David Salisbury

A student team hosted by the Vanderbilt Aerospace Design Lab is off to a strong start defending its national rocketry title in the 2015-16 NASA University Student Launch Challenge competing against a field of 39 other university teams. Read More

A new generation of gamma-ray spectrometer being developed by researchers and students in the Fisk-Vanderbilt Master's-to-Ph.D. Bridge program is perfectly suited for detecting valuable minerals hidden within the asteroids, comets, moons and minor planets in the solar system. Read More

Vanderbilt engineers have discovered that adding quantum dots made from fool's gold to the electrodes of standard lithium batteries can substantially boost their performance. Read More

An interdisciplinary team of biologists and medical researchers have created a new platform, which they call GEneSTATION specifically designed to leverage the growing knowledge of human genomics and evolution to advance scientific understanding of human pregnancy and translate it into new treatments for the problems that occur when this complex process goes awry. Read More

The thickness of the cortex in a region of the brain that specializes in facial recognition can predict an individual's ability to recognize faces and other objects. Read More

Vanderbilt chemist helps craft call for major new research initiative to increase our understanding of the invisible world of microbes that surround us. Read More

This December Rick Chappell, research professor of physics and past director of the Office of Science and Research Communications at Vanderbilt, will receive two awards from the American Geophysical Union recognizing his achievements in communicating science to the public and teaching and mentoring students toward careers in geophysics and space physics. Read More

NASA physicist and author Les Johnson will give two public lectures on campus on the technology of solar sailing and its potential for exploring the solar system and reaching other stars. Read More

A new class of DNA repair enzyme has been discovered which demonstrates that a much broader range of damage can be removed from the double helix in ways that biologists did not think were possible. Read More

Recent research by Vanderbilt University biologist Ken Catania of the electric eel has revealed that it is not primitive creature that it has been portrayed as. Instead, it has a sophisticated control of the electrical fields it generates that makes it one of the most remarkable predators in the animal kingdom. Read More

The director of forensic investigations for the Italian State Police is giving a free public lecture titled "A physicist at the crime scene" on the Vanderbilt campus on Thursday afternoon, Oct. 29. Read More

A new "geospeedometer" that can measure the amount of time between the formation of an explosive magma melt and an eruption confirms that the process took less than 500 years in several ancient super-eruptions. Read More

James Peebles, the Albert Einstein Professor of Science, Emeritus, at Princeton University, is giving a free public lecture on campus Oct. 22 titled "The Renaissance of General Relativity." Read More

When faced with ambiguous visual information, it is the visual processing areas of the brain that choose between the competing impressions, not the higher levels of the brain as previously thought. Read More

When Anna Marie Bohmann was growing up in Minneapolis, she enjoyed school in general—and math in particular—but had no idea that making a career in mathematics was even possible. Read More

Gregory Benford, a physicist at UC-Irvine and a noted science fiction author, is giving a free public lecture titled "Our Next Century in Space" that will describe steps that could see the opening of the solar system to productive use and colonization. Read More

Recent experiments at the world's largest atom smashers are producing liquid drops so small that they raise the question of how small a droplet can be and still remain a liquid. Read More

New analysis shows that the scientific literature paints an overly rosy picture of the efficacy of psychotherapy for depression comparable to the bias previously found in reports of treatments with antidepressant drugs. Read More

Invention of the first integrated circularly polarized light detector on a silicon chip opens the door for development of small, portable sensors that could expand the use of polarized light for drug screening, surveillance, etc. Read More

A doctoral student in the Fisk-Vanderbilt Master's-to-Ph.D. Bridge Program has helped develop a new kind of detector with potential applications in medical diagnostics and national security. Read More