Research Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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