Members of Virginia Tech's College of Engineering attend the opening of a new international laboratory in China during a joint symposium on bat biophysics and bio-inspired technology held at Shandong University in August.
Virginia Tech College of Engineering
Jinan, China — In collaboration with Shandong University in China, Virginia Tech's College of Engineering has opened a new international laboratory based at Shandong University in eastern China, about 250 miles south of Beijing.
The laboratory was unveiled during a joint symposium on bat biophysics and bio-inspired technology held at Shandong University in August. The symposium was attended by researchers from Virginia Tech, Shandong University, Brown University, North Carolina State University, City University of New York, University of Utah, University of California Los Angeles, Nanjing University, Tongji University, Northeast Normal University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, as well as Doshisha University and Tohoku Gakuin University in Japan.
Both the symposium and international laboratory were coordinated by Rolf Mueller, associate professor of mechanical engineering, who held a professorship at Shandong University before joining the Virginia Tech faculty in 2008. The laboratory is housed in a new, modern building for integrated research on the central campus of Shandong University in the city of Jinan, the capital of Shandong Province. It occupies about 2,100 square feet of floor space and offers a range of state-of-the-art equipment such as micro-computer tomography, multi-camera high-speed computer vision, laser Doppler vibrometry, tensile stress testing for small biological samples, mobile and calibrated recording of ultrasound, as well as parallel cluster computing. Decorative elements such as Hokie stone and Virginia Tech colors help to communicate the university's identity to the international community of lab users.
The international laboratory is funded by a Taishan endowment from Shandong Province, the Chinese Ministry of Education (Project 985 through Shandong University), Shandong University, as well as research grants by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
The laboratory is currently manned by two members of Shandong University's research staff and six of its students. Later this month, one of Virginia Tech's newly admitted graduate students, Lyvin Cai of Siping City in northeastern China, will join the team to conduct research until she arrives in Virginia for the next spring term.. During the past summer, the lab has been used by an interdisciplinary group of researchers (from the University of Utah, North Carolina State University, and University of California Los Angeles) to conduct experiments on the extraordinary capabilities of bats to generate high-powered ultrasonic pulses.
About Virginia Tech's College of Engineering Virginia Tech's College of Engineering is internationally recognized for its excellence in 14 engineering disciplines and computer science. As the nation's third largest producer of engineers with baccalaureate degrees, undergraduates benefit from an innovative curriculum that provides a hands-on, minds-on approach to engineering education. It complements classroom instruction with two unique design-and-build facilities and a strong Cooperative Education Program. With more than 50 research centers and numerous laboratories, the college offers its 2,000 graduate students opportunities in advanced fields of study, including biomedical engineering, state-of-the-art microelectronics, and nanotechnology. http://www.eng.vt.edu/main/index.php
About Shandong University Shandong University is one of China's major comprehensive universities and with about 57,500 students one of the largest in the country. With currently 7 campuses (6 in the provincial capital of Jinan and 1 in the coastal city of Weihai), it is the flagship university of Shandong Province, an ancient center of Chinese culture and today one of the most developed regions in China. Identified as one of the national key universities since the 1960s, Shandong University has received special support from the central government for a long time. Today, the university is made up of 32 schools and offers master and doctoral degree programs in the humanities, science, engineering, and medicine.