Kelly Holley-Bockelmann

The third annual Honors Banquet commemorated excellence in academics, leadership and innovation among Graduate School students and faculty. On March 20, the banquet was held to honor and reflect on remarkable achievements in research and creative expression from the more than 50 graduate programs and departments represented in the Graduate School. Read More

Since the first cohort was enrolled 20 years ago, 190 students have participated in the program, 157 master’s degrees have been awarded, 137 students have bridged to a Ph.D. program, and 70 students have earned a Ph.D. The program has an 88 percent Ph.D. completion rate, more than twice the national average of 43 percent. Read More

The Computing Catalyst Working Group will identify computing resources needed to catalyze a new wave of discovery and innovation powered by AI and computing at Vanderbilt.  Read More

The Fisk-Vanderbilt Master’s-to-Ph.D. Bridge Program, emphasizing multi-messenger astronomy, utilized strategic funding from a Scaling Success Internal Award to secure a $1.7 million NSF grant. This collaborative journey, focusing on inclusive STEM education and innovative training approaches, highlights the power of adaptability and vision in research endeavors. Read More

A team of STEM researchers, including Vanderbilt astrophysicist Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, have published a new collaborative study on Ph.D. bridge programs as a mechanism to empower students, foster diversity and spur a more holistic approach to graduate education.  Read More

Jedidah Isler, a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow in Vanderbilt’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, has emerged as an increasingly high-profile advocate for diversity among science, technology, engineering and mathematics researchers. Read More

Students who are the first in their families to graduate from college defy easy categorization. Nearly 40 percent of undergraduates at four-year colleges in the U.S. are the children of parents who did not attend college, transcending clear lines of race, geography and gender. And while the median household income of first-generation students tends to… Read More

Vanderbilt Magazine spoke to several members of the Commodore community about their experiences as the first in their families to graduate from college. Here are the stories they shared. Read More

Fifteen faculty members from diverse disciplines have been selected as the first cohort of the Chancellor Faculty Fellows program. Read More

Two Vanderbilt astronomers are among an international team that has discovered a surprising new class of “hypervelocity stars” – solitary stars moving fast enough to escape the gravitational grasp of the Milky Way galaxy. Read More

Two astronomers from Vanderbilt and Georgia Tech, sharing a car after a snowstorm canceled their flights home from a conference, put together everything they had learned at the conference during that snowy drive and worked out that a collision between two black holes could explain most of what is known of a violent episode in the Milky Way's past. Read More

Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, assistant professor of astronomy and physics, wraps up this three-part podcast series with an interview about her specialty, supermassive black holes. Read More

Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, assistant professor of astronomy, continues her discussion of black holes in the second part of this interview for Red Orbit. Read More

Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, assistant professor of astronomy, talks about what sets black holes apart from other objects in the universe and explains how the laws of space, time and gravity bend and even break down to create the most destructive force in the cosmos. Read More

Not long after he arrived at Vanderbilt nine years ago, Keivan Stassun, professor of astronomy, began building on a newly forged alliance with Fisk University, a historically black college just two miles from the Vanderbilt campus, in an effort to increase the number of African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and other minorities earning Ph.D. degrees in science. Read More

Stargazers, rejoice: The largest-ever 3-D map of the universe has been released to the public. The new map contains images of 200 million galaxies. Read More

Astronomers have identified nearly 700 rogue stars that appear to have been ejected from the Milky Way galaxy. Read More

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey-III collaboration, which includes Vanderbilt University, has resulted in a picture of the sky so big that it would take 500,000 high-definition TVs to view it at full resolution. The color image contains more than a trillion pixels and covers about one-third of the entire sky. Read More