Pioneers Of Discovery

Albert Einstein once wrote, “It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.” For Emily Hodges, Ph.D., that awakening occurred in a high school science class taught by Trudy Anderson, Ed.D. “She made science exciting,” Hodges said. Read More

It’s roughly 5,000 miles from Croatia to Tennessee as the crow flies. Read More

Jim Cassat, M.D., Ph.D., a pediatric infectious disease specialist who joined the Vanderbilt faculty this summer, loves taking care of children with bone infections and doing research to understand the host-pathogen interactions during these invasive infections. Read More

Ebola. Chikungunya. Influenza. What’s to be done about these headline-grabbing, debilitating, often lethal viruses? Read More

Dylan Burnette, Ph.D., points to one of the many striking photographs on his office walls. It’s a picture of a cell — a microscopic image showing yellow squiggles, bright purple lines and a turquoise oval on a black background, and it looks like abstract art. Read More

Beyond genetics — that’s the call Oliver McDonald, M.D., Ph.D., heard during the year between college and medical school he spent in a lab at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. Read More

Jason MacGurn, Ph.D., a new assistant professor of Cell and Developmental Biology at Vanderbilt, is studying how cells make decisions about the protein composition of the cell surface. Read More

Ken Lau, Ph.D., a new assistant professor in Cell and Developmental Biology, is out to determine the rules that lead to cells converting from one type to another, for example, when a healthy cell becomes a cancer cell. Read More

Tony Capra, Ph.D., is a new assistant professor of Biomedical Informatics and investigator in the Center for Human Genetics Research at Vanderbilt. His goal is to use the tools of computer science to address problems in genetics, evolution and biomedicine. Read More