Perena Gouma, the Edward Orton Jr., Chair in Ceramic Engineering at The Ohio State University, is well-known for her work on breath analyzers to detect various diseases. Less well-known are her contributions to the advancement of electrospinning for ceramic fiber manufacturing.

Gouma’s journey into “the poor man’s way to nanotechnology,” as she calls the technique, began at a conference in Monterey, Calif, in the early 2000s. She was inspired by an Army Research Laboratory presentation on potentially using electrospinning to create soldier uniforms with built-in sensors. She began experimenting with the technique in her lab, and between 2005 and 2011, she published numerous papers demonstrating how electrospinning could be used to produce ceramic materials and composites for sensing, catalytic, and energy applications.^a–q