Research Blog

Photo of a true blue-eyed cicada (Matt Weiss, Cicada Mania) Have you heard the latest buzz going round that scientists at Vanderbilt are paying as much as $3,000 for specimens of the rare blue-eyed cicada? If you have, I hope you haven’t spent a lot of time… Read More

Students at BSC111c poster session discussing project that determined the phylogenetic relationship of a number of common insects (Susan Urmy / Vanderbilt) In an educational environment increasingly characterized by canned and virtual science experiments that always come out right, Vanderbilt’s alternative introductory biology laboratory (BSC 111c) stands… Read More

Karoly Mirnics and Krassimira Garbett, staff scientist in his laboratory (Susan Urmy / Vanderbilt). I arrived in the states 21 years ago as a student, from what was to become the war-torn country of Yugoslavia. Twenty-one years later I am holding a title of James G. Blakemore Chair and vice… Read More

Representative Phil Roe (R-TN) chatting with Prof. Sandra Rosenthal, front, graduate student Scott Niezgoda and Christina West, assistant vice chancellor of federal relations, in Washington D.C. at the 17th annual CNSF Exhibition & Reception. (David Scavone) Last Wednesday, Sandra Rosenthal and Scott Niezgoda accepted the invitation… Read More

  An adult cicada (John Russell / Vanderbilt) Vanderbilt commencement speakers may have some unusual competition this year: Nashville’s largest brood of cicadas are predicted to emerge in May and hang around for about five or six weeks. Besides their practice of appearing in 13- or 17-year… Read More

Federal funding from the National Institutes of Health contributed to the development of a new laser technique being used at Vanderbilt to aid in drug discovery. Research Amanda Kussrow is pictured. (Joe Howell / Vanderbilt) Federal investment in scientific research is a major driver of job growth… Read More

Vanderbilt researchers are using a variety of approaches to hasten the beginning of the end of malaria. Read More

"Genetics Today" was the subject of a recent Science Café, a monthly free scientific exploration held at Nashville coffee shop Fido and sponsored by the Adventure Science Center. Read More

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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