Vanderbilt Magazine

Editor GayNelle Doll Art Director and Designer Donna DeVore Pritchett Editorial Associate Editor and Advertising Manager Phillip B. Tucker Arts & Culture Editor Bonnie Arant Ertelt, BS’81 Class Notes and Sports Editor Nelson Bryan, BA’73 Photography and Imaging Assistant Director,… Read More

At any moment during the eight-hour surgery, 14 or more personnel were working around the babies. Three-month-old conjoined twins Keylee Ann and Zoey Marie Miller were separated April 7 during a complex eight-hour operation at the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt. The surgery, carried out by… Read More

Mark Loomis, BA’89 “When I was making my 3,000th copy on the second day of my first job, I realized the one course they didn’t teach at Vanderbilt was how to fix the copier,” says Mark Loomis. That first job, with ABC Sports, saw Loomis running errands, making lots of… Read More

Jasbina Ahluwalia, BA’91, MA’92 Making time for personal relationships while juggling the demands of a busy professional life led attorney Jasbina Ahluwalia down a new career path several years ago. The second-generation Indian American is founder of Intersections Matchmaking, which caters to single South Asian professionals nationwide. “Finding time for… Read More

Kevin Wilson Kevin Wilson, BA’00, is author of the collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories (2009, ECCO/Harper Perennial). His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, One Story, Cincinnati Review and elsewhere, and twice has been included in the New Stories from the South: The Year’s… Read More

As Vanderbilt Magazine was going to press, we received word of the death of Vanderbilt’s beloved fifth chancellor, Alexander Heard, who led Vanderbilt from 1963 until 1982. Much admired by students and faculty alike, he was adviser to three U.S. presidents and chancellor at Vanderbilt during a time of enormous… Read More

Stitchery by Ethel Wright Mohamed (1906–1992)/Courtesy of Hazel L. Wilson and the Ethel Wright Mohamed Stitchery Museum, Belzoni, Miss. For most of my adult life, I have been fascinated by the old Southern style of shape-note singing—even though for many years I actually knew little about it and certainly never… Read More

On football game days, you can find Don Orr, BE’56, at the same place he was some 50 years ago—overlooking Dudley Field and looking for a Vanderbilt victory. Orr led the Commodores to their first bowl game and first bowl win in the 1955 Gator Bowl with a 25–13 win over Auburn.  “It… Read More

Bobby Johnson: “Rather than having just a few talented star players, we’re pretty good at each position now.” The man responsible for leading the Commodore football team to its first postseason win since Sputnik orbited the earth is not necessarily doing the things one might expect after such a feat. He’s not… Read More

Preeg, Blatt. Photo credits: Daniel Dubois Women’s Tennis: Preeg, Blatt Undefeated in Fall Classic The women’s team closed out the fall season with six out of eight singles wins at the SEC Fall Coaches Classic held at the University of Alabama. Freshman Chelsea Preeg and junior Hannah Blatt won their respective brackets… Read More

 www.istockphoto.com Musicians really do think differently than the rest of us. Vanderbilt psychologists have found that professionally trained musicians more effectively use a creative technique called divergent thinking, and use both the left and right sides of their frontal cortex more heavily than the average person. Previous studies of creativity… Read More

Children born four months before the peak of cold and flu season have a greater risk of developing childhood asthma than those born at other times of year, according to new research from Vanderbilt. In the Tennessee Asthma Bronchiolitis Study, which involved an analysis of the birth and medical… Read More

Earth is protected from the onslaught of solar wind by the magnetosphere, an invisible shield of magnetic fields and electrically charged particles that surrounds our planet. The northern and southern polar lights—the aurora borealis and aurora australis, respectively—are the only visible parts of the magnetosphere, but it is a critical… Read More

Why do some bone cells knit together neatly following a fracture or amputation, while others grow wildly into soft tissue that can limit range of motion and cause problems with prosthetics? Dr. Erika Mitchell, assistant professor of orthopaedic trauma, has won a $1.3 million, three-year grant from the U.S. Read More

  © MCT/TIM LEE Each year some 10 million American households borrow money through payday loans. Payday lenders now have more storefronts than McDonald’s and Starbucks combined. But a recent study shows that payday-loan applicants who received the quick cash after their first application were significantly more likely to file… Read More

Fortune Magazine’s annual ranking of the 100 best places to work in the United States includes Vanderbilt this year, marking the first time a university has made the list. The No. 98 ranking represents approximately 21,000 employees at Vanderbilt University and Vanderbilt University Medical Center. The rankings are determined… Read More

Vanderbilt researchers now have access to 15 times more bandwidth, thanks to a new 10-gigabit-per-second circuit that began routing new traffic in December. The previous circuit allowed 662 megabits of data to be transferred per second. “The new 10-gigabit-per-second circuit connects to Southern Crossing in Atlanta,” says Matthew Hall,… Read More

High-profile role models are one driver of improved academic performance for African Americans. The presidential run of Barack Obama has made a strong positive impact on the test-taking achievement of African Americans, according to research by Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management Professor Ray Friedman. Documenting what Friedman and his… Read More

 A Vanderbilt research team provides strong evidence that new, or atypical, antipsychotic drugs carry the same cardiovascular risk as older, or typical, antipsychotic drugs. Their findings appeared in the Jan. 15 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. The atypical antipsychotics have one important advantage over their older counterpart:… Read More