Month: August 2009

Imagine a platoon of soldiers carrying personal digital assistants that can display the location of enemy shooters in three dimensions and accurately identify the caliber and type of their weapons. Engineers at Vanderbilt University’s Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS) have developed a system that can give soldiers just such… Read More

The ability of breast milk to protect infants against respiratory viruses is gender-biased in favor of girls, reveal studies by Dr. Fernando Polack. Polack’s first study appeared last June in Pediatrics, and the second came out in February’s Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal. The research took place at hospitals in Buenos… Read More

As students at Jefferson Middle School in Oak Ridge, Tenn., go through their daily schedules, do they realize that Mr. Cox, their vice principal and athletics director, is a bona fide SEC basketball legend? That’s Phil Cox, BS’85, who at one time held the Vanderbilt scoring record with 1,724 points. Read More

Barnes Churches with predominantly black congregations are thriving in urban and suburban areas, and the most successful among them employ a variety of sophisticated marketing and programming strategies to draw members, a study by researcher Sandra Barnes finds. Her findings offer insights into what successful black churches have in common… Read More

The day that robots help children with autism to learn social skills is a step closer with the development of a system that allows a robot to monitor a child’s emotional state. “A lot of research going on around the world today tries to use robots to treat children with… Read More

Sophomore Curt Casali kept the competition off guard at first base as in this win against Western Kentucky. Commodores Finish 2009 Baseball Season with Strong Showing The Commodores found their bats and dug in defensively in postseason play to advance to the championship game of the SEC Tournament and the… Read More

Under the direction of Head Women’s Basketball Coach Melanie Balcomb, the Commodores put together a season that culminated with the Southeastern Conference Tournament Championship, a trip to the Sweet 16 round of the NCAA Tournament, and recognition by the state of Tennessee. Along the way, seniors Christina Wirth and Jennifer… Read More

A member of the Vanderbilt women’s swimming team, Austin Langley juggles swim practice and studies in both music and pre- veterinary medicine. Austin Langley is one busy young woman. The rising junior, who calls Burlington, N.C., home, is a musical arts major at the Blair School of Music with a… Read More

“How are you holding up?” “What about the loud music?” “Do students knock on your door at midnight?” “Do parents call you?” Reflecting on my first year as a faculty head of house in The Commons for first-year students, these are a reasonably representative sample of the questions I’ve fielded… Read More

Wirth “Welcome to Germany. Just three weeks until you’ll be in Bosnia,” I was told by my battalion’s personnel sergeant upon my 1993 arrival in Frankfurt. I never imagined then how my longing to experience the adventures of transformational Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) would lead me through the dense… Read More

Several years ago I had the chance to hear popular Vanderbilt philosophy professor John Lachs deliver a talk titled “The Human Race: Both Better Off and Better” to a small suburban group of perhaps 20 people. Lachs opened his presentation by telling the group that he hoped the evening would… Read More

I started writing stories because I was lonely. I wish there were more artistic and noble reasons that I put pen to paper, but the truth of the matter is that I wanted people to kiss me and I had the unfounded notion that, if I wrote a good enough… Read More

Health Care, Society and Personal Responsibility I very much enjoyed reading “Invisible Nation” by Dr. John Sergent, BA’63, MD’66 [Spring 2009 issue, VJournal]. The doctor argues that “decent health care is a right of citizenship” and compares, as moral equivalents, segregation based on race with denial of… Read More

Wayne Coyne, frontman for The Flaming Lips, works the crowd from inside his signature plastic bubble during the psychedelic rock band’s headliner performance at Rites of Spring. “I did not feel like I was standing on Alumni Lawn sandwiched between Alumni and Tolman halls. Rather, I felt like I was… Read More

At any moment during the eight-hour surgery, 14 or more personnel were working around the babies. Three-month-old conjoined twins Keylee Ann and Zoey Marie Miller were separated April 7 during a complex eight-hour operation at the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt. The surgery, carried out by… Read More

Editor GayNelle Doll Art Director and Designer Donna DeVore Pritchett Editorial Associate Editor and Advertising Manager Phillip B. Tucker Arts & Culture Editor Bonnie Arant Ertelt, BS’81 Class Notes and Sports Editor Nelson Bryan, BA’73 Photography and Imaging Assistant Director,… Read More

Kevin Wilson Kevin Wilson, BA’00, is author of the collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories (2009, ECCO/Harper Perennial). His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, One Story, Cincinnati Review and elsewhere, and twice has been included in the New Stories from the South: The Year’s… Read More

Jasbina Ahluwalia, BA’91, MA’92 Making time for personal relationships while juggling the demands of a busy professional life led attorney Jasbina Ahluwalia down a new career path several years ago. The second-generation Indian American is founder of Intersections Matchmaking, which caters to single South Asian professionals nationwide. “Finding time for… Read More

Mark Loomis, BA’89 “When I was making my 3,000th copy on the second day of my first job, I realized the one course they didn’t teach at Vanderbilt was how to fix the copier,” says Mark Loomis. That first job, with ABC Sports, saw Loomis running errands, making lots of… Read More

As Vanderbilt Magazine was going to press, we received word of the death of Vanderbilt’s beloved fifth chancellor, Alexander Heard, who led Vanderbilt from 1963 until 1982. Much admired by students and faculty alike, he was adviser to three U.S. presidents and chancellor at Vanderbilt during a time of enormous… Read More