BLOGS

The Fabrication Lab (Fab Lab) at the STEM campus is a workshop where students can take their ideas through a complete process from conception to reality. One side of the Fab Lab holds computers with Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software where students draft their ideas. CAD software, Google SketchUp and Autodesk Inventor, allow students to create 3D digital prototypes. The other side of the lab houses machinery that brings students' 3D designs to life.

The CAD Software on the computers and the machinery in the Fab Lab work together enabling students to be creative, imaginative, and highly practical. The Fab Lab at LEAP Academy STEM is a place where students can identify needs and create real, working solutions for social problems in the community. For example, students can use the Fab Lab to design and create a home water filtration system to address the issue of clean water in Camden. Simultaneously, the Fab Lab encourages innovation and community engagement while teaching STEM skills and real world application.

More Information Contact
Dr. Alex Nieves, Director, Fabrication Lab
alex.nieves@camden.rutgers.edu | 856. 614.3292 | Extension 7320

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Lecture from University of Oregon - "The Beginning of Time"

The ability to guide light has more profound consequences, however. Various theoreticians have pointed out that there is a formal mathematical analogy between the way certain metamaterials bend light and the way spacetime does the same thing in general relativity. In fact, it ought to be possible to make metamaterials that mimic the behaviour of not only our own spacetime but also many others that cosmologist merely dream about.

Indeed, a couple of years ago we looked at a suggestion by Igor Smolyaninov at the University of Maryland in College Park that it ought to be possible to use metamaterials to create a multiverse in which different regions of the material corresponded to universes with different properties.

Today, Smolyaninov and a couple of buddies announce the extraordinary news that they have done exactly this. They’ve created a metamaterial containing many “universes” that are mathematically analogous to our own, albeit in the three dimensions rather than four.

The experiment is relatively straightforward. Metamaterials are usually hard to engineer because they are based on nanoscale structures. However, Smolyaninov and pals have instead exploited the self-assembling nature of cobalt nanoparticles suspended in kerosene.

Cobalt is ferromagnetic so the nanoparticles tend to become aligned in a magnetic field. In fact, if the density of nanoparticles is high enough, the field causes them to line up in columns. When this happens, the nanocolumns form a metamaterial which is mathematically equivalent to a 2+1 Minkowski spacetime.

So light passing through behaves as if this region has one dimension of time, aligned with the nanocolumns, and two dimensions of space, perpendicular to the nanocolumns.

That creates a single Minkowski universe. The trick that Smolyaninov and pals have pulled off is to create a multiverse containing many Minkowski spacetimes.

Established in 1990 with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Louisiana Board of Regents, the Timbuktu Academy is an award-winning mentoring program for underrepresented minorities in STEM fields. The program's pre-college to graduate curricula includes the Undergraduate Research Program (URP), which provides students with the educational support they need to succeed in graduate school. Bagayoko, a solid-state physicist and native of Mali, named the academy after the medieval Malian city of Timbuktu, which was renowned for its scholarship.

In the beginning, Timbuktu Academy provided mentoring only for physics undergraduates and a handful of pre-college students, but with the help of additional funding from the Department of the Navy and the Office of Naval Research (ONR), in 1993 the academy added chemistry and engineering majors and 100 to 200 pre-college students. To date, the academy's URP has sent 74 students -- 47 in physics -- to science and engineering graduate programs throughout the country, including the University of Michigan, Stanford, and Cal Tech. Moreover, 19 have earned M.S. degrees and 8 have earned Ph.D.s with many others nearing completion.

Stewart entered Southern four years ago to enormous fanfare. He was under a microscope as his classmates learned of the student on campus who was too young to get a driver’s license and actually too young to live on campus alone.

He had offers from colleges across the country. Who didn’t want a child prodigy on their campus? But, it would have been difficult for his parents to send him across the country at such a young age.

Instead, he enrolled at Southern where he was familiar with the campus, where he had taken high school-level courses at the school’s famous Timbuktu Academy, and more importantly, he would only be a 10-minute drive from campus.

But with all of the local media tracing his first steps on campus, Stewart was an unwilling celebrity. He just wanted to get down to doing his schoolwork and getting to fit in with his classmates. “The attention I got died down pretty quickly,” he said.

He traces his love for academics to the dinosaur books his father bought him as a young child. Later, as a toddler, Stewart said he began watching scientific documentaries where his interest in herpetology, entomology and paleontology grew. “I was pretty much interested in all the sciences,” he said.

Now, barely an adult, Stewart has set his sights on a career in biological and physical engineering. He spent last summer doing research at North Carolina State University, where he worked on developing self-cleaning, anti-glare glass coated with anti-reflective material and designed to repel oils and water.

After continuing his research in a post-grad program next summer, Stewart said he will start graduate school at one of a number of colleges that have shown interest.

His mother, Ava Stewart, isn’t surprised by her son’s success.

“His father and I could tell early on that he wanted information. There was an intensity in his focus. He started reading when he was three,” she said.