Featured Research

When Dennis Curran has a problem, he knows where to turn for help in locating the solution: Damodaran Krishnan, director of the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) facility.

Curran, Distinguished Service Professor and Bayer Professor of Chemistry, has collaborated with Krishnan and his group several times since Krishnan assumed the director’s role 11 years ago. Curran credits the excellence of Krishnan’s work – in conjunction with the caliber of the instruments offered in the facility – with advancing his research on several projects.

When you’re working with liquid helium at temperatures hovering around 1.38 degrees Kelvin, you can’t simply order the necessary supplies – you have to make them.

The laboratory group of Wolfgang J. “Jim” Choyke, research professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, uses a dewar – or flask – made from custom-blown glass and metal fashioned in the glass and machine shops for the task, which Choyke calls “absolutely essential for what we do.”

Imagine walking into an electronics big-box store and asking for a piece of equipment that lasts for a minimum of 10 years without any need for replacement or repair. Just for good measure, it also has to work in a highly radioactive environment and help world-class scientists examine the fundamental structure of the universe.

In the three decades that Tom Gasmire has been building items for Pitt scientists, he has contributed to a lot of groundbreaking research by creating equipment that doesn’t exist. It’s one of the things he likes best about working for a university: the opportunity to build a piece of apparatus that assists a professor or graduate student while also stretching the bounds of Gasmire’s own creativity.

So when doctoral student Eden McQueen told him she needed a brothel for fruit flies, he was more than up to the task.

Few events in nature are as chaotic as a volcanic eruption. So if your job is to capture thermal images of that eruption, it’s critical that the equipment be foolproof enough to work without constant adjustment.

That was the problem facing Michael Ramsey, a professor in the Department of Geology and Environmental Science, when he approached machine shop supervisor Tom Gasmire about building him a mechanism that would hold the filters Ramsey uses to take those images.