Life, Earth And Space

Danial Asgari, a postdoctoral researcher in the Tate Lab, and Ann Tate, associate professor of Biological Sciences, recently published a study in Molecular Biology and Evolution titled “How the Structure of Signaling Regulation Evolves: Insights from an Evolutionary Model.” Their findings show that negative feedback loops (or NFLs) acting closer to a cell’s final decisions, such as turning genes on or off, are especially resistant to evolutionary change. Read More

While we know that intermediate-mass black holes should exist, little is known about their origins or characteristics—they are considered the rare “missing links” in black hole evolution. However, four new studies have shed new light on the mystery. The research was led by a team in the lab of Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy Karan Jani, who also serves as the founding director of the Vanderbilt Lunar Labs Initiative. Read More

The National Center for Science Education has named Vanderbilt University’s Evolutionary Studies Initiative as one of its 2025 recipients of the prestigious Friend of Darwin award. This national honor recognizes ESI’s outstanding contributions to advancing public understanding of evolution through interdisciplinary research, education and outreach. Read More

Vanderbilt University has joined the Urban Humanities Network (UHN) as a consortium campus, solidifying the university’s place among leading institutions at the forefront of urban humanities scholarship. Established in 2022, UHN unites universities, organizations, and researchers dedicated to interdisciplinary study within the urban humanities, which operates at the nexus of humanities, urbanism, and design. Read More

A transdisciplinary team at Vanderbilt University seeks to identify Tennessee communities at risk of exposure to toxic man-made chemicals in their drinking water. Read More

The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management awarded non-competitive financial assistance agreement Number DE-EM0005321, Consortium for Risk Evaluation with Stakeholder Participation, to Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee. Read More

A new course through the Vanderbilt Center for Sustainability, Energy and Climate seeks to engage students in discussions about taking a planetary health approach to address climate change and resource sustainability challenges. Read More

Vanderbilt University, led by Professor Ralf Bennartz, will lead a NASA satellite mission investigating Earth's high-altitude ice clouds, backed by a robust grant of $37 million. This endeavor, leveraging the university's climate research expertise, will provide opportunities for student involvement and bolsters Vanderbilt's position in global climate research. Read More

In a new innovative study conducted by the Vanderbilt Climate, Health, and Energy Equity Lab, four undergraduate students and three faculty researchers identified a new approach to reduce the health inequalities of energy cost burdens and greenhouse gas emissions. Read More

See how a passion to help underrepresented students ignited astrophysicist Keivan Stassun’s mission, earning him a MacArthur “genius” award. Read More

Stassun, who is also a founding co-director the Fisk-Vanderbilt Master’s-to-Ph.D. Bridge Program, was among the 2024 MacArthur fellows announced on Tuesday, Oct. 1. The fellowship, which is awarded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, aims to identify extraordinarily creative individuals with a track record of excellence in a field of scholarship or area of practice. Recipients also demonstrate the ability to affect society in significant and beneficial ways through their pioneering work or the rigor of their contributions, according to the foundation. Read More

In a groundbreaking study led by Sarah Worthan, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher in the Behringer Lab at Vanderbilt University, scientists have successfully evolved microbial cultures that possess the ability to sense pH changes, enabling rapid responses to environmental fluctuations. Read More

New research shows that warming and aging act as a one-two punch, lowering mosquito lifespans and fanning the flames of bacterial infections. These findings highlight how climate change could alter the risks of disease spread by mosquitoes. Read More

Hunting for black holes sounds like the premise of a new Hollywood blockbuster, but at Vanderbilt University, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy Karan Jani works with students in a lab to do exactly that. Last year, Jani’s group at the Department of Physics and Astronomy, along with the university’s Data Science Institute, jointly launched the AI for New Messengers postdoctoral fellowship. The fellowship, one of the first of its kind in the U.S., seeks to apply AI techniques to analyze data from cosmic events (such as black hole collisions) using information from the Nobel Prize–winning Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) experiment. Read More

Taylor is one of only six scientists nationwide appointed to the LISA team, a joint mission between the European Space Agency and NASA. LISA is a space-based gravitational wave detector constructed of three spacecraft separated by millions of miles in a triangle shape as big as the sun. Read More

Professor Steven Wernke's groundbreaking archaeological mapping project has secured its most substantial funding yet: a $625,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. Using satellite imagery and artificial intelligence, Wernke and his team are mapping archaeological sites across the Andes Mountain Range to build a detailed inventory that will improve our understanding of Andean settlement systems and human-modified landscapes. Read More

New research led by recent Vanderbilt Ph.D. alumna Maria Luísa Jabbur from the Johnson Lab and BBSRC Discovery Fellow at the John Innes Centre, in the UK has uncovered that even cyanobacteria—tiny organisms with a generation time of just five to six hours—can sense and respond to changes in light availability, or photoperiod, to gear up for winter. Read More

Embarking on a new research project often brings unexpected discoveries—some intriguing, some novel, but rarely a find of a lifetime. Such a remarkable discovery occurred when university archivist and associate director Kathy Smith stumbled upon a pile of plaster, hidden away for 60 years in a dim, cluttered closet of the Branscomb Quad basement. This plaster turned out to be the long-lost Crampton’s Plesiosaur Cast from the 1870s, missing for nearly six decades. Read More

Research projects investigating the history of evolution at Vanderbilt University led to the rediscovery of a long-lost Crampton’s Plesiosaur Cast from the 1870s. Read More

Vanderbilt professor Alex Lupsasca plans to extend Earth's largest telescope network beyond the atmosphere with a space-based dish. It could spot part of a black hole we've never seen before – and perhaps discover new physics. Read More