Year: 2008

Rehearsing and performing with the José Limón Dance Company was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for Vanderbilt Dance Program students. Photo by Steve Green For a university that doesn’t offer a dance major or minor, Vanderbilt attracts its fair share of dancers. In fact, more than 800 dancers from the Vanderbilt… Read More

Fifteen years ago Michael Ainslie, then president and CEO of Sotheby’s Holdings, learned about an effort to help inner-city kids succeed in college. “It was so simple and so beautiful and so obvious,” he remembers thinking. “Young people coming from some of the worst high schools to some of… Read More

Terry Grier, superintendent of 71,000-student Guilford County, N.C., Schools (which serves Greensboro/High Point), doesn’t claim to have solved the dropout problem, but he is making headway–and earning national attention for his efforts. Grier, EdD’83, has made keeping students in school his top priority, instituting a number of innovative dropout-prevention… Read More

Billy Hudson is living testament to the power of teachers. Hudson, who once seemed destined to spend his life working in the cotton fields of Arkansas, is an internationally known scientist who helped discover the molecular underpinnings of autoimmune and hereditary kidney diseases. Now 66, the Elliot V. Newman… Read More

Never underestimate the power of a good dose of outrage. About 12 years ago Chris Barbic got angry–really angry. In 1992 Barbic had graduated from Vanderbilt and signed on through Teach for America as a sixth-grade math teacher in the Houston inner-city schools. Finding the experience rewarding, he decided… Read More

Photo by Steve Green For children ages 1 to 4, the Susan Gray School provides intimate classes where typically developing children learn, play and grow alongside children with special needs. The education and environment at SGS are acceptance-based and allow children at all levels of physical and social development… Read More

I was born in Trinidad, educated in England, and moved to Nashville in 2002 to teach history at Vanderbilt. My research focuses on African Americans in the Atlantic world of the 19th century. Wherever I live, I also try to do a bit of research into local history. My… Read More

Elyn Saks feels right at home on the University of Southern California campus. There is something about the leafy-green trees and ivy-covered walls, the slate-roofed buildings, and the perpetual warmth of the California climate that has put her at ease almost from the start. But even here in… Read More

Few people have a greater impact on Vanderbilt than the person who manages the university’s $3.5 billion endowment. Last summer Philadelphia native Matthew Wright, then just 39, left his position as director of investments at Emory University to become vice chancellor for investments at Vanderbilt, succeeding Bill Spitz, who… Read More

Illustrations by Hal Mayforth In 1959 renowned Caltech physicist Richard Feynman pondered the possibilities of just how small technology could get in his seminal lecture, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” He foresaw a world of extremely small machines manufactured at the atomic scale–from the bottom up–by direct… Read More

Call them “the disappeared.” Last year 1.2 million American students dropped out of high school without receiving their diplomas. Only they didn’t really disappear. According to “The Silent Epidemic,” a recent study by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, many of them joined the ranks of the unemployed… Read More

Vanderbilt faculty, staff, alumni and students welcomed Nicholas S. Zeppos as its eighth chancellor at a celebration at the Student Life Center March 10. Join our VUCast crew for a front row seat at the festivities. Read More

Vanderbilt\'s eighth chancellor promised "my hardest work" and reflected about the journey of his family from Greece to America as he addressed the entire Vanderbilt community for the first time as chancellor, instead of interim chancellor. Read More

Affordable housing - in Nashville and across the nation - is the topic of a daylong conference Thursday, March 13, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Vanderbilt University\'s Peabody College Wyatt Center. Read More

Vanderbilt education researcher Christopher Loss has won the American Education Research Association, Division J (Post-Secondary Education) Dissertation of the Year Award. Read More

A distinguished group of scholars, journalists and activists will grapple with some of the thorniest issues of immigration during a March 20-21 symposium at the Vanderbilt Law School. The event is free and open to the public. Read More

Watch video of the celebration of the selection of Nicholas S. Zeppos as the university's eighth chancellor during a special open house Monday, March 10, at the Student Life Center. Read More

Vanderbilt will celebrate the selection of Nicholas S. Zeppos as the university\'s eighth chancellor during a special open house Monday, March 10, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Student Life Center. Read More

Franz Rosenzweig was one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, and in recent years his journals, letters and writings have been an important spur to thinking about the possibilities and limits of the humanities. He also remains a central figure in fields as varied as literature, history, philosophy and religious studies. Read More

In the space of only five weeks, three Nobel Prize-winning physicists will visit the Vanderbilt campus and provide local researchers with updates on the latest developments in fields ranging from cosmology to the behavior of atoms to science education. Two of the three will also give free public lectures while they are here. Read More