Alumni

Jim Schifman, BS'90, and his wife, Melissa, launched Project Hive Pet Company last year, selling dog toys and treats that directly contribute to rebuilding bee habitats. Their beehive-themed dog toys are sustainably manufactured in the United States and the company donates 1 percent of gross sales to the Bee and Butterfly Habitat Fund, which works with private, public and corporate partners to help establish and manage pollinator habitats on their lands. Read More

Chris Webb, BE'90, is the CEO and co-founder of Foresight Augmented Reality, a cutting-edge technology that allows those with visual impairments to live more independently. Read More

Paul K. Conkin, Distinguished Professor of History, Emeritus, former chair of the Department of History and author of more than 20 books on a wide range of American intellectual history, died July 23 in Nashville. Read More

Megan Piphus Peace, BA’14, MSF’15, is an accomplished ventriloquist and puppeteer who has performed in front of audiences across the nation, including on The Tonight Show and America’s Got Talent. In 2021, she made history as the first Black female puppeteer to work on the long-running children’s television show Sesame Street. Read More

At the beginning of 2022, the School of Medicine launched a $5 million Dean’s Scholarship Challenge to help ensure that tomorrow’s leaders in medicine are educated at Vanderbilt. The success of the early months of the effort has prompted the university to boost the available matching funds by $5 million. Read More

John R. Ingram, a longtime university benefactor whose generosity continues to shape the historic Vandy United campaign, will be honored as the Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame’s Tennessean of the Year on July 23. The event also serves as the induction ceremony for a Hall of Fame class that includes the late David Williams II, former vice chancellor for athletics and university affairs and athletic director, and former Vanderbilt golf and football standout Toby Wilt. Read More

Imani Ellis, BA'12, went from being an NBC page to vice president in 10 short years. As the NBCUniversal’s vice president of communications, she leads a team that creates comprehensive press strategies and media campaigns for unscripted shows across the NBCU portfolio.  Read More

The Vanderbilt Alumni Association has welcomed a new president and two other alumni leaders to its board. Read More

As steward of Vanderbilt's arboretum, University Landscape Architect James Moore works not only to beautify campus and preserve its botanical diversity, but also to study the resilience of campus trees to disease and better understand how they absorb heat and stormwater for midtown Nashville. Read More

A poem by Bryan Byrdlong, BA'15 Read More

The U.S. Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board have announced the Fulbright U.S. Student Program awards for 2022-23, with a record 20 Vanderbilt University students and alumni winning the prestigious awards. In addition to the 20 new Fulbright Scholars, four Vanderbilt seniors have been selected as alternates and 32 students and alumni earned recognition as semifinalists. Read More

Vanderbilt Law School Board of Advisors member W. Weldon Wilson, JD’86, and his wife, Elaine, have documented a $17.5 million bequest to support their existing Weldon Wilson Scholarship at Vanderbilt Law School. The scholarship was established in 2011 in honor of Weldon’s 25th reunion. Read More

Vanderbilt alumna Martha Craig Daughtrey, BA’64, JD’68, a senior United States circuit judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, will be featured at an upcoming event in the Nashville Public Library’s Votes for Women: Legacy of the 19th Amendment series. Read More

The Vanderbilt University Board of Trust elected Tim Warnock, BA’84, to a two-year term as alumni trustee at its April 22 meeting. Warnock, an attorney at Loeb & Loeb in Nashville, is the outgoing president of the Vanderbilt Alumni Association Board. Read More

In his long U.S. Navy career, Michael Brasseur, BS'97, has had numerous command postings, including his latest as a full commodore. Based in Bahrain, he commands Task Force 59, the Navy’s first unmanned task force dedicated to securing the waters around the Arabian Peninsula. He directs a team dedicated to rapidly harnessing the power of unmanned and artificial intelligence integration to promote the free flow of commerce in the area. Read More

Nearly 200 alumni and parent volunteers returned to campus April 1–2 for the annual Volunteer Leadership Weekend. The weekend’s theme, Vanderbilt in Classroom, Community and Conversation, was designed to give university volunteer leaders an inside view of changes underway at Vanderbilt and to provide firsthand insights from university leaders, faculty and students about how these initiatives improve the educational experience.   Read More

The late David Williams II, who, as vice chancellor, dramatically elevated the student-athlete experience at Vanderbilt while leading the athletic department, and Toby Wilt, a former student-athlete and now successful businessman, golfer and philanthropist, will be inducted into the Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame, the organization announced Friday. Read More

Mark F. Dalton, JD’75, emeritus trustee and former chair of the Board of Trust, has established the Dalton Vanderbilt Aerospace Design Laboratory Fund to support the university's rocket team, winners of an unprecedented seven NASA Student Launch national championships in 10 years. Read More

The next installment of the ’Dores in Dialogue series will explore decades of the Vanderbilt Black experience through the lens of alumni memories, current student life and new leadership initiatives for the future. The Feb. 10 event is presented by the Vanderbilt Alumni Association in partnership with the Association of Vanderbilt Black Alumni. Read More

Photography by Marc Olivier Le Blanc The opening poem in Focal Point, the debut collection by Jenny Qi, BA’11, navigates the fraught emotional space between a loving daughter’s grief over her mother’s death and a scientist’s clear-eyed inquiry into the disease-cancer-that caused it. Qi writes of “nights at a microscope in… Read More