Research

Vanderbilt faculty like Associate Dean for Research Abhishek Dubey are on the leading edge of investigation and development of AI. Dubey, also director of the SCOPE lab, develops advanced AI-driven frameworks and decision-making methods to improve public safety, transportation and infrastructure. Read more about Dubey, his research and his commitment to connecting academia and industry for the advancement of society. Read More

The National Science Foundation has granted Assistant Professor Mona Ebrish a CAREER Award, the foundation’s most prestigious honor for early-career faculty. Ebrish’s work centers on strategic modification of semiconductors to tailor their electrical behavior—aiming to push past long-standing limitations in device fabrication. She wants to achieve “new freedom in how we design, fabricate and ultimately integrate these materials into future electronic platforms.” Read More

It’s difficult to monitor lung disease patients’ airways remotely and noninvasively, so symptoms of their conditions—tissue stiffness, pressure, mucus accumulation or temperatures—can worsen undetected. Assistant Professor Xiaoguang Dong and a team of researchers have developed a device with multiple sensors and a magnetic switch that can give health care personnel consistent and long-term data to improve patient treatment. Their research was published in Science Advances on April 15. Read More

Postdocs Andrew Rice and Yanqing Xue, in the biochemistry lab of Professor Doug Mitchell, discovered which enzyme is responsible for a rare chemical modification that doesn’t exist in human cells. That could be crucial for developing antibiotics that can target bacteria while leaving human hosts’ cells completely alone. Read More

By Jenna Somers At some highly selective colleges and universities, cohorts of mostly white, wealthy applicants have three to eight times greater odds of admission than other similarly qualified applicants. These beneficiaries are legacy applicants, those who receive an admissions bonus for having alumni relatives. Legacy preferences have long… Read More

When will you feel like you have enough? From panic-buying to FOMO to the relentless drive for “more,” why does the fear of “running out” sharpen our focus while also dictating some of our most irrational behaviors? Listen to this Quantum Potential podcast for a fascinating conversation with scarcity expert and professor of marketing Kelly Goldsmith. Read More

By Jennifer Kiilerich As part of Jordan’s nationwide education reform initiative, scholars at Vanderbilt Peabody College of education and human development are partnering with four Jordanian universities through the Early Grade Education Activity (ASAS) to co-create curricula and support professional development centered on evidence-based, student-engaged learning for young… Read More

By Jenna Somers AI data centers seem to be cropping up everywhere, often in rural farming communities, where crops are grown, where livelihoods depend on their yield and where their yield depends on groundwater, the cost of energy and infrastructure, and the health of the environment. Increasingly, these communities, in… Read More

There’s nothing like a good set of tweezers. Chancellor Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor Justus Ndukaife, with his team, have developed next-generation nanotweezers that let scientists better analyze “extracellular vesicles” in real time and in their native state—no chemical staining or fixation to alter them. A patent application for the technology has been filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office; the research was just published in Light: Science and Applications. Read More

Radiation is known to destroy some breast cancer cells, but new research published in Cell Reports shows that it might also make some surrounding tissue more prone to cancerous cell growth. Vanderbilt postdoctoral fellow Kevin Corn conducted much of the study’s work with Assistant Professor Marjan Rafat. “When we think about radiation, we usually focus on tumor cells,” Rafat said. “But the surrounding tissue is also responding, and that can shape what happens after treatment.” By addressing processes in that surrounding tissue, they hope to reduce the chance that breast cancer will recur. Read More

PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” have already been linked to disruptions in thyroid hormones, among other detrimental health effects. A recent paper by first author Heather Hartmann, a Ph.D. student in the lab of Associate Professor Vivian Weiss, dug into thyroid cell behavior under long-term exposure to PFAS. It finds that the chemicals alter cellular function, including signaling pathways that are involved in cancer. “We hope [this] can help people who are already at risk for thyroid cancer … make better-informed choices, as consumers, to limit exposure to these chemicals,” Hartmann said. Read More

How teams are seeded in tournaments can make a big difference in their outcomes. The way the UEFA European Championship and the FIFA World Cup are seeded could use some work, say Owen Professor Michael Lapre and co-author Julia Amato, BA’23, in an article in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports. Improving how teams are seeded could make for fairer, more exciting tournaments, Lapre said: “Balanced groups increase the chances that the best teams advance and that more matches truly matter.” Read More

How can democratic societies endure, and even flourish, amid deep disagreement? Get ready for a fascinating and timely episode of the Quantum Potential podcast with political scientist and philosophy professor Dr. Robert Talisse and Provost C. Cybele Raver. Read More

By Jennifer Kiilerich On March 27, more than 100 students, faculty and practitioners celebrated the launch of the Vanderbilt Early Childhood Research Collaborative, established at Vanderbilt Peabody College of education and human development. The new initiative will drive innovation and promote the thriving of young children (birth… Read More

By Jenna Somers Most elementary school-aged children have a surprising cognitive ability: they can detect—nearly as well as adults—when someone treats people from one social group differently than another. The study, “Children’s and adults’ detection of social biases,” published in January in Child Development, demonstrates children’s emerging capacity to recognize… Read More

The humanities shape how we understand history, culture and the complex challenges facing society. In March, Vanderbilt advocates Paul Stob, director of the A&S College Core and professor of communication studies, and Ayla Faullin, a Vanderbilt junior studying English, traveled to Washington, D.C., for the National Humanities Alliance’s Humanities Advocacy Day. There, they met with congressional offices to advocate for continued federal support for the National Endowment for the Humanities. Read More

Vanderbilt’s dedicated institutional review board for social, behavioral and educational research soft-launched a year ago. The VU SBER IRB, now fully operational, strengthens Vanderbilt’s support for human-participant research while incorporating feedback from the research community.  Read More

Hussam Mahmoud, director of the Vanderbilt Center for Sustainability, Energy and Climate, has been named a National Geographic Explorer for an innovative study about how to provide a better framework for preparing for wildfires. National Geographic Explorers are groundbreaking scientists, conservationists, educators and storytellers who get funding and support from the National Geographic Society to illuminate and protect the planet. Read More

Extreme heat kills more people in the U.S. each year than hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes combined. It's typically thought of as a climate issue, but a new report from the Vanderbilt Cultural Contexts of Health and Wellbeing Initiative suggests that it's also a social one. The report examines how heat-related illness is often made worse by biological vulnerabilities, cultural norms and political and economic structures. Read More

Everything you touch was developed by basic science, says Ian Macara, chair of the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology. From food varieties and new crops, to your phone, your computer and the plastics we use every day, everything originally came out of a basic research lab. Macara's department, within the School of Medicine Basic Sciences, aims to train the next generation of scientists to advance basic biomedical research at the cellular, molecular and organismal levels. Read More