Publications

Four years ago Christopher Parks found himself facing an all-too-common dilemma. He and his mother, who was in the midst of cancer treatments, were sitting in her living room going through a stack of her medical bills and those of his father, who had died recently. It is a telling… Read More

In 2002, having recently undergone board certification as a neurosurgeon, Robert J. Singer, M.D., sat down at his kitchen table with some butcher paper and a few drafting instruments and began designing electric guitars. Once he had completed a dozen designs, he engaged a factory in Korea to make the… Read More

Vanderbilt Hustler: What have the players been doing in the offseason to prepare for this season? Kevin Stallings: I think there are only so many things you can do. You can work on your shooting, you can work on your strength and conditioning, you can work on… Read More

Conventional wisdom says never to look a gift horse in the mouth, but on a normal day seeing patients in the clinic, John Zic, M.D., found himself staring down at a literal gift horse, not quite sure how to react. His patient Beth McDaniel and her husband, Roger, had just… Read More

Award-winning country music group Rascal Flatts visited the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt last week. The group’s members — Jay DeMarcus, Gary LeVox and Joe Don Rooney — stayed busy performing for patients and families, making visits to patient rooms and attending the dedication of the newly announced… Read More

The mischievously dark worlds of filmmaker Tim Burton, illustrator Edward Gorey and the humorously twisted “Fractured Fairy Tales” cartoons are influencing this fall’s Vanderbilt Opera Theatre production of The Merry Wives of Windsor. It’s quite a change from the traditional, straightforward approach taken when the opera was performed a decade… Read More

A professor from the Vanderbilt School of Engineering talks with a neurosurgeon in a hallway at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Their discussion fine-tunes ideas that the engineer takes forward in implementation. An education researcher at the Kennedy Center meets with a biomedical engineering professor and they brainstorm ways imaging can… Read More

Gathered around a long dining table in an unassuming turn-of-the-century foursquare on Nashville’s Music Row, Vanderbilt students and former inmates join hands before sitting down to share the evening meal. One by one, each is given the opportunity to say a brief word of prayer or gratitude before a hearty… Read More

The Hustler staff sat down with Carolyn Dever to learn more about her role as dean of the College of Arts and Science. Vanderbilt Hustler: Why did you choose this profession? Carolyn Dever: Because of a commitment to the excellence of the university and a desire to serve. Read More

There’s an old joke that gets passed around teaching hospitals: don’t get sick in July. Why? July 1 is when the new residents arrive on the floors of the hospital, fresh from medical school and with limited patient care experience under their belts. Television medical dramas like to portray residents… Read More

Wearing clothing made to fit a 6- to 9-month-old baby, Becca Hill’s tiny size is deceptive of her real age. The bubbly 2-year-old smiles and laughs as she poses for a photograph. Becca was born nearly three months early with the astoundingly low birth weight of 13 ounces (slightly heavier… Read More

The first thing you notice when stepping into Central Library’s new fourth-floor lobby is a sense of light and space. Gone is the dark, cluttered entryway that more than one student described as “cave-like” on user surveys last year, replaced by more room, new flooring and natural light. “I’ve been… Read More

Amy Ragsdale and Brenda Copeland have a lot in common. Both suffered from polycystic kidney disease, an inherited kidney disorder. Both relied on dialysis for survival, needed kidney transplants and had several folks willing to donate. But neither of them had a compatible match among their donor pool. Luckily the… Read More

For a university that claims just one national championship to its name, Vanderbilt certainly has a national stage when it comes to alumni sports writers. ESPN, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, The Washington Post, and the sports website FanHouse all feature writers who honed their craft at Vanderbilt. Buster… Read More

It’s 6 a.m. in late August, and the sun is rising over the Vanderbilt track. The newest recruits to Vanderbilt’s Army ROTC program, clad in matching shorts and T-shirts, are assembled at one end of the track, flanked by upperclassmen holding clipboards and wearing fatigues tucked into high-laced boots. The… Read More

First-year students play games and compete against each other within their Vandy Visions teams to test their knowledge of Vanderbilt trivia and campus navigation. Read More

Jason Koger awoke in the Burn Center at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in early March 2008, and through the unfamiliar surroundings and the anesthetic haze he understood what he was being told: below the elbow, his arms were gone. His father, Mike Koger, stood at his bedside and as Jason… Read More

There’s an old joke that gets passed around teaching hospitals: don’t get sick in July. Why? July 1 is when the new residents arrive on the floors of the hospital, fresh from medical school and with limited patient care experience under their belts. Television medical dramas like to portray residents… Read More

One of Joey Barnett’s earliest memories is sitting on his grandfather’s lap as he read aloud from his grandchildren’s textbooks and science magazines, such as National Geographic. “Grandpa Barnett would say, ‘Joey, this is the sun. The sun is a star. This is a planet. Planets go around the sun. Read More

When loaded with an anticancer drug, a delivery system based on a novel material called nanosponge is three to five times more effective at reducing tumor growth than direct injection. That is the conclusion of a paper published in the June 1 issue of the journal Cancer Research. “Effective targeted… Read More