Vanderbilt Magazine

Travel back 450 million years to Middle Tennessee’s beginnings with Molly Miller, professor of earth and environmental sciences Read More

A preschool program for children ages 18 to 36 months with autism or suspected autism opened in July at the Vanderbilt Bill Wilkerson Center (BWC), with plans to expand to children ages 3 to 5 in the near future. Read More

Nursing student Molly Lalonde was a four-night winner on episodes of the game show Jeopardy! that aired in June. Read More

Kidney disease is the eighth most common cause of death in the United States and affects more than 20 million people, yet many people don’t know they have it because kidney disease often develops slowly with minimal symptoms. Read More

The School of Medicine is fielding one of 10 student teams participating in a project aimed at identifying the most frequent users of health care. Called “hot spotting,” this novel approach allows health care providers to zero in on “super users” in order to identify the reasons behind high utilization and to teach patients how to overcome them. Read More

Select law-school students also can earn a master’s in finance without increasing their time in school through a new program offered jointly by Vanderbilt University Law School and Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management. Read More

In the Jean and Alexander Heard Library exhibit The Golden Age of Sports Journalism: Grantland Rice and Fred Russell, baseball takes center stage, as it has all summer at Vanderbilt. Read More

The VU Move Crew and VUceptors helped first-year students get settled into their resident halls on The Martha Rivers Ingram Commons in August—the same month The Princeton Review ranked Vanderbilt’s students as the happiest in all the land. Read More

After a career spanning more than 60 years, most writers would be quite ready to retire, but Spencer is still working and enthralling new readers with her graceful fiction. Her seventh story collection, Starting Over: Stories, was published in January of this year to critical raves. Read More

At most conservatories and music schools, work with vocal coaches is restricted to graduate voice students. But at the Blair School of Music, undergraduate voice majors have the opportunity to work with two full-time vocal coaches—also known as collaborative pianists—who lend their input, ears and piano technique to young singers. Read More

Blair School of Music begins the academic year by continuing its 50-year celebration. On Sept. 13 it honored Roland Schneller, the longest-serving member of the Blair faculty and holder of the Chancellor’s Chair in Piano, with an evening of music. Read More

Wide receiver Jordan Matthews, BA’13, was selected 42nd overall by the Philadelphia Eagles in the second round of the NFL Draft on May 9. Read More

Tobacco smoking has been linked to approximately 2 million deaths among adult men and women in Asia in recent years, according to a new study that predicts a rising death toll. Read More

Bennett Landman, whose research lies at the interface of medical imaging, signal processing and statistical inference, has been focusing on large-scale medical image processing. Read More

Biomedical informatics is a science that draws connections between data and medicine, whether those data concern diseases, health care processes or human biology in the form of genomics and proteomics. Everyone who studies health records has the same goal: more precise medicine, leading to improved patient outcomes. Read More

Using the EHR (electronic health record) and natural language processing, the School of Medicine keeps track of each student’s exposure to patient problems across the curricular spectrum, allowing the school to advance students on a more individualized basis. Read More

Parents showed support for their Vanderbilt students like never before in the 2014 academic year, and as a result, a single challenge gift of $200,000 benefited multiple academic and student-life programs across the university. Read More

During the past two years, the number of Commodore Recruitment Programs (CoRPs) volunteers has more than doubled from 1,512 to 3,371 alumni. Read More

Janice Feagin Britton of Spanish Fort, Alabama, died Feb. 20 at age 92 after a lifetime of service and adventure. Read More

Walter R. Courtenay Jr., of Gainesville, Florida, died Jan. 30 at age 80. He was a leading authority on invasive nonindigenous fish, particularly those introduced into the United States. Read More