Rene Marois

Twenty-nine prominent faculty from across campus comprise Vanderbilt University’s latest endowed chair honorees. They include scholars working in diverse areas—from election analysis and lung cancer research to the nascent field of neurolaw, exploring the brain mechanism underlying legal decision-making. Read More

The VBI recently marked its 20th anniversary, a span that has seen the institute’s wide-ranging missions—including administering the university’s Neuroscience Graduate Program, as well as postdoctoral training and community outreach—steadily coalesce under a single umbrella. Read More

As the combination of neuroscience and law—or “neurolaw” as some call it—has been gaining traction in courtrooms in recent years, Professor Owen Jones and his colleagues have used the burgeoning field to ask deeper questions about the criminal justice system itself. Read More

Leading neuroscientist Lisa Monteggia has been named the Barlow Family Director of the Vanderbilt Brain Institute, Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Susan R. Wente announced today. Read More

Read about the latest faculty and staff awards, appointments and achievements. Read More

Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos told students, faculty and staff gathered Jan. 26 for a town hall meeting on mental health and well-being, “Our community needs to talk about people who need help, attention, love and support.” Read More

With discoveries ranging from the origins of consciousness to the end of the universe, 2015 was a year of incredibly diverse research at Vanderbilt University. Read More

New work by researchers at Vanderbilt University and Harvard University confirms that a specific area of the brain, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, is crucial to punishment decisions. Read More

Vanderbilt University researchers took a significant step toward answering longstanding questions about the origins of consciousness with a recent discovery of global changes in how brain areas communicate with one another during awareness. Read More

A new brain study has identified the brain mechanisms that underlie our judgment of how severely a person who has harmed another should be punished. Read More

René Marois (Vanderbilt University) In the 2014 Game Plan for your Health video “Manage your Energy, Maximize your Life,” professor René Marois of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt says that attention is our ability to focus. You can learn to focus your mind with some… Read More

Vandy’s supporting role in hit show Nashville Who is that with actor Alan Alda? And the sound of music for the Mighty Sky   All this and more in VUCast, Vanderbilt’s online newscast. Watch now.   [vucastblurb]… Read More

Research conducted at Vanderbilt is featured in "Brains on Trial with Alan Alda," a two-part televised series airing Sept. 11 and Sept. 18 on PBS that explores how the growing ability to separate truth from lies may radically affect the way criminal trials are conducted in the future. Read More

Neuroscientists from Vanderbilt and Harvard have proposed the first neurobiological model for third-party punishment, outlining potential cognitive and brain processes that evolutionary pressures could have re-purposed to make this behavior possible. Read More

Vanderbilt University has emerged as one of the nation’s leading academic centers in neuroscience. Read More

Groundbreaking new legal research from a team of Vanderbilt University and other researchers suggests that juror confusion over how to apply the Model Penal Code in criminal trials could cause major, unnoticed and life-altering sentencing errors. Read More

Psychology professor Isabel Gauthier, an expert in the science of face recognition, relishes the process of discovery – and mentoring graduate students along the way. Read More

Vanderbilt University professor Owen Jones, who is one of the nation’s few professors of both law and biology, has been named director of the national Law and Neuroscience Project, which will now be headquartered at Vanderbilt. Read More