Issues

Christina Sharkey Geist is many things: a mother, wife, brand strategist, small business owner, “mompreneur” and, now, a children’s book author. Read More

After playing in only three bowl games during its first century of football, Vanderbilt has now reached the postseason five times in the past nine seasons—most recently at the Independence Bowl played Dec. 26, 2016, in Shreveport, Louisiana. Read More

The Vanderbilt men’s golf team is entering its spring season as the unanimous No. 1 team in the nation, earning the top ranking from Golfweek, the Golf Coaches Association of America and Golfstat.com. Read More

Five generations of Lillian Harpole Hazelton’s family have attended Vanderbilt—and higher education has played a particularly important role for the women in her family. Read More

After his law firm agreed to represent Guantánamo prisoners in 2004, Powell—a corporate litigator and antitrust lawyer for 20 years—received a phone call from the partner in charge of pro bono work at his firm. Hours later he was lead counsel to three French citizens who had been held in Guantánamo since early 2002. Read More

Last fall, lovers of reading and writing of all ages gathered in Denver for a Commodore Classroom that doubled as a writing workshop led by Rick Hilles, associate professor of English, who also teaches in the university’s acclaimed MFA Program in Creative Writing. Read More

The manager of West Coast promotions for Warner Music Nashville, Braun recently was a guest volunteer on the Vanderbilt Alumni Association’s DoresAtWork Twitter account. DoresAtWork is a monthly series that invites Vanderbilt alumni to share their work-life experiences. Read More

Wilford launched Smokingpipes.com in the summer after his sophomore year. It was the dawn of the Internet era, and technology promised to jolt an industry bound by its tweedy tradition. Eighteen years later Smokingpipes.com is among the world’s top pipe retailers, with $15 million in sales in 2016—and this at a time when smoking is at an all-time low in the United States. Read More

Growing up in Staten Island, New York, Erica Santiago, BS’10, never dreamed of being able to attend Vanderbilt. A four-year, full-tuition Posse Scholarship she received through Vanderbilt’s partnership with the Posse Foundation changed that. Read More

In each issue, Vanderbilt Magazine publishes a handful of social media posts from alumni, students, faculty, staff and Commodore fans that include the hashtag #Vandygram. Check out social.vanderbilt.edu anytime to see what’s happening in the Vanderbilt community. Read More

Dr. Arthur S. Booth Jr., a prominent member of the Atlanta medical community for more than 30 years, died June 18, 2016, at Hospice Atlanta, which he co-founded. He was 76. Read More

Frances Isley Hardie, former head of collections and acquisitions at Vanderbilt’s Jean and Alexander Heard Library, of Nashville, died Jan. 8, 2017. She was 90. Read More

An international monetary expert and one of the most esteemed economic minds of the last century, J. Dewey Daane died Jan. 3 in Nashville at the age of 98. Read More

For the past 15 years, David Owens, professor of the practice of management and innovation at the Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management, has taught a course on New Product Design and Development, designed primarily for MBA candidates and engineering undergraduates—but available to any students with an interest in the subject. With the recently opened makerspace at the Wond’ry, this year marked the first time the class was able to spend most of its time actually building and refining prototypes rather than taking in lectures and PowerPoint slides. Read More

Handbook of Early Childhood Special Education coedited by Erin Barton, assistant professor of special education, with Brian Reichow of the University of Florida, and Brian A. Boyd and Samuel L. Odom, of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (2016, Springer) The handbook discusses early childhood special education, with particular… Read More

Like most readers of Vanderbilt Magazine, I often flip to the Class Notes section first. After scouring the Class of ’96 for any juicy nuggets, I branch out to overlapping years, searching for names that ring a faint bell. Read More

The Blair School of Music opened its concert season with numerous premiere performances this fall, including several world premieres of works specifically commissioned for Blair faculty. Read More

Networking opportunities at Vanderbilt alumni chapter events, along with untold numbers of holiday parties, are right around the corner, so Vanderbilt Magazine reached out to Katharine Brooks, the Evans Family Executive Director of Vanderbilt’s Career Center, for some tips about how to work a cocktail-party crowd. Read More

Expect the unexpected when you walk into Kit Parker’s biophysics lab at Harvard. From cuttlefish skin camouflage to cotton candy machines used for wound dressings, his science is anything but ordinary. Read More

This essay is adapted from The Long View: Essays, Poems, Stories (2015, Cordelia Hollis) by Susan Ford Wiltshire, Vanderbilt professor of classical studies, emerita. Wiltshire wrote this piece as a letter to her daughter, Carrie Wiltshire McCutcheon, JD’05, who is an attorney at Baker Donelson law firm in Nashville. Read More