Vanderbilt Magazine

The Vanderbilt Aid Society elected Elizabeth Boddie Elliston (above) as its first president and Mary Barbour Wallace (left) as its first secretary/treasurer. The “simple fare” served at their organizational meeting included chicken salad, scalloped oysters, beaten biscuits, sandwiches, individual ices and cakes, almonds, and pink and white mints. It began… Read More

Jeanne Moses didn’t have a history of cancer in her family. She didn’t have symptoms—just backache and a bit of weight loss. Nothing unusual for a 45-year-old mother working two jobs. So she was stunned when her doctor delivered the news: Jeanne Moses—technical writer, theatrical costumer, daughter of the director,… Read More

The Zeta Beta Tau house as it appeared in the 1920 Commodore yearbook. (Courtesy of Vanderbilt University Special Collections and University Archives) It was early December in Tucson, Ariz.—45 years and 1,600 miles from our undergraduate days at Vanderbilt. We came together, this graying group of sexagenarians, to recharge our… Read More

“My experiences as a NICU mom changed the way I practice medicine in a very fundamental way,” Judy Aschner says. When Dr. Judy Aschner was busy completing her third year of fellowship in neonatology at the University of Rochester School of Medicine, a personal experience did more to shape the… Read More

In 2007 Vanderbilt received the largest research grant in its history: the $40 million Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA). Additional funding since then has raised the grant to $50 million. Vanderbilt has used the CTSA funding from the National Institutes of Health to create the Vanderbilt Institute for Clinical… Read More

Glacial melting. Amphibian and honeybee populations in precipitous decline. Ocean dead zones. Rain forests burned to make way for agricultural fields. Some days it’s hard to know which we should worry about first. Fortunately for the rest of us, the alumni you’ll meet here aren’t wringing their hands waiting for… Read More

Imagine a platoon of soldiers carrying personal digital assistants that can display the location of enemy shooters in three dimensions and accurately identify the caliber and type of their weapons. Engineers at Vanderbilt University’s Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS) have developed a system that can give soldiers just such… Read More

Functional magnetic resonance imaging is revealing clues about visual memory. Vanderbilt researchers have discovered that early visual areas, long believed to play no role in higher cognitive functions such as memory, retain information previously hidden from brain studies. Researchers made the discovery using a new technique for decoding… Read More

The day that robots help children with autism to learn social skills is a step closer with the development of a system that allows a robot to monitor a child’s emotional state. “A lot of research going on around the world today tries to use robots to treat children with… Read More

Barnes Churches with predominantly black congregations are thriving in urban and suburban areas, and the most successful among them employ a variety of sophisticated marketing and programming strategies to draw members, a study by researcher Sandra Barnes finds. Her findings offer insights into what successful black churches have in common… Read More

The ability of breast milk to protect infants against respiratory viruses is gender-biased in favor of girls, reveal studies by Dr. Fernando Polack. Polack’s first study appeared last June in Pediatrics, and the second came out in February’s Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal. The research took place at hospitals in Buenos… Read More

As students at Jefferson Middle School in Oak Ridge, Tenn., go through their daily schedules, do they realize that Mr. Cox, their vice principal and athletics director, is a bona fide SEC basketball legend? That’s Phil Cox, BS’85, who at one time held the Vanderbilt scoring record with 1,724 points. Read More

Under the direction of Head Women’s Basketball Coach Melanie Balcomb, the Commodores put together a season that culminated with the Southeastern Conference Tournament Championship, a trip to the Sweet 16 round of the NCAA Tournament, and recognition by the state of Tennessee. Along the way, seniors Christina Wirth and Jennifer… Read More

Sophomore Curt Casali kept the competition off guard at first base as in this win against Western Kentucky. Commodores Finish 2009 Baseball Season with Strong Showing The Commodores found their bats and dug in defensively in postseason play to advance to the championship game of the SEC Tournament and the… Read More

A member of the Vanderbilt women’s swimming team, Austin Langley juggles swim practice and studies in both music and pre- veterinary medicine. Austin Langley is one busy young woman. The rising junior, who calls Burlington, N.C., home, is a musical arts major at the Blair School of Music with a… Read More

“How are you holding up?” “What about the loud music?” “Do students knock on your door at midnight?” “Do parents call you?” Reflecting on my first year as a faculty head of house in The Commons for first-year students, these are a reasonably representative sample of the questions I’ve fielded… Read More

Wirth “Welcome to Germany. Just three weeks until you’ll be in Bosnia,” I was told by my battalion’s personnel sergeant upon my 1993 arrival in Frankfurt. I never imagined then how my longing to experience the adventures of transformational Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) would lead me through the dense… Read More

I started writing stories because I was lonely. I wish there were more artistic and noble reasons that I put pen to paper, but the truth of the matter is that I wanted people to kiss me and I had the unfounded notion that, if I wrote a good enough… Read More

Health Care, Society and Personal Responsibility I very much enjoyed reading “Invisible Nation” by Dr. John Sergent, BA’63, MD’66 [Spring 2009 issue, VJournal]. The doctor argues that “decent health care is a right of citizenship” and compares, as moral equivalents, segregation based on race with denial of… Read More

Wayne Coyne, frontman for The Flaming Lips, works the crowd from inside his signature plastic bubble during the psychedelic rock band’s headliner performance at Rites of Spring. “I did not feel like I was standing on Alumni Lawn sandwiched between Alumni and Tolman halls. Rather, I felt like I was… Read More