Machine Shop Featured Research

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.