group attended 2024 Gordon Conference on plasmonics

Jul. 12, 2024—Had a great week at the 2024 Gordon Conference on plasmonics! Alumni and current students joined and really showed off the amazing students and postdocs!!! Even had time for a Caldwell group hike to a water fall!

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Congrats to Ryan Kowalski! 2nd place poster at BNW2024!

Jun. 7, 2024—Ryan was awarded 2nd place for his poster at the hBN Workshop in Sydney! Well deserved!!! Excellent work Ryan!  

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Boron Nitride Workshop 2024 (BNW 2024), Sydney

Jun. 7, 2024—Josh Caldwell is one the organizers for the Boron Nitride Workshop. This series is dedicated entirely to boron nitride, and the inaugural meeting was held in Montpellier in 2023 (https://bnw2023.sciencesconf.org/). Over the last several years the BN community has grown immensely, and BN has become a material of choice for applications spanning electronics, polaritonics, lighting,...

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Congrats to Josh Caldwell! 2024 School of Engineering Interdisciplinary Research Award!

May. 16, 2024—Josh Caldwell, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Director of Vanderbilt’s Interdisciplinary Materials Science (IMS) graduate program, was honored with the Interdisciplinary Research Award for successfully leading interdisciplinary projects and integrating different fields of study to address complex research questions.

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Luke Kim wins Materials & Advanced Devices award at ME Senior reception

May. 13, 2024—Congrats Luke! The Materials & Advanced Devices Award is presented to an Outstanding Senior showing the most promise in the study and pursuit of Materials and Advanced Devices Engineering.

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Congrats to Youngji and Ethan! MRS Spring Meeting Award winners

Apr. 29, 2024—Congrats to Postdoc Youngji Kim and former VINSE REU Ethan Ray. They  received poster awards at the 2024 MRS Spring Meeting in Seattle. Youngji won the ‘Best Poster Award for Symposium EL08 in 2024 MRS Spring Meeting’ for the poster titled “Configurationally Tunable Mie, Plasmonic and Diffractive Structural Colors in a Single Design”. This poster...

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Emma Bartelsen and Trey Long have accepted NREIP positions

Mar. 7, 2024—Emma Bartelsen and Trey Long have accepted NREIP positions working under Dr. Jeremy Robinson at NRL in Washington, DC this summer. This will involve upgrading hardware and performing programing work to automate 2D material identification and transfer. This involves identifying the orientation of the flake facets, aligning with an underlying sample to orient the flakes...

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Nanoscale Horizons HOT Papers designation

Feb. 15, 2024—“Role of carboxylates in the phase determination of metal sulfide nanoparticles” was selected by the Editors as a 2024 Nanoscale Horizons HOT article.          

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Josh Caldwell elected as Optica and SPIE fellow

Feb. 1, 2024—Josh Caldwell was elected to the 2024 class of Optica Fellows and SPIE Fellows. Optica https://www.optica.org/get_involved/awards_and_honors/fellow_members/elected_fellows/ SPIE https://spie.org/membership/member-recognition/spie-fellows#_=_  

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Congratulations to Katja Diaz-Granados!

Dec. 20, 2023—This past week Katja Diaz-Granados successfully completed her qualifying exam. Her research has focused on exploring the role of crystal symmetry for controlling both thermal emission and the propagation characteristics of polaritons. Before graduating, she hopes to extend the use of the lab’s nano-optic probing techniques to the field of art conservation, where efforts to...

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Caldwell group awarded an FY24 Defense University Research Instrumentation Program grant

Dec. 19, 2023—The Caldwell group was recently awarded an FY24 Defense University Research Instrumentation Program grant to purchase several upgrades to the nano-optic probes housed within the laboratory. The grant provides funding to upgrade the existing scattering-type scanning near-field optical microscope (s-SNOM) and nano-FTIR metrology suite present in his laboratory at Vanderbilt University to enable s-SNOM mapping...

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Josh Caldwell Plenary Lecture at AVS 69

Dec. 15, 2023—Josh Caldwell gave the Plenary Lecture at AVS 69 on November 6, 2023 Exploiting and Controlling Lattice Symmetry and Strong Coupling for Infrared Nanophotonics and Ultrafast Thermal Transport

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Caldwell Earns Prestigious Office of Naval Research MURI Grant

Sep. 18, 2023—The Caldwell group, in collaboration with the Dionne, Heinz, Jornada (all of Stanford University), Low (Minnesota), and Folland (Iowa) labs were awarded a prestigious Multi-University Research Initiative (MURI) grant from the Office of Naval Research to generalize our understanding of twist-optics and moire phenomena in misoriented layers of two-dimensional materials, metasurfaces and low-symmetry crystalline systems....

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