Metamaterials and Invisibility

Ashwin Atre(Robert L. and Audrey S. Hancock Fellow) is one of a team of Stanford engineers who have developed a new metamaterial i.e. an engineered material that exhibits properties not found in the natural world. With adjustments, the team believe this metamaterial could lead to developing a "perfect lens" for a microscope or even invisibility cloaks. Their findings are detailed in this Advanced Optical Materials article and summarized in this May 6th article in the Stanford Report.

Light-emitting bioprobe in a single cell

Gary Shambat, 2008 Sequoia Capital Stanford Graduate Fellow and doctoral candidate in Electrical Engineering, is one of the scientists involved in the development of a new type of nanobeam device which can be inserted into living cells. The implications for research and treatment are described as "stunning" in this February 19, 2013 article of the Stanford Report.

Hydrogen-Plasma Reactions with Graphene

Georgi Diankov, 2008 John Stauffer Stanford Graduate Fellow, has been researching the reactive properties of the material graphene. His discovery that single sheets of graphene are 100 times more chemically reactive than double or triple sheets is detailed in this online paper at ACS Nano.

Visualizing Blood Flow

Guosong Hong, (shown, left) 2010 Abbott Laboratories Stanford Graduate Fellow and graduate student in Chemistry is part of a team of Stanford scientists that have developed a new technique for watching blood flow in living animals. Their research is detailed in a paper (first authored by Hong) in the journal Nature Medicine and also featured in a recent edition of the Stanford Report

AUV Exploration

Sarah Houts, 2008 Claudia and William Coleman Foundation Fellow and doctoral candidate in Stanford's Aerospace Robotics Laboratory, has programed a software system with possible applications ranging from monitoring icebergs for change to enabling autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to better navigate obstacles. Read about her research in this article in the Stanford Report.

Quantum Cryptography

Kristiaan De Greve, PhD, a 2005 Herb and Jane Dwight Fellow and currently a postdoc at Harvard, was the lead author in a recent paper in Nature. The article details the collaboration between researchers at Stanford, the University of Würzburg and Heriot-Watt University. Their findings are also discussed in a November 2012 issue of The Stanford Report.

Optical Control of Protein Activity

Xin Zhou, the 2011 Gabilan Fellow was the lead author on an article in the Nov. 9th edition Science . Collaborating with Stanford Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and of Bioengineering Michael Lin, fellow graduate student Amy Lam, and research assistant Hokyung Chung, they developed a simple way to activate and track proteins using beams of light.

Magnetism to Control Light

Kejie Fang, (shown, right) 2011 William R. and Sara Hart Kimball Fellow, is the first author of a recent paper in Nature Photonics which describes the first-ever effective control of the flow of photons using magnetic fields. Using a device created by an interdisciplinary team of Stanford physicists and engineers, the researchers were able to create a synthetic magnetic force to direct a stream of photons.

“Bi-Fi” - the Biological Internet

Monica Ortiz, 2008 Gabilan Fellow and currently a doctoral candidate in bioengineering, together with Drew Endy, PhD, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford, have harnesed the DNA of a paraisitic virus and used it to create a biological mechanism which can send genetic messages between cells. This exciting development is described in this paper in the September 2012 edition of the Journal of Biological Engineering.

Real-Time RNA Folding

Kirsten Frieda, 2006 Gabilan Fellow, in collaboration with Professor Steven Block used "optical tweezers" to observe the folding up of a single RNA molecule in real-time. Their use of microscopic beads as a read-out of RNA folding is unprecedented and has important implications in understanding gene regulation. Their technique has been published in the journal Science.

Battery Discovery

Johanna Nelson, postdoctoral scholar at SLAC, has been using high-power X-ray imaging to study lithium-sulfur batteries to hopefully develop viable lithium-sulfur batteries for electric cars. The co-lead authors of the study are SLAC postdoctoral researcher Sumohan Misra and Stanford doctoral student Yuan Yang, a 2009 ABB SGF fellow. The study is also co-authored by Hailiang Wang, a 2009 Henry Fan Fellow.

Pre-Natal Testing

H. Christina Fan, a 2005 Hong Kong Alumni Fellow, was co-first author of an article under Stephen Quake, the Lee Otterson Professor in the School of Engineering and professor of Bioengineering and of Applied Physics, on the sequencing of fetal genomes. This method requires blood samples from only the mother - not the father or fetus, and so can diagnose genetic abnormalities without risk to the fetus. She was recently named one of 2012's top 35 innovators under 35

Mark Churchland, now a professor at Columbia, and John Cunningham, a 2004 Professor Michael J. Flynn Fellow, now a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, have shown that the brain activity controlling arm movement does not encode external spatial information – such as direction, distance, and speed – but is instead rhythmic in nature. Justin Foster, 2007 Texas Instruments SGF, was also an author of the paper.

Carbon Nanotubes

Hailiang Wang, a 2009 Henry Fan Fellow, is a co-author of a study on the potential of carbon nanotubules to energize fuel cells and metal-air batteries. Platinum catalysts, which are currently used to energize fuel cells, are very expensive, and this alternative could lower the cost of fuel cell electricity production. This discovery may play an important role in many fields, including the development fuel cell cars.