Research

Professor Josh Caldwell was awarded a MURI grant from Office of Naval Research that provides up to $1.5M per year for five years to study twist optics using so-called two-dimensional materials with defined crystal misorientations, which has the potential to lead to new laser sources, compact optical components for on-chip photonics, and electro-optics. Read More

Vanderbilt Divinity School and the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries announced a grant of $350,000 from the NEH that is enabling Vanderbilt to partner with Texas A&M and Marquette universities to continue preserving the history of Syriac culture, a medieval dialect once spoken widely by Middle Eastern Christian communities.  Read More

A team of engineering seniors has designed an embedded thermoelectric generator to convert that wavy shimmer of heat that rises from hot asphalt—waste heat radiation—into electrical energy. To protect soldiers’ hands from heat burns while rappelling from helicopters, another team has created ‘fast rope’ insertion gloves. These design projects and 52 more will be on display at the Vanderbilt School of Engineering’s Design Day 2023, Monday, April 24. Read More

For the second year running, the Vanderbilt Poll–Nashville shows more than half of respondents believe the city is on the wrong track. This trend is amplified by a plurality of respondents indicating the growth of the city is making their quality of life worse, rather than better or having no effect. Read More

Kevin Leach, assistant professor of computer science, has won an Amazon Research Award in the fall 2022 awards cycle. The Amazon funds will allow him to advance the state of the art in robust document understanding by developing new iterative methods for collecting and labeling training data. Read More

Tennessee’s open COVID testing policy reduced actual COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths. Costs of expanded testing were so low that essentially any reduction in the number of deaths due to the policy would justify its cost. Read More

Justitia, an independent and nonpartisan think tank based in Copenhagen, Denmark, has opened its first U.S. location at Vanderbilt University. The expansion of the "The Future of Free Speech" project, led by Justitia CEO Jacob Mchangama, aims to advance the global culture of free speech. Read More

Meet some members of the Class of 2023 whose inspired collaborations—within Vanderbilt, across the Nashville community and beyond—are making the world better.  Read More

Graduate student Reese Martin and his doctoral advisor, Ann Tate, assistant professor of biological sciences, used theoretical modeling to identify a potential relationship between genetic pleiotropy and the evolution of immune responses. Read More

A Vanderbilt study finds a strong association between lower ratings for interpersonal communication skills among medical residents in their last year of training and greater likelihood of unsolicited patient complaints among doctors during their first year of employment after training. Read More

Tim Vogus, deputy director of Vanderbilt's Frist Center for Autism and Innovation, uses research to push for a workforce that welcomes, accepts, and embraces neurodivergent professionals. Read More

Vanderbilt computer scientist Yankai Huo is working with key clinical collaborators at Vanderbilt University Medical Center to develop a quantitative and reproducible 3D analytics tool for large-scale digital analysis of kidney tissues and biopsies. Read More

An international coalition of biomedical researchers co-led by Vanderbilt's Alexander Bick, MD, PhD, has determined a new way to measure the growth rate of precancerous clones of blood stem cells that one day could help doctors lower their patients’ risk of blood cancer. Read More

Led by Vanderbilt University School of Medicine Basic Sciences professor Hassane Mchaourab, the Center for Applied Artificial Intelligence in Protein Dynamics will focus on the application of machine learning techniques to understand how proteins work. Read More

by Paul Govern Reported in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, a statistical analysis of sentiments expressed online by U.S. Twitter users captures the rural-urban divide regarding COVID-19. Google software engineer Yongtai Liu, PhD’22 in computer science; Bradley Malin, professor of biomedical informatics and computer science, and colleagues created a natural language processing system backed by artificial intelligence to... Read More

Research from Associate Professor of Medical and Linguistic Anthropology T.S. Harvey demonstrates how a disease’s name can have a significant impact on the public’s perception, attitude and behavior toward the disease. Harvey argues that disease names should be selected with careful consideration of their potential impacts on public health from the framing of risk perceptions through the circulation of harmful misinformation. Read More

Sarah Worthan, along with Robert McCarthy and Megan Behringer, led a new effort to understand the effects of the environment on the outcome of experimental evolution studies. Read More

A Vanderbilt-led study evaluating two investigational drugs to treat severe COVID-19 demonstrated that neither drug was effective. Read More

Class of 2023: See how Kavya Sharman is using the rich experiences and connections she’s cultivated as an undergraduate and graduate student in the School of Medicine Basic Sciences to build bridges between biotechnology and business. Read More

Class of 2023: See how Mary Cayten Brakefield using her experiences with physical illness to inform and inspire her namesake fashion business focused on accessible and inclusive universal design. Read More