Welcome to The EIGER Project at Virginia Tech!

The EIGER Program at Virginia Tech, supported by NSF IGERT funding through 2010, focuses on graduate research in the areas of 1) interdisciplinary environmental interface science, as studied by physical scientists and engineers, and 2) human interfaces within interdisciplinary scientific and engineering teams, as studied by behavioral scientists.  Ten departments in four colleges are involved in this project which will support 27 Ph.D. students over its lifetime.

More EIGER People in the News

BEVLEE WATFORD, associate dean, College of Engineering, and member of the EIGER Advisory Board, is the recipient of the 2009 Distinguished Alumni Award from the university's Department of Mining and Minerals Engineering. More...

White House awards core faculty member Maura Borrego the prestigious National Science Foundation Presidential Award. More on this story....

EIGER graduate student coordinator, Connie Lowe, recognized with the 2008 Provost's Award for Excellence in Advising.

EIGER fellow, Matt Hull, invited to serve on a graduate student panel on "Integrative graduate and postdoctoral training and career development" at the Council of Southern Graduate Schools annual meeting in Norfolk, VA in February, 2009.

EIGER Board chair and University Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Dr. James Mitchell, honored with a special symposium at the Sixth International Conference on Case Histories in Geotechnical Engineering, held in Arlington, VA in August, 2008.

EIGER alum, Jiajia Dong, joins the Physics Department at Hamline University in St. Paul, MN as an Assistant Professor. Good luck, Jiajia, we're all very proud of you!!!

EIGER Participating Faculty Member, Patricia Dove, named a 2008 Fellow in the American Geophysical Union

EIGER core faculty member, Beate Schmittmann, honored with 2007 Advancing Women Award from the Women's Center.

More...

News and Events

Newly-minted Ph.D.s:

• IGERT fellow, CALLIE RAULFS, in the Department of Biochemistry successfully defended her dissertation entitled, "Isolation of in vivo intermediates in iron sulfur cluster biogenesis," on April 3rd, 2009.
• IGERT fellow, KEVIN CROSBY, in the Department of Biological Sciences successfully defended his dissertation entitled, "Use of FLIM-FRET to study the interactions of Arabidopsis flavonoid biosynthetic enzymes in living cells," on December 10th, 2008.

The 2008 EIGER Board Meeting was held on October 26-28 at The Inn and Skelton Conference Center. We thank all of the participants for a very productive and enjoyable meeting, particularly board members Marta Wilson (Transformation Systems Inc.), Camellia Okpodu (Norfolk State), Gordon Matheson (Schnabel Engineering), Karen DePauw and Anne McNabb (VT Graduate School), Tim Long (VT Chemistry), and Whitney Edmister (VT Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Diversity).

INTERNATIONAL INTERNSHIPS:

• KELLY HAUS spent the fall at the University of Vienna in Austria, and Goteborg University in Sweden learning Field Flow Fractionation, a high-end filtration technology that allows for particle size and shape determination and chemical analysis, that she will apply to her work on nanoparticles in the environment.
• KEVIN CROSBY spent 4 months in the laboratory of Dorus Gadella at the Swammerdam Institute in Amsterdam last spring, where he developed expertise in FLIM-FRET microscopy and generated some of the first evidence for flavonoid enzyme interactions in living cells.
• LEE BRYANT has returned from a year at EAWAG in Switzerland

Visit our STUDENT PAGES to learn more about EIGER trainees, past and present.

Contact Us Page last updated 5/13/09