Momentum - The Magazine for Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering Vol. 1 No. 3 | Seite 2

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Azim Eskandarian
ME Department Head

Recently, the Executive Vice President and Provost of Virginia Tech,
Thanassis Rikakis, spoke to Mechanical Engineering faculty of the university leadership's vision for the future
and how it presents a generational
opportunity for the department.
As one of the top Mechanical Engineering departments in the nation,
we should look at change as an
opportunity to distinguish ourselves
by highlighting our best and brightest - by leading with our high impact
technologies and working diligently
to elevate evolving areas of research.
This quarter we have been busy
working toward all these goals. On
Page 20 of this magazine, I invite
you to read about the work of
Associate Professor Bahareh Behkam whose lab has developed the
elegantly-named SWAN Lithography.
Bahareh has been working with her
students to create micro and nano
structures on 3D objects. In a similar
vein, Assistant Professor Rayne Zheng
(Page 16) has established himself as
a leader in making small things big
by successfully tackling the problem
of scaling up nano structures while
maintaining their structural integrity
and performance.
It's important to note, that as a tier1 research university, our successes
do not come only from faculty members. Our students have a significant
role in our accomplishments. For
example, our undergraduate Hyperloop team has been making
headlines since their fourth place

finish in Texas last January. In January
of 2017 they'll head to California to
place their pod, Vhyper, in head-tohead competition again. Their work
on a technology that has profound
potential for our national transportation infrastructure has not gone
unnoticed. In September the provost,
the College of Engineering, and the
Institute for Critical Technology and
Applied Science, together committed
nearly a quarter million dollars to the
construction of the first hyperloop
test track east of the Mississippi
River.
There are dozens of examples of
our Mechanical Engineering faculty
and students who are making the
world a better place through the appropriate application of engineering,
science, compassion, and the spirit
of Ut Prosim that lies at the heart of
who we are as Hokies.
The quality of discovery isn’t bound
by degree or specialty. We work in a
diverse world; not only in terms of
gender and race, but also in terms of
disciplines and outcomes. Engineers
are embracing additive manufacturing and rapid prototyping; those
who study robotics routinely work
with medical professionals; and
mechanical engineering laboratories
with microscopes are becoming as
common as those with wrenches.
Virginia Tech is a confluence of engineers working together to build and
elevate high-impact technologies,
while educating the next generation
of engineers who are eager to create
entirely new technologies to lead us
forward.
I invite each of you, regardless of
generation, to embrace these changes and welcome the opportunities
they bring, as we continue to do the
same at the ME department at VT.