News Archive
8/18/20: Congrats to Mojtaba, Kevin, and Ranit for their paper on bridging-droplet thermal diodes getting published in Advanced Functional Materials!
6/11/20: Prof. Boreyko has received tenure with promotion to associate professor. A big thanks to my mentors, Prof. Chuan-Hua Chen and Dr. Patrick Collier, collaborators, and all of my wonderful students who made this possible!
4/16/20: Read this new paper in Advanced Sustainable Systems to find out how Fog Harps can harvest water even in a light fog! Congrats to Weiwei, Thomas, Brandon, and Prof. Kennedy!
3/30/20: Congrats to Viverjita for defending her MS thesis! We will miss you but are excited about your future adventures in ecology.
3/24/20: Weiwei has successfully defended her PhD thesis! Thanks for all of your outstanding work on the Fog Harp and synthetic tree projects, NIFI will miss your bright presence in our group!
2/18/20: Congrats to Pranav, Tejas, and Andrew, for their paper in Langmuir on using evaporating droplets to characterize hygroscopic materials.
2/7/20: Congrats to Saurabh and Farzad, who captured the physics of inter-droplet ice bridging in their new Soft Matter paper.
1/15/20: Congrats to Kaavya for winning the MII Adhesive Manufacturing Scholarship for her research with NIFI!
1/14/20: Congrats to Weiwei and the senior project team of Richard, Collin, David, Ziad, and Daniel, whose paper in Scientific Reports shows how to build a tall and scalable synthetic tree.
12/12/19: Three NIFI grad students have won awards in Engineering Mechanics! Congrats to Weiwei (Amir Chand and Dewki Bai Batra Fellowship), Ranit (Daniel and Frances Frederick Scholarship), and Hyunggon (Liviu Librescu Memorial Fellowship)!
11/1/19: Our paper on anti-frosting cables has been published in the International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer. Congrats to Lance, for getting a first-author as an undergraduate, and to Farzad!
6/25/19: Prof. Boreyko has received the 2019 Outstanding Early Career Award from ASME ICNMM.
6/19/19: Can plants sneeze? Read our new paper featured on the cover of the Journal of the Royal Society Interface to find out! Congrats to NIFI students Saurabh, Farzad, Stuti, and Caitlin! Also, a big thanks to our collaborators Hope and David!
6/18/19: Prof. Boreyko has received the Ferdinand P. Beer and E. Russell Johnston, Jr., Outstanding New Mechanics Educator Award from the ASEE.
6/18/19: Our paper on freezing bubbles has been published in Nature Communications! Congrats to Farzad, Saurabh, and Christian, and to our collaborator Pengtao.
5/29/19: Congrats to Lance for winning an undergraduate research scholarship from the Virginia Space Grant Consortium!
5/29/19: Congrats to Hyunggon for winning the Outstanding Poster Award at the 2019 Soft Matter and Biological Physics Symposium!
5/13/19: A huge congrats to Farzad for successfully defending his PhD thesis! Farzad is not only NIFI's first PhD, he also won this year's Outstanding CoE Doctoral Student Award. Farzad, thanks for all you've done over the past 5 years, and for setting the bar high for the NIFI lab!
5/8/19: Pranav has successfully defended his MS thesis, congrats!
5/7/19: Congrats to Pranav for winning 1st-place MS student for the Torgerson Research Excellence Award!
4/15/19: Congrats to Kaavya for winning the Clare Boothe Luce Undergraduate Research Award!
4/3/19: Our paper on how surface orientation affects jumping-droplet condensation has been published in Joule. Congrats to Ranit for getting accepted in this prestigious new journal by Cell Press! Also, congrats to undergraduate co-authors Austin and Joshua for getting two papers published in the same week!
3/26/19: Our first paper on synthetic transpiration has been published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. Congrats to Weiwei!
2/26/19: Farzad has won this year's Outstanding Doctoral Student award for the College of Engineering! A big congrats to Farzad for this well-deserved honor.
2/20/19: Congrats to Lance for winning a Best Poster prize at the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Adhesion Society for his research on anti-frosting cables!
2/8/19: Our paper on how liquids wick aross ice has been published in Physical Review Fluids. Congrats to Katherine for getting a first-author paper as an undergraduate!
12/7/18: Congrats to Farzad for winning the Amir Chand and Dewki Bai Batra Fellowship, Ranit for winning the Liviu Librescu Memorial Fellowship, and Pranav for winning the Manuel Stein Fellowship!
11/16/18: Congrats to Weiwei for being a national finalist in the Collegiate Inventors Competition for her fog harp!
10/18/18: Congrats to Julia O'Brien for winning the Louis H. & Diane E. Sharpe Award and to Lance De Koninck for winning the Adhesive Manufacturing Scholarship from MII!
10/12/18: Our paper on controlling desublimation with ice nucleating proteins has been published in Applied Physics Letters. Congrats to Julia for getting a first-author paper as an undergraduate!
9/27/18: Our collaborative research with Prof. Sunny Jung has been published in PLoS ONE.
9/17/18: Our paper on passive anti-frosting surfaces has been published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. Congrats to Farzad, Saurabh, Grady, and our ORNL collaborators!
8/29/18: Our paper on dry zones around ice has been published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics. Congrats to Saurabh and Caitlin for getting our group's first JFM paper!
8/3/18: Our paper on oil-impregnated polyethylene films has been published in Scientific Reports. Congrats to Ranit, Mohammad, and Ziad, and thanks to our co-authors at Bemis!
7/3/18: Our perspective paper on how to diversify bioinspired research has been published in Bioinspiration & Biomimetics.
5/15/18: Congrats to Collin, Daniel, David, Ricky, and Ziad for winning the Best Senior Project Award for their research on synthetic trees!
4/24/18: Congrats to Farzad for winning the Liviu Librescu Memorial Fellowship and to Weiwei for winning the Manuel Stein Scholarship!
4/24/18: Congrats to Kevin for winning a Best Poster award at the MII Technical Conference and Review!
3/28/18: Our paper on fog harvesting with harps has been published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. Congrats to Weiwei and our collaborating authors in the School of Architecture and Design!
3/28/18: Our paper on the latent heat of traffic flows was selected for the New Journal of Physics "Highlights of 2017" Collection. Congrats to Farzad!
3/28/18: Prof. Boreyko has won an ICTAS Junior Faculty Award for his research on synthetic trees.
1/27/18: Our paper on melting snow with thermally absorptive blankets has been published in Langmuir. Congrats to Owen, Andrew, Kristen, Karl, Sarah, and Matthew for getting their senior project published!
1/12/18: Our study on the latent heat of traffic flows was covered by WVTF Virginia Public Radio and was picked up by NBC News Radio. It was also covered by Science, The Guardian, Engineering.com, The Roanoke Star, WDBJ Channel 7 News, Indian news site The Wire, and VT News.
12/18/17: Our NSF Career research on synthetic trees was featured in the first issue of Virginia Tech Engineer magazine.
11/22/17: Our paper on the latent heat of traffic flows has been published in the New Journal of Physics and was the #1 most read article in December. Congrats to Farzad and the rest of the team!
11/3/17: Congrats to Ziad, who won the 2017 Adhesive Manufacturing Scholarship from the Macromolecules Innovation Institute!
11/3/17: A big congrats to Farzad, Grady, and Saurabh, who were national finalists in the 2017 Collegiate Inventors Competition for their anti-frosting surface technology!
8/21/17: Congrats to Megan Mulroe and Farzad Ahmadi, whose research on jumping-droplet condensation made the front page of VT News!
8/16/17: . The NIFI group is working with Proctor & Gamble to develop a novel type of anti-perspirant. Hopefully the research will be no sweat!
7/31/17: Our work on dynamic defrosting was featured in WSLS News 10 and VT News.
7/18/17: Our paper on enhanced jumping-droplet condensation has been published in ACS Nano. Congrats to Farzad, and a big congrats to Megan for getting a first-author paper as an undergraduate!
7/17/17: Congrats to Saurabh Nath for graduating with his Master’s degree and receiving a prestigious scholarship to pursue his PhD under David Quéré! We will miss Saurabh’s brainstorming skills and his infectious love of scaling analysis!
7/11/17: Our work on dynamic defrosting was covered by Yahoo! News.
6/27/17: Our paper on dynamic defrosting has been published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. Congrats to Kevin!
5/3/17: Prof. Boreyko has received the 2017 Dean’s Award for Outstanding New Assistant Professor.
5/2/17: Congrats to Saurabh, who won a Torgersen Graduate Student Research Excellence Award for best MS Poster Presentation (3rd place)!
4/3/17: Our paper on hotspot cooling made the front cover of Applied Physics Letters. Congrats to all of our collaborators at Duke and Intel!
4/3/17: Congrats to Katherine Witt, who has received an Undergraduate Research Scholarship from the Virginia Space Grant Consortium!
3/2/17: Prof. Boreyko has won the NSF CAREER Award from the Thermal Transport Processes program for his proposal on engineering synthetic mangrove trees for water harvesting applications.
2/28/17: Congrats to Megan Mulroe, whose poster on jumping-droplet condensation won 2nd place at the Adhesion Society’s 40th Annual Meeting!
2/6/17: Thanks to MII for awarding the NIFI group a Small Instrumentation award!
2/1/17: Our review paper on condensation frosting was published in Nanoscale and Microscale Thermophysical Engineering. Congrats to Saurabh and Farzad!
12/8/16: We are Virginia Tech’s “Inventors of the Month” for December! Congrats to Saurabh, Caitlin, and Grady for their great work developing anti-frosting surface technology!
10/11/16: Prof. Boreyko is one of 58 young faculty who received an award from the Air Force’s Young Investigator Research Program (YIP) The NIFI group will use this support to develop a new type of phase-change thermal diode that regulates the direction of heat flow.
9/26/16: “Resource Sharing Controls Gene Expression Bursting” was published in ACS Synthetic Biology. Congrats to all of our collaborators at ORNL!
8/25/16: Our beetle-inspired anti-frosting research was featured in Science News for Students.
8/24/16: Congrats to Megan Mulroe for receiving the Louis and Dianne Sharpe Undergraduate Scholarship Award from the Macromolecules Innovation Institute!
8/15/16: The NIFI group, in collaboration with Prof. Pengtao Yue, received a grant from the National Science Foundation to research how localized vapor pressure gradients could be exploited to suppress frost growth
8/11/16: Our paper on modeling condensation and frost phenomena was published in Langmuir. Congrats to Saurabh!
5/12/16: Prof. Boreyko has received the Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award from Oak Ridge Associated Universities.
5/9/16: The Workshop on Biological Collections as a Resource for Technical Innovation, sponsored by the NSF and co-organized by Prof. Jonathan Boreyko, is being held May 9-10 at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC.
3/18/16: Prof. Jonathan Boreyko has been selected to receive the 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award from the 3M Company.
1/25/16: Our work on beetle-inspired anti-frosting surfaces was covered by Virginia Tech News, Discovery Channel Canada, Popular Science, The Christian Science Monitor and WSLS10.
1/22/16: Controlling condensation and frost growth with chemical micropatterns” was published in Scientific Reports. Congratulations to Saurabh and Kevin!
6/19/15: Our research was featured on “You Are Here,” a radio news program broadcast by 88.9 WERS in Boston.
6/2/15: "Self-propelled sweeping removal of dropwise condensation," was published in Applied Physics Letters.
4/6/15: The NIFI group presented their research at the Virginia Tech Hampton Roads Showcase in Newport News, Virginia.
4/4/15: The NIFI Lab received a grant from Bemis Company, Inc. to fabricate omniphobic polymer films for use as food-release agents.
4/1/15: “Control of Membrane Permeability in Air-Stable Droplet Interface Bilayers” was published in Langmuir.
3/16/15: Our video publication on using sealable microfluidic chambers for cell-free biology has been published by the Journal of Visualized Experiments.
12/23/14: The website launches for NIFI Lab! Thanks to Alex Parrish for the web design and Mary Katherine Chin for creating our theme artwork!
12/9/14: Our research on the asymmetric wettability of tilted nanopillars and micropillars was featured on the front cover of Advanced Materials Interfaces.
8/10/14: Dr. Jonathan Boreyko joins the Virginia Tech Dept. of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics as an Assistant Professor.