Research

Women are better than men at recognizing living things and men are better than women at recognizing vehicles: That is the unanticipated result of an analysis of data from a series of visual recognition tasks collected by Vanderbilt psychologists. Read More

Eight scientists, including four Nobel laureates, received the first Golden Goose Awards on Thursday, Sept. 13 at an awards ceremony on Capitol Hill. The award was established to highlight the importance of federally funded basic research that, on the surface, seemed particularly odd or obscure, but which ended up having a large impact on society. Read More

“Stage & Screen: The Star Quality of Vanderbilt’s Performing Arts Collections,” now open at Vanderbilt University’s renovated Central Library and Special Collections, invites viewers to step “behind the curtain” of some of the world’s most memorable productions. Read More

A new survey from the Vanderbilt University/YouGov Ad Rating Project shows that the latest attack ad aimed at President Obama is not working as well as previous efforts. Read More

After more than a decade spent successfully decoding the malaria mosquito’s sense of smell, the Zwiebel Lab has added ant olfaction to its research repertoire and has just received a major grant to pursue this new avenue for the next four years. Read More

An analysis of Massachusetts’ health care reform program by a Vanderbilt researcher indicates insurance gaps may remain as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) expands insurance coverage beginning in 2014. Read More

A transcription factor called LIP is capable of causing one cell to consume another. Read More

Vanderbilt University professor Billy Hudson, Ph.D., and his lab have achieved a scientific “bleacher burner” -- their paper is published, discussed in an editorial and featured on the cover of this month’s Nature Chemical Biology, a high profile journal. Read More

Vanderbilt’s MFA Program in Creative Writing has been ranked among the top 10 programs in the country in a survey conducted by "Poets & Writers" magazine and reported in the September/October issue. Read More

Dysfunction or loss of an “antioxidant” enzyme may lead to higher risk for esophageal cancer in patients with gastric reflux disease. Read More

Ants have four to five times more odor receptors than most other insects, a team of researchers have discovered. Read More

A novel approach to improve location information to centimeter scale accuracy using the global positioning system has earned a Google Research Award for an engineering professor and his team. Read More

Deep brain stimulation used to treat Parkinson’s disease may impair some aspects of language processing, a recent study suggests. Read More

In 2010 the Vanderbilt Institute for Energy and Environment began a unique interdisciplinary study of agricultural adaptation to water scarcity in Sri Lanka's Mahaweli River Watershed. Now a five-year, $3.7M grant from the National Science Foundation, through their Water Sustainability and Climate program, will further the study and its global best practices. Read More

A new exploratory data mining technique for identifying important student learning behaviors and strategies is grabbing entrepreneurial interest and kudos from the international community. Read More

Pregnant women who have had prior preterm births may avoid a subsequent early birth if given progestogens, which are natural or synthetic forms of progesterone, a female hormone that naturally increases during pregnancy, a Vanderbilt analysis shows. Read More

Camilla Benbow has been appointed to the Board of Directors for the Washington, D.C., think tank, Education Sector. Read More

This month BioVU logged in its 150,000th unique genetic sample. It is now the world’s largest collection of human DNA linked to searchable, electronic health information. Read More

Inhibitory neurons that connect and regulate signaling in the brain (interneurons) may contribute to epilepsy and autism in patients with tuberous sclerosis complex. Read More

Vanderbilt researchers have combined the photosynthetic protein that converts light into electrochemical energy in spinach with silicon, the material used in solar cells, in a fashion thatproduces substantially more electrical current than has been reported by previous "biohybrid" solar cells. Read More