Featured Research

A scientific team led by University of Louisville doctoral student Karen Collins has discovered a hot Saturn-like planet in another solar system 700 light years away. The discovery was made using inexpensive ground-based telescopes, including one specially designed to detect exoplanets and jointly operated by astronomers at Ohio State University and Vanderbilt University. Read More

Strike zone judgment grows worse over the course of a Major League Baseball season in a predictable way, possibly due to the effect of grueling travel schedules, disrupted sleep patterns and fatigue, a Vanderbilt University Medical Center sleep researcher has found. Read More

Vanderbilt health policy expert John Graves co-authored a report that shows as many as a quarter of people eligible for subsidized health insurance under the Affordable Care Act may be shut out because they don’t have a bank account. Read More

A team of researchers, headed by Vanderbilt astronomer C. Robert O’Dell, has combined images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope with images from ground-based telescopes to reconstruct the three-dimensional shape of the iconic nebula with unprecedented precision. In the process, they determined that it is considerably different than previously thought. Read More

The latest Vanderbilt Poll shows that Tennesseans strongly support charter schools while their feelings about school vouchers are more divided. Read More

Daniel Gervais of Vanderbilt Law School told Congress that the copyright system of the United States requires “a comprehensive review and modernization" during testimony May 16. Read More

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, may have created the smallest drops of liquid made in the lab. Read More

What exactly pushed Christopher Columbus to embark on a voyage across the Atlantic, or Edward Jenner to test his theory for an early smallpox vaccine on a child, or Henry Ford to bet that automobiles could replace horses? David Zald, professor of psychology, studies risk-taking and is quoted. Read More

Kindergarten teachers report spending much of their math instructional time teaching students basic counting skills and how to recognize geometric shapes—skills the students have already mastered before ever setting foot in the kindergarten classroom, new research finds. Read More

Vanderbilt phylogeneticists examined the reasons why large-scale tree-of-life studies are producing contradictory results and have proposed a suite of novel techniques to resolve the contradictions. Read More

John Wikswo, Gordon A. Cain University Professor of biomedical engineering and A. B. Learned Professor of Living Physics, presented "Homunculi and I: Lessons from building organs on chips" at TedX Nashville April 6, 2013. Read More

Vanderbilt University engineers in the Institute for Software Integrated Systems have been awarded a $9.3 million contract over two years to continue their work to mature META tools that are part of a flagship Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Adaptive Vehicle Make (AVM) program. Read More

A team of Vanderbilt astronomers will play a key role in the planet-seeking space telescope that NASA has just approved and scheduled for launch in 2017. Read More

Economic prospects improved for small mountain farmers in Guatemala when consumers developed a taste for coffee brewed with beans grown at high altitude, according to a new study from the Vanderbilt Institute for Coffee Studies. Read More

A team of computer engineers from Vanderbilt University’s Institute of Software Integrated Systems has developed an inexpensive hardware module and related software that can transform an Android smartphone into a simple shooter location system. Read More

Vanderbilt Heart and Vascular Institute is participating in a clinical study to further evaluate the safety and feasibility of rapidly lowering the body’s temperature to significantly reduce the amount of damage caused by a heart attack. Read More

The latest research on the nation’s key education issues will be presented by Vanderbilt University Peabody College faculty April 27 - May 1 at the American Educational Research Association’s annual conference in San Francisco. Read More

Health disparities between white and black adults in the South are not connected to a lack of exercise but more likely related to other factors such as access to health care, socioeconomic status and perhaps genetics, according to a Vanderbilt study published in PLoS ONE. Read More

An international team of scientists, including six from Vanderbilt University, has identified the first unique genetic determinants of body mass index (BMI) in people of African ancestry. Read More

Vanderbilt researcher David Lewis says that anything that can be done to corral the use of patronage for political appointments would help the federal government to operate more efficiently. Read More