Alumni Profiles

Photo by Susan Urmy As director of the Center for STEM Education for Girls at Harpeth Hall School in Nashville, retired Navy Capt. Barbara Bell wants to give girls the confidence and knowledge to excel in technical careers long dominated by men. A 28-year veteran and one of the first… Read More

Duc Pham often speaks about how lucky he has been, despite a difficult childhood during the Vietnam War after which his father, a police captain in South Vietnam, was sentenced without trial by the North Vietnamese to seven and a half years of hard labor in a prison camp. “When… Read More

Like many people her age, Lauren Mandel developed her funny bone to the antics of comedians like Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader and Maya Rudolph on "Saturday Night Live." Read More

It was with a scholarship from the Africa–America Institute that Ann Therese Ndong-Jatta enrolled at Vanderbilt to study educational leadership. Honored with the institute’s Distinguished Alumna Award, she now invests those skills in her native Africa. Read More

Photo by Pamela Lepold Congress passed the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in June 1919, and the amendment became law Aug. 26, 1920, giving American women the right to vote after a decades-long fight. This year, the centennial of women gaining the right to vote, a record number of… Read More

Photo by Elena Cherkashnya Look no further than Tom Mulder to sing the praises of ArtSmart, a nonprofit begun three years ago in which classical musicians provide free individualized music lessons to high school students in underserved communities. “There’s a power in that one-on-one relationship between a teacher and a… Read More

Investigative journalist and New York Times best-selling author Elaine Shannon has spent decades reporting from the globe’s danger zones. Her latest book recounts the efforts to take down notorious criminal Paul LeRoux, whom she describes as “a twisted-genius entrepreneur and cold-blooded killer who brought revolutionary innovation to transnational crime.” Photo… Read More

Dee Margo (photo courtesy City of El Paso) EDITOR’S NOTE: As this issue of Vanderbilt Magazine was going to press, the world was just starting to hear about the tragic mass shooting that took place in El Paso on Aug. 3. Mayor Dee Margo wrote on Twitter in the immediate… Read More

On the wall of heart-rhythm specialist Jeffrey Williams’ medical office is his seventh-grade essay in which he writes that he wants to be a cardiologist. He doesn’t remember writing it, but his younger self accurately predicted the future. As co-director of the Heart Rhythm Center at Lakeland Regional Health in… Read More

Sarah Vaillancourt (Photo by Kevin Richtik/Caroline Photography) Sarah Vaillancourt’s mission—to help women get the care they need—far predated her nursing degree. “I knew I wanted to work in women’s health before I knew exactly what I wanted to do or how I wanted to do it,” says Vaillancourt, who earned… Read More

Dr. Constance Mobley is among only 14 female African American physicians in the U.S. who are abdominal transplant surgeons. She directs the surgical and liver intensive care unit for Houston Methodist Hospital. Photo by Tommy Lavergne As a molecular physiology and biophysics doctoral student at Vanderbilt, Dr. Constance Mobley… Read More

Photo by John Russell Reading, and a child’s access to books, is a precursor to success by all yardsticks. But the lack of reading materials in many neighborhoods across America—regions known as “book deserts”—threatens the educational achievements of countless students. English teacher Jarred Amato decided to do… Read More

Courtesy Merrily Talbott It was while interviewing travelers for a tourist publication in Breckenridge, Colorado, that high school psychology teacher and writer Merrily Van Norstrand Talbott came up with a fresh idea. A woman who thought she was suffering from altitude sickness told Talbott that she found relief after… Read More

Courtesy of Kim Le After spending nearly two decades as a storyboard artist for Hollywood film and television production companies, Kim Le is guided by a singular imperative: “I want to tell a good story, entertain people, and hopefully make them laugh.” As creative types go, storyboard artists… Read More

Nicole Feliciano’s Momtrends blog helps “busy, style-starved women keep in touch with what’s hip and cool.” The website attracts almost 100,000 unique visitors each month. As a working mother of two daughters, Nicole Feliciano, like countless other moms, would love to have an extra hour in the day. Read More

Entertaining a continent as populous as Asia is no small feat. Todd Miller, CEO of Hong Kong–based Celestial Tiger Entertainment, is doing it with aplomb. “You can think of Celestial as the HBO of Chinese movies,” he says. “We operate six core channels, all of… Read More

Judge Escobar outside the Justice A.A. Birch courthouse in Nashville. (John Russell) There were no road maps for Ana Escobar to follow when she was elected Nashville’s first Latina judge in August. Further, the self-described introvert had to step outside her comfort zone to run for the elective post… Read More

Photo by Ryan Hodgson-Rigsbee Being a student at the Blair School of Music kept Dana Kelley busy, but being a professional musician in New York City adds a whole new meaning to the word. Kelley is violist with the Argus Quartet, the Juilliard School’s quartet-in-residence, which played on the… Read More

Ecclesiastes, left, and Ramsey are working together to rejuvenate and transform a long-neglected, 25-block New Orleans corridor that stands in the shadow of an elevated expressway constructed more than 50 years ago. Photo by Greg Miles When Nyree Ramsey visited New Orleans in 1995, three words came to… Read More

Photo by Ashley Hylbert Shortly after graduating from law school, Bailey Spaulding got a harebrained idea: She’d open a brewery and name it the Jackalope Brewing Co., after the mythical rabbit–antelope hybrid that she believed in as a kid. Seven years after the business was launched in Nashville’s… Read More