Research Blog

  • Vandy rocket launch USLI09

    Vandy rocketeers strike again

    Last Sunday, Vanderbilt’s Aerospace Club participated in a major NASA rocket competition at Huntsville, Alabama and came away with a first place award for their payload design. This is the fourth year that the Vanderbilt group has been invited to the NASA Student Launch Projects rocketry challenge and… Read More

    Apr 22, 2011

  • Build Haiti back better

    Build Haiti back better

    With the beginning of the spring rains, cholera is on the rise in Haiti once again. Pioneering Haitian physician Jean William "Bill" Pape is determined to be ready. "The new vision is to build back better," Pape said during this year's Tennessee Global Health Forum hosted by the Vanderbilt Institute for Global Health. Read More

    Apr 21, 2011

  • It takes a (global) village

    It takes a (global) village

    When the residents of Lwala, Kenya, raised $900 for a one-way ticket to send Milton Ochieng' to college in the United States nearly a decade ago, they could not have envisioned that he would return to build a medical clinic in the heart of their rural village near the shores of Lake Victoria. Read More

    Apr 21, 2011

  • Vanderbilt University

    Vanderbilt: Laboratory for health care reform

    Vanderbilt University Medical Center is a laboratory for health care reform. Increasingly, Vanderbilt researchers are applying their expertise in informatics, genomics, drug discovery, basic science and clinical medicine to the solution of critical problems in patient care. Bedside checklists and electronic “dashboards” developed at Vanderbilt, for example, enable doctors and… Read More

    Apr 15, 2011

  • Vaughan Jones

    Beyond knot theory

    I’ve always been fascinated, and occasionally frustrated, by the tendency of string, yarn, rope and wire – any thing that is long, thin and flexible – to knot and tangle. Fields Medal winner Vaughan F.R. Jones Clearly, I’m not the only one. Mathematicians have been studying knots… Read More

    Apr 14, 2011

  • Double Klein bottle

    Big Bang or Big Bounce?

    There is a new dark-horse entry in the cosmological sweepstakes. Cosmologists Alan Guth, left, and Paul Steinhardt In the last 50 years, the Big Bang theory has gradually become the standard scientific model for how the universe began and has been written into the grade school science… Read More

    Apr 5, 2011

  • Science fair tickles the brains of participants

    Science fair tickles the brains of participants

    Brain Blast 2011 featured 35 different ways to learn about the brain, guided by Vanderbilt neuroscience graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, faculty members and other volunteers. More than 100 neuroscientists participated. Read More

    Mar 28, 2011

  • Cora Martt

    Insights on NSF funding from agency’s deputy director

    Cora Marrett, nominated to serve as deputy director of NSF, speaking at the NSF regional grants conference at Loews Vanderbilt March 21. (Susan Urmy / Vanderbilt) The Loews Vanderbilt Hotel was bustling with scientists, engineers and research administrators March 21 and 22 when Vanderbilt University hosted its… Read More

    Mar 24, 2011

  • Worm grunter Gary Revell

    Worm grunting on NPR

    Gary Revell shows some of the worms he has collected using worm grunting (Ken Catania) “What is worm grunting?” That is one of the questions that moderator Richard Sher asked panelists last weekend in a rerun of a pre-recorded edition of “Says You!” – the popular… Read More

    Mar 11, 2011

  • Robert Scherrer

    Future of the Parable of the Lost Sheep

    Vanderbilt physicist Robert Scherrer supplements his scientific research with writing science fiction stories. Bob Scherrer is bicultural: Not only is he a practicing theoretical physicist, but the chairman of Vanderbilt’s physics department is also a published author of science fiction. Several years ago we did a… Read More

    Mar 3, 2011

  • HAL-Watson-thumb

    Hal, make room for Watson

    HAL 9000 from the movie 2001 and WATSON from the Jeopardy competition Hal, make room for Watson. When it defeated two of the all-time champions of the television game Jeopardy this week, the IBM computer named Watson joined Hal 9000 in the ranks of… Read More

    Feb 18, 2011

  • Vanderbilt chemist Brian Bachmann is exploring Tennessee caves in search for new drugs.

    When events conspire

    Caving expert John Hickman, who accompanies Bachmann on his underground expeditions, rappels down to the entrance of the Snail Shell Cave near Murfreesboro, Tenn Have you ever had the feeling that events beyond your control are working in your favor? That certainly seems to have been the case in the… Read More

    Feb 1, 2011

  • Students at the School for Science and Math at Vanderbilt

    Scientists of the future

    School for Science and Math students Katie Roland, left, who attends Hume-Fogg Academic Magnet School, and Isaiah Bolden, who attends Martin Luther King Jr. Magnet High School, with the School for Science and Math’s director, Angela Eeds, Ph.D. (Mary Donaldson / Vanderbilt University) Report after report, it… Read More

    Feb 1, 2011

  • Pills

    How universities can help fill the “pipeline” with important new drugs

    Bringing a new drug to market is an increasingly daunting – and expensive – task. Today it costs more than $1 billion and takes more than seven years, on average, to complete the human studies required for a drug to be approved for marketing. Only about one in five drugs… Read More

    Jan 27, 2011

  • Vanderbilt University

    Trillion, trillion everywhere

    The number trillion has popped up in the news several times in recent weeks. On January 11, for example, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-III – a scientific consortium that includes Vanderbilt – announced that it had created the largest digital image of the sky and is releasing it to… Read More

    Jan 20, 2011

  • Vanderbilt University

    Hope endures in Haiti

    Seven years ago this month, I was in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, with a contingent of Vanderbilt University AIDS researchers and health care professionals. That was before the earthquake and subsequent cholera outbreak riveted international attention once again on this, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. Yet hope endures, even in… Read More

    Jan 19, 2011

  • Health care reform at the “grass-roots” level

    Health care reform at the “grass-roots” level

    Health care reform will likely remain a hot-button issue through the 2012 election. But while the pros and cons of last year’s health reform legislation are debated in Congress and on the campaign trail, considerable efforts are underway at the grassroots level to redesign the way health care is delivered… Read More

    Jan 15, 2011