Releases

Sabine Fuhrmann and colleagues have discovered a novel underlying cause of coloboma — a birth defect that causes missing tissue in the eye and accounts for up to 10% of childhood blindness. Read More

Genetic variation that impacts glucose- and insulin-related signaling affects responses to type 2 diabetes treatments and warrants further study. Read More

Laboratory and administrative personnel at Vanderbilt University Medical Center were honored last week for research excellence during the 17th annual Research Staff Awards, held virtually this year because of the pandemic. Read More

Valeria Reyes Ruiz, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology, has been selected as a 2020 Hanna Gray Fellow by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). Read More

Vanderbilt biochemist Yi Ren is part of a team that has identified a new behavior of a SARS-CoV-2 protein and discovered that interfering with its function can block virus replication in host cells. This opens up the potential for new therapeutic targets for COVID-19. Read More

A major new research review commissioned by The Wallace Foundation paints a detailed picture of how strong principals affect students’ educational and social outcomes. The report, co-authored by Professor Jason A. Grissom at Vanderbilt University, concludes that school leaders are even more important than previously believed and that investing in their success has a very large payoff. Read More

Assistant Professor of Chemistry Steven D. Townsend, PhD’10, has been awarded a 2021 Sloan Research Fellowship, one of the highest honors for young scientists who have the potential to revolutionize their fields of study. Read More

Vanderbilt’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, which helps mature adults rediscover the joy of learning in an inclusive community, offers a variety of courses this spring, including Alzheimer’s disease prevention, little-known Tennessee history, and jazz in the 1930s and ’40s. Read More

Vanderbilt University announced today that alumni Carolyn Thomas Rogers, BA’75, and Robert Moss Rogers, BA’75, have made a $5 million gift to establish the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Center for the American Presidency in the College of Arts and Science. Read More

The Nashville area is under a winter storm warning from 6 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 17, until 6 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 18. All Vanderbilt University classes will be conducted on their normal schedule. The COVID-19 testing center at the David Williams II Recreation and Wellness Center will be CLOSED on Wednesday, Feb. 17. Read More

Bruce Carter, professor of biochemistry and an associate director of the Vanderbilt Brain Institute, has been appointed to the scientific advisory board of the CMT Research Foundation, which shapes research directions and therapeutic development of Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease. Read More

Julie Carell Stadler, Kathryn Carell Brown and Edie Carell Johnson have made a commitment to endow a new chair in pediatric infectious diseases research at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. The inaugural chair holder of the Edie Carell Johnson Chair in Pediatrics will be announced this spring. Read More

Delirium, a form of acute brain dysfunction, is widespread in critically ill patients in lower resourced hospitals, and the duration of delirium predicted both mortality and disability at six months after discharge, according to a study published in PLOS ONE. Read More

Wei-Qi Wei, MD, PhD, assistant professor of Biomedical Informatics and scientific director of the Precision Phenotyping Core at the Center for Precision Medicine, has been awarded a four-year, $1.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to continue development of high-throughput software for quickly identifying traits of interest, or phenotypes, in electronic health records (EHRs). Read More

David Merryman has discovered that targeting a protein receptor in heart cells may limit a heart attack’s acute and long-term effects. Read More

Retrieval of clearer, more complete information from the EHR could go a long way toward improving predictive models of who will next be at risk of suicide, thereby improving care for patients with suicidal thoughts and behaviors. Read More

The Nashville area is under a winter weather advisory until 6 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 11. All Vanderbilt University classes will be conducted on their normal schedule. Staff who are considered “essential” should make plans, in collaboration with their managers, to report to work if they are safely able to do so. Read More

Surgery for prostate cancer—the most prevalent cancer in men—soon could no longer require cutting through healthy tissue and nerves. Surgeons instead may work with minuscule robots developed at the Vanderbilt Institute for Surgery and Engineering. Read More

A noninvasive, quantitative MRI method could be used after surgical repair of traumatic peripheral nerve injury to help clinicians make decisions about whether additional surgical interventions are needed. Read More

HIV-1, the virus that causes AIDS, exploits inositol phosphates in T cells to aid its own assembly and maturation — suggesting that targeting inositol phosphate binding could inhibit HIV-1 replication. Read More