Research News

Vanderbilt University secured four National Endowment for the Humanities grants totaling $330,696 to support projects ranging from Yiddish literature to the preservation of Special Collections. The grants highlight Vanderbilt’s leadership in humanities research and were facilitated by the university’s Research Development and Support team. Read More

Vanderbilt's Spring 2024 Scaling Success Grant awards support four innovative research projects, empowering faculty to secure expanded external funding. The grant program, initiated in 2022, has already helped its inaugural awardees obtain prestigious grants. Read More

Vanderbilt Department of Computer Science researchers Kevin Leach and James Weimer have won a $2 million award from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health to develop technology aimed at improving software security in medical devices like insulin pumps, pacemakers and stroke predictors. This is the first award Vanderbilt has received from ARPA-H, an agency within the National Institutes of Health with a mission to support “high-impact” solutions for pressing health care needs. Read More

Clintoria Williams, associate professor in the Department of Neuroscience, Cell Biology and Physiology at Wright State University, has received the John F. Perkins, Jr. Research Career Enhancement Award from the American Physiological Society. This will enable her to join Vanderbilt as a visiting scholar in the Department of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics for four months to collaborate more closely with Antentor Hinton Jr., assistant professor in the department. Read More

In support of its commitment to fighting health inequities, Vanderbilt University School of Nursing has launched an ambitious campaign to raise and match $1 million to support health disparity research. Dean Pamela Jeffries recently announced the school’s Nursing Health Equity Fellowship program, setting aside $1 million for health equity research at the school and asking VUSN supporters to make a 1:1 philanthropic match to fund this critical research. Read More

Tucked behind the 6 Magnolia Building on Vanderbilt’s Peabody Campus is what might look to some like a lush garden of weeds. In reality, it’s a strategic Native Meadow full of pollinator-friendly plants. Since its inception, the meadow has flourished, and many faculty, staff and students have found ways to collaborate and interact with the space, thought of as a ‘living lab.’ Read More

Americans saw an uptick in unity for the first time in over a year, with widespread agreement that the U.S. political system needs to be more responsive and an overall distrust of social media influencers, according to the most recent Vanderbilt Unity Poll measuring Americans' views of national unity and the democratic process. Read More

NERL, a consortium representing some of America’s leading research institutions, and Springer Nature, a global leader in research publishing, have agreed to a new three-year open publishing agreement. The deal provides seven NERL member institutions—including Vanderbilt University—with read access to the entire corpus of Springer journals and permits eligible authors to publish open access, with fees covered, in hybrid journals across the Springer portfolio. Read More

The researchers, including Vanderbilt’s team led by Kari Hoffman, focused their efforts on the detection of hippocampal ripples, which are considered biomarkers of memory and are affected by epilepsy and Alzheimer’s disease. Read More

For more than 75 years, Vanderbilt has been a pioneer in the study of the Americas, forging new paths to innovate, shape, and advance the field. Now, the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies once again finds itself at the forefront, driving important changes in education, research and programming, both at the university and across the country. Read More

Vanderbilt University Professor of Biochemistry and Vice Dean of Basic Sciences Chuck Sanders and Professor of Biochemistry Bruce Carter have been hard at work searching for therapies, if not a cure, for CMT. Read More

Brandt Eichman and Walter Chazin, professors of biochemistry, have worked together to provide a better understanding of how exactly DNA replication is initiated in eukaryotes. Using Vanderbilt’s state-of-the-art instrumentation in the Center for Structural Biology’s Cryo-Electron Microscopy Facility, Eichman, Chazin and their colleagues provided detailed visualizations of a multi-functional protein in action, which sheds light on how DNA replication is initiated in humans. Read More

Vanderbilt University’s Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries and Taylor & Francis, one of the world’s leading academic publishers, have signed a new three-year read-and-publish agreement that expands the breadth of journals available to Vanderbilt researchers and enhances the potential reach and impact of their published work. Read More

Vanderbilt scientist Houra Merrikh led a team of researchers who discovered the first evolution-resistant chemical compound that prevents drug resistance development in bacteria. The compound is also a drug development platform that targets antimicrobial resistance during treatment of infections with antibiotics and evolution in general, Merrikh said. Read More

AIP Publishing, a leading publisher of scholarly scientific journals, has signed a three-year read-and-publish agreement with Vanderbilt University’s Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries that will promote open science and drive discovery within the university’s research community. Read More

Join the next Lab-to-Table conversation, “Picturing Progress: Representation in Scientific Art” on Feb. 20 at 11:00 a.m. Read More

Steven Wernke, associate professor and chair of anthropology, has developed GeoPACHA (Geospatial Platform for Andean Culture, History and Archaeology), a web application that allows researchers to map archaeological sites in the Andes at a greater scale than ever before. GeoPACHA has enabled new discoveries about past human occupation in the region that will be featured in six articles in the February issue of the journal Antiquity. Read More

Avenir Award funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse recognizes research that represents “the future of addiction science.” Brown’s research is creating an AI-experiment feedback loop that will help optimize painkilling drugs to be less addictive. Read More

Vanderbilt University expands its health care innovation role by joining the ARPA-H Customer Experience Hub as a spoke, aiming to advance patient-centric health care solutions. This is the second spoke designation with ARPA-H, underscoring Vanderbilt’s commitment to transformative health care research and accessibility for all Americans. Read More