Issues

Leslie Labruto Leslie Labruto’s career illustrates how a young civil environmental engineer can accommodate both her heart’s leaning and her tangible talents. Before she graduated from the School of Engineering with her bachelor’s degree in civil engineering in 2011, Labruto’s studies and service work had… Read More

From corporate boardrooms to statehouse chambers to the halls of academe, sustainability is one of this century’s biggest challenges. Read More

Willie Geist is a natural on camera because he comes by it honestly. His father, Bill, is a longtime Emmy Award-winning correspondent for CBS News, and some of the younger Geist’s earliest memories have to do with his dad’s profession. Read More

You could find a somber study carrel or park your posterior in your dorm room when duty calls. But the sun is out for a change, a mockingbird is trilling love songs on Magnolia Lawn, and over in the Baseball Glove Lounge, generations of students before you have already broken in those comfy-kitschy chairs. Read More

Jon Meacham, executive editor and executive vice president at Random House and author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, joined the Vanderbilt faculty last summer with a three-year appointment as Distinguished Visiting Professor. Read More

My dad used to tell me I took things for granted, especially on my birthday or Christmas. I always thought he was just a party pooper. But of course, you should never ignore what a wise Chinese man has to say. Read More

Innovative Method Takes Aim at ‘Undruggable’ Proteins The fruitfulness of Vanderbilt’s drug-discovery effort depends in large part on its willingness to invest in research, infrastructure, and the collaborative nature of its scientists. There is no better example than Vanderbilt’s cancer drug-discovery program. Since he arrived at Vanderbilt in 2009, “we… Read More

Compounds Offer New Options for Diabetes Treatment One of the hottest areas of drug discovery involves the search for new treatments for diabetes, obesity and other metabolic disorders. Last year Vanderbilt signed a collaboration agreement with pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) for the discovery, development and commercialization of novel therapies for… Read More

‘Laboratory in a Box’ Conducts Thousands of Experiments Simultaneously David Weaver is out to help drug discovery “bloom” at Vanderbilt University. Weaver came to Vanderbilt in 2004 from the pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers Squibb to develop and lead its High-Throughput Screening (HTS) facility, used today by about… Read More

When Blair Academy of Music first opened its doors in the fall of 1964, I was a violin student of Wilda Tinsley [MMus’43], having lessons in a beautiful old house on West End Avenue. I still remember my first lesson with Miss Tinsley at the new school on 18th Avenue. 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

Transplant Procedure Overcomes Blood-Type Incompatibility More young children could receive life-saving heart transplants in the future, if a procedure performed for the first time at Vanderbilt becomes accepted practice. Pediatric cardiac surgeons at the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt recently performed the state’s first ABO-incompatible heart… Read More