Research Blog

The Vanderbilt Aerospace Club has captured first prize in the 2013 NASA Student Launch Initiative. The Vanderbilt team also took home the 2013 Best Payload Design award for the most creative and innovative payload experiment: bio-hybrid ramjet engines that use carbon-neutral, 100-percent-renewable bio-hybrid fuels for combustion. Read More

As part of Vanderbilt’s ongoing federal advocacy efforts in support of federal funding for research and education at the National Science Foundation, Sharon Weiss, associate professor of electrical engineering and physics, traveled to Washington, D.C., for the Coalition for National Science Funding’s (CNSF) advocacy day and Capitol Hill reception on May 7. Read More

Viruses are among the most confounding creatures on the planet. Read More

"Eight weeks and 30,000 students gave me a crash course in the future of digital learning technologies," writes engineering professor Doug Schmidt in this Vanderbilt Magazine column on his experience teaching one of Vanderbilt University's first massive open online courses, or MOOCs. Read More

Vanderbilt University Medical Center is celebrating its women scientists with five events this month that feature inspiring women sharing their research achievements and lives. Read More

In an era of budget cutting and belt-tightening, how can science get more support from the federal government? Read More

Twenty-five years ago this March, Iraqi forces coordinated a calculated campaign of genocide against the Kurds, an atrocity that should remind the world that it must rally to the aid of those who suffer from brutal regimes, writes Michael Newton, professor of the practice of law. Read More

This week marks the 25th anniversary of the gas attacks on the Kurdish village of Halabja, Iraq, at the hand of Saddam Hussein that killed at least 5,000 civilians. Vanderbilt University international criminal and humanitarian law expert Michael Newton says lessons learned from the Halabja attack could help the persecuted Kurds being attacked in Syria today. Read More

Over time, guns become much more than symbols of self-protection—they become symbols of racial inquietude and mistrust, writes Jonathan Metzl, Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology and Medicine, Health and Society, in NBC news blog "The Grio." Read More

The vital partnership between NIH and Vanderbilt – reproduced at universities all around the country – supports thousands of brilliant minds from all around the world. Sequestration will discourage a generation of young people from even considering a career in research. Read More

School of Engineering Dean Philippe Fauchet emphasized the importance of federal research investment to members of Tennessee's congressional delegation while he was in Washington, D.C., for the annual American Society of Engineering Education conference. Read More

Last month representatives of more than 140 countries agreed to the terms of a treaty called the Minamata Convention that would ban many uses of mercury by 2020. But the efforts do not go far enough, says Vanderbilt pharmacologist Michael Aschner. Read More

A new video report of research by Antonis Rokas and John Gibbons describes how humans domesticated microbes like yeast just as we domesticated cats and dogs. Read More

Sen. Lamar Alexander (Courtesy of Congress) Imagine a world where American research universities lag behind those in other nations, can no longer be counted upon to make major new scientific discoveries and, as a consequence, money flows to businesses in Bangalore or Beijing that capitalize on their… Read More

Vanderbilt chemist John McLean served as one of the 14 members of the NRC expert committee that prepared a report in September that recommends the potential of new methods for monitoring the process of destroying the remainder of the nation’s aging stockpile of chemical warfare munitions that could reduce the time and expense involved by almost two thirds. Read More

Electrical engineering professor Alan Peters has posted the lecture notes to his popular introductory image processing course online. Read More

Jessica Mazerik is a graduate student in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology. As scientists, our ability to obtain funding, publish papers, and generate interest in our research is dependent upon our ability to successfully “sell” our scientific data and ideas – that is, to convince… Read More

An amputee using a prosthetic leg designed at Vanderbilt made history by climbing 103 flights of stairs to the top of a Chicago skyscraper. Read More

Faculty members of Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management conduct research across a broad range of disciplines, from finance and economics to consumer behavior and negotiation strategies. Their work has a solid footing in traditional academic theory, but much of it also seeks to make an impact on… Read More

Dean Camilla Benbow (John Russell / Vanderbilt) In her bimonthly column for The Tennessean, Camilla Benbow, Patricia and Rodes Hart Dean of Education and Human Development, writes about the challenges of educating gifted children. In many schools and classrooms, we ask gifted students to adjust to the… Read More