At the 2026 Fall Staff Assembly, Vanderbilt University recognized Sarah Ross, Senior Program Manager at the Vanderbilt Institute of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (VINSE) and the Interdisciplinary Materials Science Graduate Program, with the Student Impact Award.

Sarah was honored for mentoring, advocating for, and guiding graduate students in STEM fields for three decades. Her impact extends far beyond administrative support, from helping students navigate financial challenges and imposter syndrome to rallying the Vanderbilt community around a graduate student whose home a tornado destroyed.

Chancellor Daniel Diermeier presented the awards on Nov. 2 at Langford Auditorium, honoring staff whose contributions span community outreach, research, operations, student support, and institutional progress. “These colleagues come from different parts of Vanderbilt, and they contribute in very different ways,” Diermeier said. “What they share is a commitment to excellence, to one another, and to the larger purpose of this university.”

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In the second installment of a multipart series, alumni of the Chancellor Faculty Fellows program were interviewed about the research centers they run and to explain the impact of this university support. Sharon Weiss, VINSE Director, reflected on how being named to the inaugural cohort of Chancellor Faculty Fellows (2017) continues to turn that early investment into breakthrough research and leadership at Vanderbilt.

“As VINSE director, I am proud to have launched several new initiatives to support students and faculty, including career mentoring, pilot funding, the development of a new immersion course combining STEM and entrepreneurship, and the establishment of an industrial associates program,” she said.

When Sharon received the fellowship more than a decade ago, it gave her the opportunity to take risks that led to breakthrough research. “The CFF funding facilitated my exploration of porous silicon for energy storage. One aspect of the energy storage research involved growing a graphene coating on porous silicon. It turned out that this technique, which stabilized the surface for energy storage, also stabilized the surface when porous silicon is used as a rapid diagnostic test,” she said. The Weiss lab group has filed two patents based on this research and is now participating in the national NSF I-Corps program to assess the technology’s translational potential.

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VINSE is excited to announce that the Heidelberg μMLA Maskless Aligner is available to users in the cleanroom. This new direct-write photolithography tool has a faster write speed than our old tool, is compatible with both positive and negative photoresists, has a Draw Mode that allows real-time adjustments to existing patterns and electrical contacts, and can be used to make masks that are compatible with the VINSE Karl Suss MA-6 Mask Aligner to enable higher throughput wafer-scale patterning. The μMLA Maskless Aligner supports rapid prototyping for research ranging from high power and high frequency semiconductor devices to microfluidic lab-on-a-chip devices. For training and access information, please visit: Heidelberg μMLA Maskless Aligner

Daniel Chavarria, Ph.D.

 Growing up with a father who was a mechanical engineer and an aunt who was a physician, I was drawn early to bioengineering to apply engineering solutions to biomedical problems. My focus on Alzheimer’s disease was motivated by watching my grandfather live with the condition for over a decade. My research leverages tissue engineering principles by integrating microfabrication, synthetic biology, and stem cells to develop the next generation of in vitro models of neurodegenerative conditions, including Alzheimer’s disease. To achieve this, our team generates human stem cell–derived vascularized neural organoids that mimic the brain’s structural architecture and recapitulate its complex cellular composition.

Using VINSE’s state-of-the-art core facilities, we characterize and validate key dimensions of the microdevices we prototype in the Lippmann Lab. This high-precision characterization enables us to predict reliably and model hemodynamics in our vascularized neural organoids. In May 2026 our grouped published an article in RSC Advances titled, “Tolerances in microfluidic master molds: a comparison of 3D printing and micromilling”. The results from this publication demonstrated a significantly rougher surface finish on 3D-printed master molds compared to micromilled aluminum master molds. This surface finished resulted in different fluid dynamic behaviors affecting our biological outcomes for each microfluidic chip. This work highlights the importance of facilities like VINSE to characterize key dimensions and surface roughness of our microdevices. Looking ahead, we aim to model Alzheimer’s disease pathology in these vascularized systems to enable mechanistic studies and high-throughput drug screening.

Outside the lab, I enjoy rock climbing, hiking, woodworking, and playing video games. My wife and I also love exploring local Nashville coffee shops and unwinding with movies alongside our pets.

A special thank you to our NanoGuides, Liz Hays, Zack Martin, Soren Smail, and Kirsten Stinson, for helping make the program a success. Their guidance helped students navigate forensic puzzles, explore fundamental scientific concepts, and stay engaged throughout the activities!

If your school would like to participate in this fun and interactive science program, please contact vinse@vanderbilt.edu for more information!

The Valentine Lab develops nanostructured optical metamaterial composites that let researchers engineer optical properties at will. They explore both metal-based (plasmonic) metasurfaces and low-loss, all-dielectric metasurfaces. At a fundamental level, it uses the design freedom of nanoscale structures to create and study optical properties not found in nature, such as negative and zero indices of refraction. In practical applications, the lab uses metamaterials to enable novel devices, including ultra-compact optical elements, optical information processors, and dynamically reconfigurable optics.

Optica, formerly the Optical Society of America, is the preeminent professional society in optics and photonics, with 22,000 members from 180 countries and 41 Nobel Laureates. Optica will honor the new fellows at conferences and events throughout 2027.

Read Optica news release—>

Dr. Han earned his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Tianjin University in China before completing his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at The Ohio State University. His research combines materials synthesis, characterization, and transport studies to understand how membrane structure and chemistry influence separation performance. By studying these relationships, he aims to develop materials capable of selectively separating molecules and ions that are difficult to separate using conventional methods.

At Vanderbilt, the Han Lab is developing membranes that could make chemical separations more efficient and less energy-intensive. His group investigates how nanoscale structures and molecular interactions affect transport through membrane materials, with applications in industrial separations and resource recovery. We are excited to welcome Dr. Han to VINSE and look forward to the new perspectives and collaborations his research will bring to our community.

Dr. Fang earned her B.S. in Information Engineering from Zhejiang University and her Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University. She directs the Smart Medical Informatics Learning and Evaluation (SMILE) Laboratory, where her group develops multimodal AI methods that integrate neuroimaging, retinal imaging, electronic health records, genomics, and other biomedical data. Her research aims to enable earlier detection of neurodegenerative diseases, predict individual disease progression and treatment response, and guide personalized interventions, including brain stimulation. In 2026, she was named a Victor J. Dzau Emerging Leaders in Health and Medicine Scholar by the National Academy of Medicine.

Alongside these biomedical applications, Dr. Fang investigates how principles of brain function and learning can inform more trustworthy and adaptive AI. Her interdisciplinary approach creates opportunities for collaboration across the VINSE community, including applying AI to complex imaging and sensing data and connecting computational methods with emerging biomedical technologies. We are excited to welcome Dr. Fang to VINSE and look forward to the perspectives and collaborations she will bring to our community.

VINSE welcomed Dr. Soumya Srivastava in fall 2026 as an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. She joins Vanderbilt from West Virginia University, where she was a tenured Associate Professor. Her research combines microfluidics, electrokinetics, and machine learning to build label free platforms that read the electrical signatures of cells and particles for diagnostics, biological analysis, and separations.

Dr. Srivastava earned her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from R.V. College of Engineering in Bangalore, India, her M.S. in Chemical Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Mississippi State University. Her core technique is dielectrophoresis (DEP). DEP uses nonuniform alternating current fields to move and sort particles by their frequency dependent dielectric properties; for cells, these include membrane capacitance and cytoplasmic conductivity. Because those properties shift with cell type, activation state, and disease, DEP and complementary impedance measurements yield a label free fingerprint of cell state, with no antibodies or fluorescent tags required.

At Vanderbilt, she directs the Microfluidics and Electrokinetics bioSeparations and Analysis (MESA) Laboratory. Her group studies bacteria, fungi, blood and immune cells, and stem cells. In infectious disease, the lab develops electrical diagnostics for tickborne illness. In oncology, it pairs bioelectrical profiling of blood cells with interpretable machine learning to detect pancreatic and breast cancer early and noninvasively. Her group also advances space biology through a patented clinostat that simulates microgravity in the laboratory. This platform lets researchers examine how cells respond to spaceflight conditions and informs biomedical questions relevant to human space exploration. Additional efforts span organ-on-a-chip model and the electrokinetic separation and sensing of rare earth elements (REEs), extending the lab’s tools from biomedicine to critical materials.

Dr. Srivastava is a licensed Professional Engineer and serves as Vice President of the American Electrophoresis Society. We are excited to welcome her to VINSE and look forward to her contributions to our community.

Dr. Bhansali earned his B.S. in Metallurgical Engineering from MREC in Jaipur, India, followed by an M.S. in Aircraft Production Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He completed his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at RMIT University. Throughout his career, Dr. Bhansali has worked on developing functional nanomaterials, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), and sensors capable of detecting biological and environmental changes and their impact on cellular microenvironments. He has also built engineered systems to create digital twins of additive manufacturing processes. His contributions have been recognized through his election as a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), The Electrochemical Society (ECS), the Institute of Physics (IOP), and Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Honor Society.

At Vanderbilt, Dr. Bhansali combines nanomaterials, microfluidic devices, wearable electronics and additive manufacturing, to develop sensors and sensing systems for real-time monitoring. His current research explores how artificial intelligence can be integrated with nanoscale sensing technologies and sensing systems to improve the detection and analysis of biological signals and changes in physical environments. We are pleased to welcome Dr. Bhansali to VINSE.