Spring 2016

The Vanderbilt women’s tennis team advanced to the Final Four in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in an attempt to repeat their national championship, but ended the season with a loss to Stanford. The Commodores, the No. 6 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament, ended with a 23–6 record. Read More

By the end of his first year, Donny Everett—Vanderbilt’s hard-throwing, right-handed pitcher—had already become one of the most beloved student-athletes on campus. Then, in early June, on the eve of the NCAA Regional tournament played on campus at Hawkins Field, the unthinkable happened. The Clarksville, Tennessee, native drowned at Normandy Lake, about 70 miles southeast of Nashville. Read More

The precarious state of the Edgehill community is captured by James Threalkill’s painting “View from the Neighborhood.” Threalkill, BS’79, previously served as the community services and arts director for the Edgehill Community Center. He writes, “The painting captures a moment when a young student, rather than relaxed and engaged… Read More

Michael Aurbach, professor of art, who has taught sculpture and drawing at Vanderbilt since 1986, is retiring after 30 years. To honor him the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery exhibited his work from mid-January through early March. The Last Laugh: Selections from Michael Aurbach’s Secrecy Series showed work in… Read More

Want to watch a live concert at Blair? Many student and faculty concerts now are streamed live from Ingram Hall, Steve & Judy Turner Recital Hall, and the Choral Rehearsal Hall from Blair’s live-streaming page at vu.edu/blair-stream. The performances are not archived. Read More

Interactive Writing Across Grades: A Small Practice with Big Results, PreK-5 (2016, Stenhouse) by Kate Roth and Joan Dabrowski, EdD’08 Interactive Writing Across Grades provides a how-to guide for using interactive writing—a dynamic, unscripted instructional method in which the teacher and students work together to construct a meaningful text… Read More

Politics and politicians have never been spared the cartoonist’s pen From Charlie Hebdo to the lampooning of U.S. presidential candidates, political cartoons continue to be a staple of editorial pages. While the rise of digital media—and the decline of newspapers—may have reduced their reach, political cartoons remain one of the… Read More

Jeff Coffin and Ryan Middagh work with the Blair Big Band Local music industry fuels expansion of program Nashville may be best known for country music, but the moniker “Music City” most accurately reflects the proliferation of stellar musicians in town who play all types of music. At Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music, Ryan Middagh, director… Read More

In the fall of 1902, Dr. Charles Wardell Stiles, a zoologist with the U.S. Public Health Service, got a hunch that parasites were causing large swaths of the South’s rural poor to suffer an array of debilitating symptoms. Read More

When Nathan Bird, BE’15, got married at the end of last year and sat down with his wife, Katherine, to plan their first budget together, it was important to him to set aside funds for Vanderbilt. Read More

Jedidah Isler, a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow in Vanderbilt’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, has emerged as an increasingly high-profile advocate for diversity among science, technology, engineering and mathematics researchers. Read More

With a greater focus on how the health care system functions, particularly in the wake of the 2009 Affordable Care Act, Vanderbilt has adjusted its own research and teaching programs surrounding public health and health policy. Read More

During the coming decades—probably a lot sooner than most people realize—the next great wave of technological change will wash over our lives. Its impact will be similar in sweep and rapidity to the advent of computers, cellphones and the Web, but this time around, it is not our gadgets that will be transformed—it is we ourselves, our bodies, our minds. Read More

This year a total of 491 Vanderbilt students participated in Alternative Spring Break projects, which spanned 42 U.S. cities, as well as Panama, Nicaragua and Jamaica. Read More

Plenty of notable personalities visited Vanderbilt this past spring or showed some love to Commodore Nation on social media—and sometimes both. Read More

ADDENDA I have some additional facts to add to the article “A Plan for All Seasons” in the Winter 2016 issue. First, I was surprised to learn that George Kessler designed the 1905 plan for Vanderbilt that was realized only in the case of Furman Hall. Read More

Several years after graduating in 1996, Meredith Dolhare found a new passion: running. Dolhare completed several marathons and 12 Ironman triathlons before setting her sights on far more arduous adventures. In 2013 she finished third in the Badwater Ultramarathon—a 135-mile race in 120-plus-degree heat that features a grueling climb from California’s Death Valley (279 feet below sea level) to the trailhead of Mount Whitney (8,360 feet). Read More

World War I marked the beginning of a great adventure that took Harvie Branscomb and Oliver Carmichael from Oxford, England, to Belgium, where they played a vital role in the largest hunger-relief effort the world had ever known. Read More

I’m graduating in May, and while it will be hard to leave Vanderbilt, it will be even harder to leave The Commons. The Commons has been such a defining part of my Vanderbilt experience, and has been my home here since day one. Read More

Last August, Hannah Stahl won first place in the Westminster Kennel Club’s dog art contest—held several months before the club’s 140th annual dog show, in partnership with the New York Academy of Art—by wowing judges with Lucy, an oil-on-canvas painting of a leaping Staffordshire bull terrier. Read More