Around the Drillfield
psychology. By targeting outreach efforts to high schools, they also are working to increase the number of women graduating from college with technical degrees. In the department, 35 percent of the recent master’s graduates and 25 percent of the recent Ph.D. graduates were women. The department also has six female teaching and research faculty members.
VT KnowledgeWorks and the Business Technology Center, two Virginia Tech offices that promote economic development by providing a range of services to technology-based businesses, have joined forces to create a single, comprehensive entrepreneurship-assistance program. The merged VT KnowledgeWorks will launch an “in-reach” program aimed at helping Virginia Tech inventors commercialize their discoveries in a more timely manner.
MICHAEL KIERNAN
The Virginia Tech Foundation received the 2011 Award for Excellence for Mid-size Nonprofit of the Year from the Foundation and Endowment Intelligence (FEI) information service. FEI cited an endowBloomberg dubs ment performance that placed Blacksburg best the foundation “solidly in the place in the U.S. to top quartile of performers.” raise a family The endowment earned a 19.6 Bloomberg Businessweek percent return for fiscal year ranked Blacksburg No. 1 on 2011 and topped $600 million its list of best places to raise for the first time in 2011. kids. The publication cited
“excellent schools, combined with an affordable cost of living, relatively low crime, and plentiful amenities” as reasons for the town’s jump from its previous No. 6 ranking. The report also notes the economic impact of Virginia Tech as MICHAEL KIERNAN
Endowment performance recognized with award
VT KnowledgeWorks announces merger and expansion
the town’s largest employer, the presence of Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center’s 140-plus companies and 2,200 employees, and the success of tech start-ups such as Modea, an advertising agency founded by Tech alumni.
COURTESY OF TECH’S BIO-INSPIRED TECHNOLOGY LABORATORY
Bats’ shape-shifting ears make hearing more flexible
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“Certain bats can deform the shapes of their ears in a way that changes the animal’s ultrasonic hearing pattern. Within just one-tenth of a second, these bats are able to change their outer ear shapes from one extreme configuration to another,” said Rolf Müller, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech. Along with Ph.D. student Li Gao and master’s candidate Sreenath Balakrishnan, Müller wrote a paper that appeared in the Physical Review Letters. Weikai He and Zhen Yan, both in the School of Physics at Shandong University, also contributed to the study. Müller said, “In about 100 milliseconds, this type of bat can alter his ear shape significantly in ways that would suit different acoustic sensing tasks. [By comparison], a human blink of an eye takes two to three times as long.”