Year: 2011

Gary Jaeger could probably improve the writing in this magazine standing on his head. A philosopher, writing coach and yogi, Jaeger serves as the assistant director of the Writing Studio and senior lecturer in the philosophy department, as well as a yoga instructor at 12 South Yoga in Nashville. After… Read More

I didn’t finish the race. Forty hours into the Death Race and a mere five hours from the end, I quit. In my four years as a Vanderbilt athlete, I had never failed to make it to the finish line. I had faced disappointment, failed to meet goals, even finished… Read More

Çağlar Oskay is an expert in failure and that makes him—and his work—a success. Oskay, assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering since 2006, has focused much of his research on the failure of structures and predicting the lifespan of heterogeneous materials through multiscale computational mechanics. “People… Read More

Some of the biggest businesses started out as ideas dreamed up in student apartments and dorm rooms. Two Stanford students started Google as Ph.D. projects. When he was at Yale, Fred Smith turned in a term paper outlining his idea for an overnight delivery service—FedEx. Vanderbilt’s Cam Chalmers, BS’98, created… Read More

When Julie Fraser arrived in Kabul, Afghanistan, in January 2002, it was clear that the mission at hand would be unlike any she’d had before. The Kabul airport had been one of the primary targets of the U.S. invasion three months earlier, and the widespread destruction was evident as soon… Read More

Clark Bosslet and Blake Knight are both MBA candidates for 2012 and bloggers for OwenBloggers.com, a website that offers an uncensored student perspective on life at the Owen School. The Owen Podcast Series, which Bosslet and Knight film and produce for the site, features interviews with faculty, fellow students,… Read More

Arun Majumdar is the first director of the Department of Energy's ARPA-E (Zach Goodyear / Vanderbilt University) “Gentlemen, we have run out of money. It’s time to start thinking.” This quote, attributed to the New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford, summarizes the main point of the presentation that… Read More

Providing increased mentorship, research opportunities and a nurturing, intellectual environment during fellowship training may help reduce a projected shortage of academic hematologists and oncologists. Read More

Vanderbilt researchers have identified an antigen important to balancing the immune response to bacteria in the gut. Read More

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has awarded Vanderbilt researchers a two-year, $1 million grant to Vanderbilt to develop a model for applying genomic testing to drug prescribing in “real-world” settings. Read More

Watch video of the Harrod Lecture with Norman T. Gottwald. Norman T. Gottwald, a pioneer in the social critical study of the Hebrew Bible, delivered the Harrod Lecture Nov. 10. His groundbreaking book “The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250-1050 BEC” argues for the… Read More

Watch video of Alondra Nelson, associate professor of sociology at Columbia University, speaking Nov. 8. Typically associated with the revolutionary rhetoric and militant action of the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the Black Panther Party  did significant and lesser-known work pursuing equality in the… Read More

Watch video of Arun Majumdar, director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E), delivering a lecture titled “ARPA-E: Catalyzing Energy Breakthroughs for a Secure American Future” Nov. 9 in Featheringill Hall. Majumdar became the first director of ARPA-E, the country’s only agency devoted to transformational energy research and development,… Read More

A simple procedure can correct ‘tongue-tie,’ a commonly missed condition that could prevent newborns from breastfeeding properly. Read More

Vanderbilt University and Australia’s University of Melbourne have awarded $344,000 to support eight joint research projects as part of the expansion in their academic partnership announced last fall. Read More

They’re called patriots, extremists, conservatives, libertarians.  So who really makes up the Tea Party?  Vanderbilt sociologist Steven Tepper surveyed some two thousand people and found four major traits that make up a Tea Party supporter: authoritarian, libertarian, fear of change and strong anti-immigrant sentiment. He also found that one of… Read More

A distinguished panel of business and academic experts will discuss the viability of record labels in the digital age during the first Vanderbilt-Melbourne Global Debate. The debate, the first of an ongoing series born of Vanderbilt University’s partnership with The University of Melbourne, will be held 9 to 10:45 a.m. Nov. 15 in Flynn Auditorium at Vanderbilt Law School. Read More

America has a drug problem. But it’s not what you think; in fact this drug problem is probably happening in your community – even in your own home. The problem is the accumulation of prescription drugs with no good plan for disposing of them. As the number of prescriptions continues… Read More

Light and the hormone melatonin may play important roles in the developing brain. Read More

Implementation of antibiotic stewardship tactics as part of infection reduction campaigns sees significant results. Read More