Year: 2013

Luda Davies, clinical instructor in Surgery in the outpatient surgery clinic at the Nashville campus of the Veterans Affairs Tennessee Valley Healthcare System, has been named Physician Assistant of the Year by the Tennessee Academy of Physician Assistants. Read More

Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the University of Alberta in Canada have identified a biomarker for a cellular switch that accurately predicts which prostate cancer patients are likely to have their cancer recur or spread. Read More

David Hall, M.D., has joined the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt as professor of Clinical Pediatrics and the director of the new Program for Children with Medically Complex Needs within the Division of Hospital Medicine. Read More

Vanderbilt University Medical Center researchers and co-authors from four other U.S. institutions from the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics (eMERGE) Network are repurposing genetic data and electronic medical records to perform the first large-scale phenome-wide association study (PheWAS), released today in Nature Biotechnology. Read More

The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee has recognized Francis S. Guess, MBM’74,  for his commitment to equality, justice and the advancement of Middle Tennessee with the Kraft Humanitarian Award. He served six years on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and an additional 32 years on the Tennessee Human Rights… Read More

Emily White, BA’00, is the director of business operations at Facebook’s Instagram—a job she has held since April of this year. She recently accepted a job at Snapchat, where she will be second in command to CEO Evan Spiegel. Read More

Between family get-togethers, holiday parties and the abundance of special treats available during the holidays, it can be a real challenge to avoid putting on a few pounds. “It’s a good idea to eat in a healthy way all year round, but for a lot of people it’s especially challenging… Read More

A new study has found that skilled typists can’t identify the positions of many of the keys on the QWERTY keyboard and that novice typists don’t appear to learn key locations in the first place. Read More

Tighter regulation of financial institutions - especially "shadow" banking institutions - is needed to avoid another economic disaster like that of 2008-2009, says economist Margaret Blair of Vanderbilt Law School. Read More

Robert D. Collins, M.D., professor of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology, Emeritus, died Nov. 28. He was 85. Read More

Thanks in part to a computer program named “Rosetta,” Vanderbilt University researchers are closer to understanding how the ubiquitous G protein is activated – a discovery that could lead to the design of more specific and effective drugs. Read More

From Bomb Disposal to Painless Colonoscopies, These Precocious Partners Boldly Go Where Man Prefers Not To By David F. Salisbury In the foreseeable future, robots will stick steerable needles in your brain to remove blood clots, and capsule robots will crawl up your colon to reduce the pain of… Read More

America’s Drug War Has Led to a ‘New and Improved’ Racial Caste System, Argues Michelle Alexander By Arnie Cooper Portrait of Michelle Alexander © Robert Shetterly / Americans Who Tell the Truth Michelle Alexander didn’t set out to do her undergraduate work at Vanderbilt. As a high… Read More

Vanderbilt University Athletics partnered in July with Soles4Souls to send student athletes on a 10-day journey to deliver shoes to those in need in Tanzania, Africa. Read More

If You Really Want to Improve Health Care, Start by Asking Those Who’ve Spent Sleepless Nights in Family Waiting Rooms By Nancy Humphrey Richard Mia During a recent clinic visit at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Lynn Ferguson and two other patients were simultaneously called back… Read More

In 2004, Kristin Fleschner began a year as a Vanderbilt Michael B. Keegan Traveling Fellow, journeying to Africa to study sexual violence against women and children. Now a student at Harvard Law School, Fleschner received a pancreas transplant in 2007 and started experiencing vision loss in 2008. Read More

Student Ownership, Responsibility Are Keys to Success Why are some high schools better than others at boosting achievement among traditionally underserved students? A new report from the National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools (NCSU), based at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of education and human development, finds that student… Read More

Physician Exodus Is Diminishing Health Care Where It’s Needed Most The past decade has seen a dramatic rise in the number of physicians trained in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) emigrating to the United States, resulting in a “brain drain” on nations in the greatest need for affordable and accessible health care. Read More

Long before there was a Student Recreation Center or any of the adjacent outdoor facilities, Sam Hirt was doing what he could to promote sports activities on campus. Read More

Researchers Stalk Deadly Flu Viruses Using New Weapons The high mortality rate of a new strain of bird flu that emerged in China last spring has caused the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to issue provider alerts to watch for flu-like illness in recent travelers and prompted… Read More