The Vanderbilt Story

An athlete may weigh 250 pounds, but all that bulk is controlled by a mere three-pound brain. Those three pounds control the other 247 pounds, the muscles and bones and heart and lungs that enable athletes to perform their feats of strength and agility. And Nashville’s professional athletes entrust their… Read More

Clark Bosslet and Blake Knight are both MBA candidates for 2012 and bloggers for OwenBloggers.com, a website that offers an uncensored student perspective on life at the Owen School. The Owen Podcast Series, which Bosslet and Knight film and produce for the site, features interviews with faculty, fellow students, alumni… Read More

Ashoke “Bappa” Mukherji is no stranger to pressure. Soon after graduating from Vanderbilt with both an MBA and a law degree, he was thrust into one of the more challenging roles a budding young attorney could ask for—sitting second chair in a first-degree murder trial. It was his first trial… Read More

This Week on VUCast, Vanderbilt’s weekly newscast  highlighting  research, experts, students, sports and everything Vanderbilt: experience the grand opening of the new Vanderbilt Bookstore the dangers and solutions for handling old medicine  and Peabody through the centuries [vucastblurb]… Read More

Gary Jaeger could probably improve the writing in this magazine standing on his head. A philosopher, writing coach and yogi, Jaeger serves as the assistant director of the Writing Studio and senior lecturer in the philosophy department, as well as a yoga instructor at 12 South Yoga in Nashville. After… Read More

I didn’t finish the race. Forty hours into the Death Race and a mere five hours from the end, I quit. In my four years as a Vanderbilt athlete, I had never failed to make it to the finish line. I had faced disappointment, failed to meet goals, even finished… Read More

Çağlar Oskay is an expert in failure and that makes him—and his work—a success. Oskay, assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering since 2006, has focused much of his research on the failure of structures and predicting the lifespan of heterogeneous materials through multiscale computational mechanics. “People… Read More

Some of the biggest businesses started out as ideas dreamed up in student apartments and dorm rooms. Two Stanford students started Google as Ph.D. projects. When he was at Yale, Fred Smith turned in a term paper outlining his idea for an overnight delivery service—FedEx. Vanderbilt’s Cam Chalmers, BS’98, created… Read More

When Julie Fraser arrived in Kabul, Afghanistan, in January 2002, it was clear that the mission at hand would be unlike any she’d had before. The Kabul airport had been one of the primary targets of the U.S. invasion three months earlier, and the widespread destruction was evident as soon… Read More

Clark Bosslet and Blake Knight are both MBA candidates for 2012 and bloggers for OwenBloggers.com, a website that offers an uncensored student perspective on life at the Owen School. The Owen Podcast Series, which Bosslet and Knight film and produce for the site, features interviews with faculty, fellow students,… Read More

This Week on VUCast, Vanderbilt’s weekly newscast  highlighting  research, experts, students, sports and everything Vanderbilt: A Vanderbilt doctor’s amazing surgery lands on “Grey’s Anatomy” Scientists create a breakthrough bug repellant A Vandy minister’s actions honored by the White House   [vucastblurb]  … Read More

Talk to people who know David Merryman best, and one adjective is heard frequently: passionate. Talk to Merryman yourself and it is easy to see why. Discussing his research, the assistant professor of biomedical engineering seems ready to leap out of his chair at any moment, perhaps to tweak the… Read More

Sarah Barr, senior Child Studies major, Spanish minor On campus activities: AXO, Vice President of Vanderbilt Performing Arts Council, member of Green Dots committee, Reformed University Fellowship music team, VUcept Claim to fame: Singer/songwriter    … Read More

This Week on VUCast, Vanderbilt’s weekly newscast highlighting research, experts, students, sports and everything Vanderbilt: Occupy Wall Street: A historical look at the new protest movement A cool way to learn how your brain really works with “Brain Matters” See the best of Memorial Madness! [vucastblurb]… Read More

The Yellow Ribbon Program is helping veterans and their family members pursue education (Joe Howell/Vanderbilt) For Erin Gardiner, the decision to pursue a career in medicine was forged on the battlefield. As the executive officer for an Army surgical team stationed in Seoul, South Korea, Gardiner worked with an… Read More

Bruce Morrill researches the enigma of suffering Bruce Morrill, the Edward A. Malloy Chair of Catholic Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School. (John Russell/Vanderbilt) Consider a young mother. Say she is a practicing Christian, stricken with inoperable cancer and has six painful months to a year to live. Is God… Read More

This Week on VUCast: A shark attack victim inspires a bionic breakthrough; why political prices are going up; and making a cappella cool. [vucastblurb]    … Read More

Not many teenagers would attempt to write a two-act chamber opera based on Shakespeare’s play The Winter’s Tale. But that’s exactly what 16-year-old Amy Thompson has been doing for more than a year. “It’s been a long, drawn-out project, but I hope to finish it by the end of the… Read More

This Week on VUCast: How sticky mittens could help kids with autism A new toolkit to make doctor’s visits easier May the force be with us… See Yoda’s ties to Vanderbilt It’s all in this week’s VUCast —… Read More

In college, Ashley Rowatt Karpinos, M.D., was an elite athlete, one of the best NCAA swimmers in the country. She says the dedication and work ethic she brought to the pool continues to serve her as she seeks an unorthodox combination of specialties in her medical career. Sure, the uniforms… Read More