External Story

Rep. Brenda Gilmore, MEd.’88, has been elected as state director for Women in Government, a group that advocates for women serving in state legislatures. She was elected to the position by her female colleagues in the state General Assembly. Read More

A recent survey of 1,000 parents with children between 2 and 10 found that many planned to give their kids tech instead of toys for the holidays. M. Eric Johnson, dean of the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University, has studied the toy industry and is quoted. Read More

A new way of assembling things, called metamaterials, may in the not too distant future help to protect a building from earthquakes by bending seismic waves around it, the way invisibility cloaks bend light. Jason Valentine, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, is quoted. Read More

I’m leaving Africa with a heavy heart and a monumental task before me. When saying goodbyes at the Center for the Rehabilitation of Child Soldiers, Edna [not her real name]—an 18-year-old who was abducted by Ugandan rebels at the age of 12—asked me to promise her two things. First, not to forget the experiences and lives of the women I had been working with for the past year. Second, that I would use my voice to create positive change. Read More

Lift Ev’ry Voice “First-generation students who don’t have cultural capital, who don’t come to the table with college-educated parents or economic resources—for those kids to walk across the stage at graduation makes every single day worthwhile,” says Roslyn Clark Artis of her work in higher education. Read More

Vanderbilt University and the University of Maryland have teamed up to introduce a new approach to massive open online courses, or MOOCs – a two-part, sequenced course offered through the digital learning platform Coursera. Read More

A NASA astrophysicist and Vanderbilt graduate student Lisa Upton have confirmed the existence of giant convection cells flowing slowly on the sun, lending further insight into the transport of heat from its core and the origin of cycles of sunspot activity that affect essential satellite-based communications such as cell phones and TV broadcasting. 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

For CEO and Vanderbilt mechanical engineering graduate Krista Donaldson, BE’95, revolutionary engineering is about changing the world, one life at a time. Read More

Keith Caldwell came to study at the Vanderbilt Divinity School because he wants to help reimagine a better version of this world. “People here are not just doing God talk,” Keith says. “They are pulling it down and putting it in action.” As a community organizer in… Read More

Muhammad Yunus, Phd‘71, and the 1996 Vanderbilt Distinguished Alumnus, was an inspiring keynote speaker during the fifth annual Global Social Business Summit. After Vanderbilt, Yunus began his active work to fight poverty in Bangladesh by issuing microcredit loans to the poor, eventually creating the Grameen Bank. Yunus and the bank… Read More

Nashville startup InvisionHeart is a finalist for the Global Food and Health Innovation Challenge and will compete next week for a $1 million prize. InvisionHeart was created by a group at Vanderbilt University, including biomedical engineering professor Franz Baudenbacher and cardiac anesthesiologist Susan Eagle. Read More

After finding the original mugshots of the Freedom Riders, Eric Etheridge, BA’79, took on a unique project; he tracked down 328 of the original activists, photographing them again and displaying their current portraits alongside their mugshots. The portraits are collected in Etheridge’s book, “Breach of Peace.” Etheridge recently visited the Freedom… Read More

Vanderbilt’s Office of Alumni Relations and the Association of Vanderbilt Black Alumni are excited to announce the AVBA’s newest leadership team. William Wyatt, BE’95, is president, Damien Charley, BS’99, is vice president and Charity Hemphill-Frierson, BA’10, will serve as secretary. The AVBA made great strides under its previous leadership… Read More

A video resume lets your personality and speaking skills set you apart from your competition. Vanderbilt is here to help you with Optimal Resume, now available through the Alumni Career Services program. The process could not be easier. Optimal Resume gives you the tools to create your script, an… Read More

Although the NSA may not conduct queries or examine content unless it or a court determines that “national security” is at stake, national security is apparently at stake quite often, if the recent reports about monitoring hundreds of thousands of foreigners’ calls as well as the calls of foreign leaders are true, writes Christopher Slobogin, Milton R. Underwood Professor of Law. Read More

Matt Rubinger, BA’10, learned to authenticate designer handbags as a teenager. Today he is in charge of the luxury accessories division at Heritage Auctions. Read More

A team of computer engineers from Vanderbilt University’s Institute of Software Integrated Systems (ISIS), including Associate Professor of Computer Engineering Akos Ledeczi, PhD’95, has developed inexpensive hardware and software that can transform an Android smartphone into a simple shooter location system. Read More

Anita Mahadevan-Jansen has been elected to the Board of Directors of SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. Her three-year term begins Jan. 1, 2014. Read More