Mini Features

This speech was presented April 19, 2007, to members of the Vanderbilt Aid Society by Lyle Lankford, senior officer for university history and protocol at Vanderbilt University. From its very founding, Vanderbilt University has been obliged to women who came to the rescue to make dreams reality. It’s… Read More

In 2007 Vanderbilt received the largest research grant in its history: the $40 million Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA). Additional funding since then has raised the grant to $50 million. Vanderbilt has used the CTSA funding from the National Institutes of Health to create the Vanderbilt Institute for Clinical… Read More

“As academics we can try to find ways to decrease the conflict instead of exacerbating it.” ~Diana Orces, graduate student from Ecuador Photo by Daniel Dubois. America’s political scholars keep a close eye not only on our own democratic process, but on attitudes about democracy worldwide. And… Read More

Al Gore Lamar Alexander Fred Thompson Ross Perot In four of the six most recent presidential campaigns, Vanderbilt alumni have watched one of their own vie for his party’s nomination. Al Gore was a front-runner in the 1988 Democratic race, winning on Super Tuesday. Gore… Read More

From left: CBS producer/reporter Fernando Suarez, BA’01; ABC producer/ reporter Eloise Harper, BS’02; and Fox News colleague Aaron Bruns. When producer/reporters Fernando Suarez, BA’01, and Eloise Harper, BS’02, started covering U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign last fall, they could have passed for contestants on the reality show… Read More

Fifteen years ago Michael Ainslie, then president and CEO of Sotheby’s Holdings, learned about an effort to help inner-city kids succeed in college. “It was so simple and so beautiful and so obvious,” he remembers thinking. “Young people coming from some of the worst high schools to some of… Read More

Terry Grier, superintendent of 71,000-student Guilford County, N.C., Schools (which serves Greensboro/High Point), doesn’t claim to have solved the dropout problem, but he is making headway–and earning national attention for his efforts. Grier, EdD’83, has made keeping students in school his top priority, instituting a number of innovative dropout-prevention… Read More

Billy Hudson is living testament to the power of teachers. Hudson, who once seemed destined to spend his life working in the cotton fields of Arkansas, is an internationally known scientist who helped discover the molecular underpinnings of autoimmune and hereditary kidney diseases. Now 66, the Elliot V. Newman… Read More

Never underestimate the power of a good dose of outrage. About 12 years ago Chris Barbic got angry–really angry. In 1992 Barbic had graduated from Vanderbilt and signed on through Teach for America as a sixth-grade math teacher in the Houston inner-city schools. Finding the experience rewarding, he decided… Read More