The Vanderbilt Story

Health care once seemed simple: You got sick, called a doctor, and paid the bill as best you could. Today health care accounts for nearly 20 percent of the total U.S. gross domestic product—about $3 trillion of economic activity annually. It’s also the largest item in the federal budget, making… Read More

To read Meredith Dolhare’s long list of athletic triumphs, it’s tempting to ask if there’s anything she can’t do. After transferring to join the Vanderbilt women’s tennis team in 1993 following a freshman stint at perennially top-ranked UCLA, Dolhare (along with then-new Head Coach Geoff Macdonald) helped lift the… Read More

In 1913 a farmer’s son named Oliver Cromwell Carmichael became the first Rhodes Scholar from Alabama. Just 21, he had earned an A.B. from the University of Alabama and had taught German and French there and at Florence Normal School. In 1914 a 20-year-old Methodist minister’s son named Harvie Branscomb… Read More

As a little girl growing up in Virginia Beach, Virginia, Jedidah Isler was obsessed with the sky. “I really just thought it was beautiful,” she says, “and I remember feeling a sense of calm whenever I looked up.” Today that same sense of calm and wonderment continues to help fuel Isler’s… Read More

Hoping to ensure that the door to a Vanderbilt education is open to every talented student inspired Board of Trust member Dr. Robert Schiff Jr., BS’77, a Cincinnati pediatrician, to make a transformative $10,000,000 commitment to Opportunity Vanderbilt. Begun at the outset of the financial crisis in 2008, Opportunity… Read More

Kate Hendricks’ career in comedy started off slowly. In fact, she only realized she wanted to pursue comedy during an interview for a job at an ad agency. So she did what a lot of self-respecting comedians do: She moved to New York City and performed anywhere that would have… 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. After my first year I became… Read More

When Deya Maldas signed up to be a tutor at the Boys & Girls Clubs of Middle Tennessee, she didn’t know she was about to have the most transformative experience of her freshman year. Read More

Sam Reilly does some of his best thinking when he’s out for a run with his Vanderbilt cross-country teammates. It is one of the rare moments in his busy schedule when he can stretch his mind along with his legs. Read More

Sam Hoskins has spent the last four years living on The Martha Rivers Ingram Commons. From his introduction to the residential community as a first-year student in Gillette House to his last three years as a resident adviser in North House, Hoskins says The Ingram Commons has played a significant role in his journey of self-discovery. Read More

Michaela Novakovic’s majors take her from the grand to the microscopic on a daily basis. The Sorrento, Florida, native and Blair School of Music senior is a double major in harp and molecular and cellular biology. Read More

In his four years at Vanderbilt, Connor D. Henderson has become a strong advocate for expanded campus space and resources for student productions. Some of his favorite memories are of cultural showcases by the Vanderbilt performing arts community filled with music, dance and food. Read More

School of Engineering senior Gabrielle Tate—Gabbey to her friends—has the drive it takes to make U.S. automakers take notice. Read More

On Leap Day—Feb. 29—Blair School of Music senior Jack Coen took a leap of faith. That night Coen, a composition and theory major, premiered his capstone project "Folk and Flora"—a song cycle based on flowers and how people relate to them—in Sarratt Cinema to a full house. Read More

Growing up in small-town Kentucky, Safiah Hassan longed to live in a larger city with a diverse population. After coming to Vanderbilt, she made seeking out diverse communities a hallmark of her university experience. Read More

There’s the Pranjal Gupta dressed in kurta and pyjama, his feet keeping time with an impossibly fast Indian dance tune. And then there’s the Pranjal Gupta in a lab coat, peering through glasses at data on how children with autism integrate sight and sound. Read More

Like many little girls, Eunice Jun was a ballerina growing up. But by the time the Los Angeles native arrived at Vanderbilt four years ago, she had traded in her toe shoes to cultivate twin interests in graphic design and technology, pursuing double majors in cognitive studies at Peabody College and computer science at the School of Engineering. Read More

For Ariel Helms, a genealogy search when she was young revealed a long-kept secret: Her ancestors were Cherokee Native Americans. Read More

For Rani Banjarian, the summer of 2006 was the defining moment of his young life. For a month that summer, artillery and airstrikes were a daily occurrence as the unrest between his home country of Lebanon and neighboring Israel grew into the July War. Read More

Dr. Annabelle de St. Maurice rapidly is ascending to the cutting edge of addressing the practical problems of world-impacting diseases. After earning her master’s degree in public health at Vanderbilt, in July 2015 she began work in Atlanta at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as an Epidemic… Read More